19/04/2021
Catholic group finds wage theft in US construction industry - UCA News
As a result, workers at many job sites get paid less than the minimum wage in the District,
which is $15 an hour. They don't get paid in checks with pay stubs that itemize deductions,
because none are taken out. Instead, they're paid, if not with cash, the with checks on the
account of a firm other than the one that hired them.
Workers can either wait two weeks for a bank to give them their money -- provided the check
clears-- or are steered to a check-cashing outlet that skims a percentage of the worker's pay
as its fee.
Sinyai said workers tend not to complain to their boss on the job site about any of this because
they are in this country without documents.
Should one of them come in and get their problem handled, if the fella out there is a contractor
or is employing dozens of people, he can afford to settle up on one of them, he added.
Who benefits from this arrangement? The primary beneficiary is the dishonest contractor
who's paying their employees this way and in turn is underbidding legitimate business and
cheating the rest of us law-abiding taxpayers because they're not paying into the
unemployment insurance, Social Security and Medicare, Sinyai said.
Frank Mahoney, communications director of the Eastern Atlantic States Regional Council of
Carpenters, said studies of this nature are rare. The Internal Revenue Service, he added, has
not reported on the issue since 2012.
However, a study conducted by Harvard University, according to Mahoney, added up the
worker comp issues, the state and federal taxes across the board, when you do independent
contracting. They estimated in the past seven years that it could be an $8.4 billion loss in tax
revenues.
Labor brokers take advantage of us because they know we are immigrants
and some of us are undocumented
Subcontractors are so able to drastically underbid law-abiding and ethical contractors, they
just can't get that work, Mahoney said. We have reps on the ground in Virginia, D.C., across
the region. They go to job sites to see that they're good. We're seeing it on job sites all the
time -- being paid cash, not having taxes taken out.
He added workers have to be underground to make a living. And that's not always the safest
place when you're seeing the immigrant workers, the people who are worried about being in
the spotlight sometimes -- being the people these subcontractors go after.
The Catholic Labor Network interviewed 79 workers in the construction trades for the report.
One, identified only as Ivan, 28, was a bus driver in the El Salvadoran capital of San Salvador
until he fled to the United States once gangs started threatening bus drivers to pay them
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