JUSTICE IN THE WORKS
The Workplace Project, a grass-roots organization located in suburban Long Island was founded
in 1992 after a Harvard Law School graduate, Jennifer Gordon became alarmed by the working conditions of Latinos in the area. She created a haven for immigrant workes with few other options for legal assistance. Workers were working long hours for low wages and receiving poor treatment. A typical arrangement would be when a worker contracted with an employer to wait tables, clean houses or take care of children or work for a contractor and once payday came, the employer would either disappear or simply refuse to pay the agreed-upon rate, which is illegal regardless of employee's immigration status. These conditions were not being addressed by the government or the unions.
Project employees would call on behalf of the workers to try to negotiate payment. Often, employers would not return phone calls, if the Project located the employer they would deny they had ever hired or even knew the worker. When the project pursued the issue with requests for work records, employers would often threaten lawsuits or deportation as retaliation. It was all part of a game abusive emplohers play. Unscrupulus employers have gotten away with because they face no legal action. The project sought to change that.
Jennifer Gordon left the Project, Nadia Marin-Molina, a fledgling attorney who had worked as a volunteer with the Project during the summers while she attended law school, became executive director in 1999. Since then she has been at the epicenter of some of the most turbulent immigration and worker-rights debates in the area's recent history. According to Marin-Molina, Long Island is the third most-segregated area in the nation and now finds itself home to thousands of new Latin American
immigrants, most from Central America and Mexico. Work is plentiful but the high cost of living and lack of affordable housing created numerous problems. Countless immigrants are subjected to discrimination, wage skimming and growing anti-immigrant sentiment.
Many feel that by aiding undocument workers Marin-Molina and the Project are aiding crimin activity, supporting illegal immigration and helping to lower the qualify of live and property value of the suburban community. The suburgan area is also the birthplace of various citizens groups bent on evicting immigrants and pushing local anti-immigrant legislation.
Marin-Molina and her small staff of four full-time and one part-time employees make it a priority to help workers become a part of the system that discriminates against them and ignores the blatant abuses of some employers. Slowly, small changes Marin-Molina hoped for are being made, but not without obstacles.
Recently in nearby Brookhaven, government agencies began to evict immigrants frm their homes. Due to the shortage of affordable housing singly family homes were crowded with up to 20 people. Officials cited safety and stated that overcrowding was a health hazard. The evicted workers would move into another small house from which they were again quickly evicted. Some resorted to sleeping in the woods.
Undocumented workers are faced daily with violence. Incidents where workers were picked up at a hiring corner then taken into the woods and beaten. One such incident resulted in the death of two immigrant workers who were picked up by white supremacists pretending to be employers lured them to a barn where they stabbed and beat the workers to death. In another incident a Mexican couple’s home was fire-bombed by white teens in a racially motivated incident. These and similar incidents lead to the creation of the Long Island Immigrant Alliance, a collective of immigrants’ rights groups that banded together under the principles that immigrants deserve human and legal rights, of which the Workplace Project is a member.
Marin-Molina continues to fight for workers, both documented and undocumented who are locked outsidtsysm that exploits and ignores them. Some of the people who yell the loudest about undocumented laborers are the very ones who benefit from the labor of these workers. Employers who pay skimpy wages, or do not pay at all benefit at the expense of these people. Everything you eat has probably gone through the hands of undocumented workers. For anyone to say they are criminals is hypocrisy. Says Marin-Molina.