Melinda Tuhus Photo
Workers rallied downtown Friday to decry what they called unfair treatment by several employers and claim they were owed tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid wages — while one of the targeted employers claimed he was a victim of the workers’ manipulation.
About three dozen people rallied on the sidewalk at noon outside the College Street eatery, Downtown at the Taft.
A former cook there, Naftali Palma (pictured), claimed that he and his three-man crew were denied overtime pay despite working over 70 hours many weeks.
One of the owners, Claudio San Francesco, said on Thursday that Palma had been hired on salary, not hourly pay.
“We were giving him the money and he was paying his own people,” he said, “and that was conditional to him to give us his social security numbers and all this information, which he constantly denied to give to us. It was the main reason why we had to get rid of him. Now he’s trying to go back to us and make it complicated. That’s why we had to get a lawyer to defend ourselves.
“These people are trying to take advantage to us,” he added, “that we’re trying to make a living ourself. We have to understand the reality — not all the time there is somebody taking advantage of Mexicans. Most of the time it is them — they are trying to screw you. We cannot hire illegals; it’s against the law. So that’s the main reason everything happened. We’re not here to screw nobody. We are very lucky when we have good people on board. Most of the time we are the one they are taking advantage of.”
Palma said the agreement was for him to work 45 to 55 hours a week. He added that he was never asked to provide documentation, and that he was fired when he complained to the government.
There was also disagreement about how long the employees worked there, with San Francesco saying it was two months, Palma saying it was a year, and one of the kitchen workers saying it was five months.
Asked if the workers had pay stubs to verify employment, John Jairo Lugo of Unidad Latina en Accion, an immigrants’ support group (pictured at the demo), said he believed they were paid in cash, muddying the waters.
Peter Goselin, a labor attorney who is assisting the workers and who spoke at the rally, said employers often say that people who work for them are independent contractors, “But that’s not what the law says. The Connecticut Labor Department has said repeatedly that under these circumstances these people are still employees of the employer — of the restaurant, in this case.”
“Increasingly, in a number of low-wage industries, employers are just operating under the assumption that they don’t have to follow basic workplace laws,” said Sarah Leberstein, a staff attorney from the New York City-based National Employment Law Project, who was on hand to put the issue in a national context. She said in a recent survey the project conducted, 26 percent of low-wage workers earned less than the minimum wage and 76 percent who worked over 40 hours were not paid the required overtime.
And she said while immigrants are at especially high risk of exploitation, any low-wage worker is at risk.
The rally was sponsored by Junta for Progressive Action, Unidad Latina en Accion, the New Haven Workers Alliance and others. Junta’s Patricia Juarez (pictured in photo at top) said she helped calculate the exact sums the workers are owed, based on hours worked. Among the other employers targeted was Goodfellas restaurant on State Street. Reached on Wednesday, co-owner Gennaro Ianhaconne declined comment, saying he’d just been served with papers seeking information about former workers who were complaining of being underpaid.