Kansas City Worker Justice Project aims to help Hispanics gain lost wages

KANSAS CITY, Kan. (AP) -- Jesus Perez was promised $20 an hour to pour concrete for a residential construction company. But he said he has received "nada" for the 160 hours he worked over a three-week period in September and October. So recently, with the weather bad and construction jobs hard to find, Perez and two co-workers met with volunteers with the Kansas City Worker Justice Project - one of a growing number of nonprofit groups seeking to collect unpaid wages for immigrant workers.

Social service agencies report a rampant problem of wage theft in industries that employ large numbers of Hispanics. They say many undocumented Hispanics don't protest when they aren't paid because they fear deportation. Further complicating the problem, experts say the federal government is spending less money enforcing wage and hour laws, leaving the burden to states and nonprofits, like the Kansas City Worker Justice Project.

The group started its once monthly clinics at El Centro, a Kansas City, Kan.-based social service agency, in September 2005. Last year, volunteers helped more than 100 low-wage workers collect about $6,000, said Raymundo Rojas, the group's director.

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Soon, the group may begin taking the cases to court. But David Grummon, an attorney who represents Hispanic clients in the Kansas City area, said an array of issues makes these types of cases tricky to litigate. Sometimes employers misclassify their workers as "independent contractors" or employ them through an intermediary subcontractor - often nothing more than a Hispanic worker with a valid Social Security number who hires a crew of undocumented Hispanics, keeps track of the hours they work and pays their wages. Because such workers aren't afforded the same labor protections given to other employees, unpaid-wages cases are handled as contract disputes. And Grummon said those contracts are almost always verbal.

"They can always come back and claim, say our understanding of the agreement was this, but the guy didn't speak very good English," he said.

Even people opposed to illegal immigration have a reason to care about the problem, said Annette Bernhardt, co-director of the Economic Justice Project at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

"These laws, like minimum wage, are the core standards we have set down that define the floor for our labor market," she said. "When we let employers consciously decide to violate those laws, it threatens standards throughout the entire labor market, not just for those workers."



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