Vinicio Ezparza doesn’t expect to see the $5,500 he says he’s owed for construction work he did on a Darien pet store last year.
The checks the contractor issued to him and about 30 other workers on various projects bounced, though the employees kept working for several more weeks in hopes of finally getting paid, Ezparza said. Then, the company declared bankruptcy and nobody was paid anything, he said.
During a meeting Saturday with a U.S. Department of Labor director, Ezparza and a group of other mostly immigrant workers said such cases are on the rise as jobs become more scarce and people like them become more desperate.
“People are willing to do whatever they have to,” Ezparza said, speaking for many in the group of several dozen people gathered in the basement of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in the South Chicago neighborhood.
But, because many of those workers are too afraid to lodge a formal complaint, the practice is allowed to continue, countered Jules Van Rengen, a director with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division.
“It’s difficult for us to do many things if we’re not aware of it,” Van Rengen told the group, urging them to become his agency’s “eyes and ears.”
“There’s a lot of good employers out there, but that’s not the ones we have to worry about,” Van Rengen said. “The ones we want to worry about are the ones who end up concealing, intimidating and terminating if you don’t agree with their philosophy.”
Ana Guajardo, executive director of the Centro de Trabajadores Unidos, said the challenge is to convince workers that regardless of whether they are documented or here illegally, employers cannot exploit them. But she said it is predictably difficult to convince undocumented workers to file federal complaints against bosses who refuse to pay them.
“People think that if they’re talking to the federal government, they’re in danger of getting deported,” Guajardo said. “We’ve got to convince people to speak up for themselves when their employers take advantage of them.”