Immigrants got cleaning jobs through connections

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, August 3, 2008

By Karen Lee Ziner

Journal Staff Writer

Whether they were classified as employees or independent contractors was a distinction lost on Lucy Contreras and Gustavo Cabrera, 2 of 31 maintenance workers arrested during last month’s courthouse sweeps.

Both said they got their jobs through connections, who handled all their paperwork. They never knew who had hired them, and never knew their job classification. All they knew was that they had jobs.

Contreras, a mother of three from Guatemala, said she’d been out of work for several months when she bumped into a friend who worked at TriState Enterprises.

“She offered me a job. She knew about my status,â€