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Hurricane Katrina

Immigrants often unpaid for Katrina cleanup work

GULFPORT, Miss. - A pattern is emerging as the cleanup of Mississippi's Gulf Coast morphs into its multibillion-dollar reconstruction: Come payday, untold numbers of Hispanic immigrant laborers are being stiffed.

Sometimes, the boss simply vanishes. Other workers wait on promises that someone in a complex hierarchy of contractors will provide the funds to pay them.

Nonpayment of wages is a violation of federal labor law, but these workers - thousands of them, channeled into teams that corral debris, swaddle punctured roofs in blue tarps and gut rain-ravaged homes - are especially vulnerable because many are in the country illegally.

After Katrina hit, Armando Ojeda paid $1,200 to be smuggled across the desert border from Mexico, a walk that took several nights. Talk of $10 an hour - more in a day than he made each week at a computer factory back home - led him to pay another $1,200 to be crammed in van with a dozen other immigrants and driven 1,600 miles, from a safe house in Arizona to Mississippi.

The passengers were not fed and were discharged near the Naval Construction Battalion Center in Gulfport, where Ojeda sleepwalked through his first day clearing hurricane-strewn junk.

The job was supposed to pay $7 an hour. But six weeks later, Ojeda hasn't been paid the $600-plus he said he is owed for eight days of dawn-to-dusk labor.

Karen Tovar, the subcontractor on the job, acknowledged she hasn't been able to pay dozens of workers a total of about $130,000. She said she is not at fault, blaming payments getting stalled along a long chain of subcontractors often led by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

After several weeks, many unpaid workers grew frustrated and left.

"I've told them, "When I get paid, you will receive your funds.' And they say, "When?' " Tovar said. "I'm very sure it's going to be shortly."

An Army Corps spokesman said he wasn't aware of problems with payments.

Tovar said she knew of other subcontractors who disappeared with their payrolls, and wondered whether her former workers expect she will do the same.

"I don't know if they're thinking that I've left and took the money or that I'm trying to hide the funds, because I wouldn't do that," said Tovar, 47. "In my type of work, you're working on trust."

Armando Ojeda is not trusting. He doesn't think he'll be paid, though he remains among the platoons of workers bivouacked along the coast.

"I am stupid for coming," he said, with a smile and shake of the head. "It was a foolish thing, nothing more."

Nonpayment of immigrant workers is not a new phenomenon - and it doesn't appear to be as much of an issue in New Orleans. With so much work to do and not enough laborers to do it, the market there appears to favor workers, said immigration lawyer David Ware.

In beleaguered Mississippi, which doesn't have a labor department, the issue isn't even on the radar.

Nonpayment is not specified as a crime under Mississippi law and the state Department of Employment Security defers wage claims to the federal Department of Labor. Workers who claim back wages have two formal options: Filing a civil suit in state court or a federal complaint. Mississippi prosecutors haven't received any complaints, according to special assistant attorney general Peter Cleveland.

A spokeswoman for the federal Labor Department said she could not determine whether there have been any post-Katrina claims in the Gulf region. But there are some in the pipeline: On Friday, a representative of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance said the advocacy group had prepared complaints on behalf of more than 150 workers who are owed more than $100,000 by five contractors, including Tovar's KTS Services.

Out in the cleanup-zone, dozens of Hispanic immigrant workers shared a common refrain: "I worked without being paid."

In Gulfport, several dozen men living in makeshift bunks in a hangar-like building said they were owed tens of thousands of dollars.

Like other workers, Alfredo Roblero saw opportunity in the wreckage, and was recruited from Ft. Pierce, with promises of steady work for good wages, expenses paid.

"They bring you to nothing," said Roblero, 26, who said he was due about $500 for five days spent demolishing what was left of the coastal Casino Magic Biloxi. "They owe you, and you wait for them."

Many of the workers wore the shirts of Dallas-based Restoration Group. In a subsequent telephone interview, company president James Rea said the workers were the responsibility of a subcontractor. He said all have been paid and blamed insurance companies for any delay.

"We're all standing in line and we take our piece of each dollar off as we hand it down," he said, "and eventually it gets down to the end of the line."

[Last modified November 6, 2005, 02:15:12]