Melissa Bailey Photo
Chef Neftali Palma got a $7,500 check Tuesday for unpaid wages from the defunct Downtown at the Taft restaurant — one of 70 people who got help in 2011 from the New Haven Workers Association.
Palma (at left in photo) received the check as part of a $50,000 settlement between six workers and the owners of the former restaurant at 261 College St., which folded eight months ago.
The workers claimed they put in more than 70 hours per week and got paid $4 to $6 per hour or sometimes were not paid at all.
The New Haven Workers Association helped them file complaints with the state Department of Labor and launch a campaign of public protests, which prompted the employers to agree to a settlement.
It was the latest in a year’s worth of campaigns bringing to light a problem facing low-wage restaurant, landscape and construction workers in town, many of them immigrants. The cases don’t involve only immigrants; see this story, for instance, about an ongoing case involves employees of the short-lived Pic-Nic restaurant on Chapel Street.
The problem of underpayment is “rampant,” said Attorney Peter Goselin, who represented the workers in the Taft case. The state Department of Labor recovered more than $6 million in unpaid wages last fiscal year, according to spokeswoman Nancy Steffens. Her office received 4,030 complaints regarding underpayments in the fiscal year that ended July 1; it received more than 5,000 the year before.
Neftali Palma said he worked for two years managing a kitchen crew that made pizzas, baked lasagnas and cooked meatballs for customers at the Taft. The restaurant was supposed to pay $3,600 per week for the crew, but the workers would get shortchanged if business was slow, he said.
“I had to put my own money to pay my guys,” Palma recalled at a press event Tuesday at 439 Ella Grasso Blvd.
The workers are Mexican immigrants. Palma said he often worked 89 hours per week, filling in a managerial role from 10 a.m. to 3 a.m., without getting paid overtime.
Attorney Goselin brought an envelope of settlement checks to the press conference. Each worker will get $7,500, which leaves $5,000 for attorney fees.
“For all the bad treatment,” workers are pleased to “get something back,” Palma said.
Palma cautioned that the abuse of immigrant kitchen workers is commonplace.
“It’s not just our place,” he said. “It’s everywhere.”
In total, the New Haven Workers Association recovered $80,000 in unpaid regular and overtime wages for New Haven area workers in 2011, according to organization volunteer Megan Fountain (at right in photo above). That includes a settlement with former workers of the Goodfellas Cafe on State Street. The other employers involved were restaurants, a construction company and a landscaping outfit, she said.
The volunteer organization, which is part of Unidad Latina en Acción, helped 70 workers in 2011, Fountain said. Of those, 17 workers recovered unpaid wages, including 11 restaurant workers, four construction workers and two landscaping workers. The Taft was the only case in which a lawyer helped with the negotiations (and thus took a cut of the settlement), according to Fountain.
The campaign at the Taft began in December 2010, when the owners “refused a written request to pay back wages to several workers,” Fountain said. Seven workers (one of whom has since moved away and dropped the case) filed complaints with the state Department of Labor. The New Haven Workers Association, Junta for Progressive Action and Unidad Latina en Acción contacted the employer to ask them to pay up.
One of the owners, Claudio San Francesco, told the Independent that Palma had been hired on salary, not hourly pay.
Attorney Goselin (pictured) said the employer was arguing the workers were independent contractors. But state law says they are employees of the restaurant and must be paid the state minimum wage of $8.25 per hour. The attorney for Downtown at the Taft, Robert Golger, did not return a call requesting comment Tuesday morning.
Activists held rallies from December to March, at which point when the employer stepped forward and began negotiating a settlement, according to Fountain. The Taft case didn’t get to the point of state intervention: The workers withdrew their complaints as part of the settlement.
Goselin said the public pressure was key to getting the money back. The $80,000 represents a fraction of the unpaid wages New Haven workers missed out on in 2011, he reckoned.
“The problem is so enormous that without the [intervention of a] community group, the wages would not be paid.”
“There’s no question the restaurant industry as a whole, they think they’re going to get away with it,” he said. He said the settlement should serve as a lesson: “The day when employers could get away with it is over.”
With those words, the New Haven Workers Association turned attention to its next target: the owners of the former Mario’s Discount Furniture store at 439 Ella Grasso Blvd. The group held the press conference in the parking lot of that store, which has reopened under another name and under new ownership. The group claims that former worker Ana Aranda was paid less than $2 per hour when she worked for Mario’s. She filed suit last week claiming $5,000 in unpaid wages. (Click here to read Amanda Pinto’s report of that case in the Register.)