http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/l ... te18m.html

Monday, September 18, 2006 - 12:00 AM

State struggles to catch work-site abuses

By Sanjay Bhatt
Seattle Times staff reporter

State inspector Bob Esparza walks around construction job sites asking workers to name their employer and smiling knowingly when a name is nowhere on his list: He smells an unregistered contractor.

At some of those same job sites, union organizer Jimmy Matta heartily greets Latino workers in Spanish, asking how many hours they're putting in and what they're getting paid for it.

Both are working to stop abuses in the region's construction industry, which is hiring increasing numbers of Latino immigrants as laborers, drywallers, painters and framers.

While it's the federal government's responsibility to go after employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants, the job of policing construction sites is largely up to the state Department of Labor and Industries (L&I).

The state is not concerned with whether workers are here legally or illegally. Rather, its agents are charged with making sure that contractors are registered and paying taxes and workers-compensation premiums, job sites are safe, and workers are properly paid.

Though laws are in place, L&I officials say staffing is often insufficient to enforce them, and penalties against wrongdoers sometimes are too light to be effective.

Labor unions say cases of illegal immigrants getting stiffed out of pay are especially common. In some cases, unions are stepping in to help these workers, most of them nonunion, take legal action.

Carl Hammersburg, L&I's fraud-prevention and compliance manager, says illegal immigrants are not the cause of abuses in the construction industry.

Employers willing to break the law are the problem, he said. Without firm consequences, it becomes "really easy for people who want to do the wrong thing to justify it to themselves by saying, 'I can get away with it.' "

Rebecca Smith, an Olympia attorney with the National Employment Law Project, spoke at a recent training session for lawyers wanting to represent illegal workers.

"We have more undocumented workers in the country than ever, and they are working in dangerous, low-paying jobs," she said.

Hard to police

Even before the influx of illegal immigrants, the construction industry was tough to regulate.

By their nature, construction sites are not fixed in place like, say, restaurants. They are open to workers who come and go and are typically organized in small crews that may work for different employers. That can make it difficult to determine who's in charge and thus responsible.

"Construction sites change from day to day," said Elaine Fischer, a spokeswoman for L&I. "It's not like a store where you can speak to the manager."

In the construction industry alone, the department regulates 56,000 registered contractors and estimates there are 5,000 contractors who are unregistered.

The state says its staffing is better in some areas than others, enabling it in recent years to conduct more safety inspections and identify more contractors who aren't registered or paying workers-compensation premiums.

On the lookout

Esparza is the lone Spanish speaker on a three-member team launched by the department in March to catch unregistered contractors. He was raised in the Yakima County town of Sunnyside, where migrant laborers worked on farms. In the 1980s and '90s, Esparza saw farm laborers moving into higher-paying jobs in the construction industry, and now he finds many being exploited.

Esparza said some contractors, when bidding on jobs, don't factor in the cost of workers-compensation premiums, and when they get caught, they stiff their workers.

"We educate workers to write down the name of the person who hired them and to keep track of their hours," Esparza said.

In its first four months, the team cited more than 30 unregistered contractors and identified more than $675,000 in unpaid workers-compensation premiums, Fischer says.

One recent case involved a Fife real-estate broker who was hiring illegal Latino workers to install drywall and carpeting in homes he bought for quick resale. Esparza says the workers contacted him after the broker refused to pay. After investigating, Esparza cited the broker for being an unregistered contractor.

Statewide, the department has 23 field agents assigned to enforcing wage-and-hour laws — far fewer than the number who monitor workplace safety and health. There are six such wage agents in King County, and only two speak Spanish.

The agents try to overcome their small numbers by tipping each other off. In one case, 14 Latino framers at a hotel-construction site were not paid. A safety inspector relayed their information to a wage-and-hour investigator, who got the site's general contractor to pay up.

Typically, though, the department is not successful in helping such workers recover wages.

Fischer, the L&I spokeswoman, in part blames factors outside the department's control: Employers go bankrupt. Workers disappear. Evidence is spotty.

Unions step in

Unions have stepped into the enforcement void.

Sometimes they pick up where a state investigation has stalled. Other times, illegal workers contact union organizers directly. And in a few cases, unions mount a sting on an employer, sending in Latino members as workers.

Unions are especially active in keeping tabs on public projects, which must pay prevailing wages, often union scale, to all workers.

Matta, an organizer for the Pacific Northwest Regional Council of Carpenters, met two years ago with six Latino workers who alleged in a lawsuit that they had been threatened with retaliation by their employer.

The workers said they were being paid an hourly wage between $10 and $14 instead of the legally required prevailing wage of $30 or more for renovation work at Somerset Elementary in Bellevue.

Matta first helped the workers file a complaint with L&I, which conducted an initial investigation. Seattle attorney David Mark filed a lawsuit on the workers' behalf and won them back pay, plus interest.

Mark said the state's enforcement resources have become strained "as there are more and more outlaws out there." Within the construction industry, he said, "it's the days of the old Wild West."

Sanjay Bhatt: 206-464-3103 or sbhatt@seattletimes.com