JOSE DAVID ORTEGA of Camden
liked to work with his hands.
In July, Ortega and two other
men, all three of them day laborers, were razing a defunct Blockbuster in Cherry Hill.
A wall collapsed on Ortega,
killing him, said his mom, Odily Castro. When she buried her son a week later,
she said, the expense was shouldered entirely by the family.
That's because Ortega, 40, a
father of two, was an undocumented immigrant brought to the U.S. in the '80s by
his mother, who was granted political asylum after fleeing the Contras in
Nicaragua.
Ortega's story embodies the
plight of day laborers, who experts say make up an "underground
economy" that is being exploited.
Bureau of Labor Statistics
data show that the number of foreign-born workers killed on job sites in the
Philadelphia area (which includes parts of South Jersey, Delaware and Maryland)
has spiked in recent years. Some victims are undocumented day laborers who
sacrifice safety for a salary.
'Like
the Wild West'
When someone is killed at a
job site, the worker's employer is required to contact the Occupational Safety
and Health Administration, which investigates the factors that led to the
death.
If violations of OSHA's
standards are found, the authority issues citations, which are handled in civil
court, according to Nicholas DeJesse, head of the local OSHA office.
Criminal charges are rare and
usually follow the discovery that a company "willfully ignored"
federal standards.
That can be difficult to
prove: DeJesse couldn't recall any willful violations in cases involving day
laborers in the past two years.
Barbara Rahke knows the
plight of day laborers all too well.
As director of the
Philadelphia Area Project on Occupational Safety and Health, Rahke organizes
outreach programs and tracks down information about workers maimed or killed on
the job.
"It's really sort of
like the Wild West," she said. "We're dealing with an industry that's
very difficult to stay on top of."
Undocumented immigrants stand
in groups at area stores waiting to be selected for work. They are drawn to day
labor for obvious reasons, Rahke said.
"If you're new to the
area, you don't have access to the informal networks that provide most
construction jobs," she said. "Standing in front of these stores is
sometimes the most efficient way to get work.
"The result is a large
underground economy that hires a lot of people."
"Underground"
usually means not providing proper safety equipment or training.
Sometimes, said Rahke, it's
as simple as pointing to the tools and saying, "Go to work."
The reason these employers
hire undocumented workers is also obvious.
"If a worker tries to
exercise his rights, the employer can hold [Immigration and Customs
Enforcement] over their heads," Rahke said. "And if someone is killed
on the job, his family goes underground; they're scared, and they don't want to
be found."
But an undocumented worker is
entitled to the same rights as his or her American-born colleagues.
"Otherwise, there would
be even more incentive to say, 'Oh, I'm hiring someone who's undocumented, so I
can pay them whatever I want,' " Rahke said.
The tricky part is exercising
those rights.
Fight
for your right
Employers must have
insurance, said Todd Lasky, a lawyer with the Center City firm Zavodnick,
Zavodnick & Lasky, which specializes in workers' compensation cases.
In the event of a workplace
injury, the policy helps pay for medical bills and other expenses. If someone
dies, it provides "dependency benefits" to the worker's spouse and
children.
How much those benefits offer
depends on the wages paid to the worker.
"When it comes to that,
your status as undocumented really is irrelevant," Lasky said.
For day laborers, the
best-case scenario is that the employer pays for medical bills or other
expenses out-of-pocket. The worst case is that the employer denies ever hiring
them.
And without a solid paper
trail, proving employment becomes almost impossible.
"Someone gets picked up
at Home Depot, gets paid in cash, doesn't know the company's name and doesn't
have contact info for his co-workers - how do you prove anything?" Lasky
said.
In successful cases, the
workers piece together scraps of information: a number painted on the side of
the truck, a first name remembered in passing, a T-shirt bearing the
contractor's logo.
More often than not, however,
the cases are uphill battles with little recourse for the worker's family.
That's why Lasky and his
office are joining other labor advocates in teaching workers what they are
entitled to before their boots even touch the dirt on a work site.
'No
one has to . . . die'
Every morning, the parking
lot of the Home Depot on Roosevelt Boulevard near Langdon Street in
Crescentville is an open-air market for day laborers.
Men in paint- and
dust-stained jeans mill about, converging on cars as they pass by.
On a recent morning, amid
this chaos, a handful of workers learned how not to fall off a roof.
Hillary Blecker, a trainer
for PhilaPOSH, held a session with the day laborers on safety harnesses. It
allowed the attendees to try on the harnesses required on roofing jobs.
The session's other tool was
much smaller: business cards that, alongside contact information for the local
OSHA office, warn workers, "No one has to hurt themselves or die for
pay."
Natalia Nicastro, an
organizer for the Philadelphia Workers Association, said that message can't be
stressed enough.
Nicastro's organization formed
last year, after the workers outside Home Depot encountered increasing
resistance from the store's manager.
"People don't realize
that [undocumented workers] are escaping from bad situations in home countries
and trying to survive here and find honest jobs," she said.
"It's not that they are
not willing to work with the legal process; it's that they don't have the
opportunity. It would be better for everyone if they did."
Source: Philly.com
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