Thread: Undocumented housekeeper at Trump golf course says she does not regret going public

Originally Posted by Judy

What "history" is that?

The story fizzled because it's a non-story about Trump.

Excerpt:

A former Trump advisor — a labor negotiator who had been convicted of tax evasion — recalled a conversation with the developer in June 1980.
“Donald told me that he was having his difficulties and he admitted to me that — seeking my advice — that he had some illegal Polish employees on the job,” Daniel Sullivan testified. “I reacted by saying to Donald that ‘I think you are nuts.’”



“I told him to fire them promptly if he had any brains,” Sullivan added.
Under oath at the trial, Trump was asked if he recalled when he learned of the unpaid workers. “I really don’t,” he said.
Asked when he knew they were undocumented, he said, “I really still don’t know that.”
Sullivan, who has since died, told NBC News in 1989 that Trump’s pleadings of ignorance were not to be believed.



“Donald’s lying. Flat out,” he said.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/donald-says-controversy-over-his-tower-was-trumped-n397821

Excerpt:

On the campaign trail and as president, Mr. Trump has made curbing immigration one of his top priorities, seeking to close the borders to people from certain Muslim-majority countries and to deport immigrants who are here illegally. The settlement serves as a reminder that as an employer he relied on illegal immigrants to get a dangerous and dirty job done.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/27/n...ettlement.html

Excerpt:

Some three decades later, nothing has changed. Last year, the Washington Post reported that Trump is using undocumented workers in the construction work on his much-feted project to convert Washington, D.C.’s Old Post Office Pavilion into a luxury hotel. “Interviews with about 15 laborers helping renovate the Old Post Office Pavilion revealed that many of them had crossed the U.S-Mexico border illegally,” the Post’s Antonio Olivo wrote in July, “before they eventually settled in the Washington region to build new lives.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/...t-good-enough/

Excerpt:

According to a report from the Washington Post, several undocumented immigrants are working on the construction site of Trump's new $200 million hotel in Washington D.C.

According to the Post, the majority of the workers on the site of the future Trump International Hotel in D.C. are Hispanic, many of whom entered the country illegally.

https://www.abc27.com/news/report-several-illegal-immigrants-work-at-trump-hotel-construction-site-in-d-c/1108163296

The Polish workers in New York worked for a contractor, not for Trump.

There's no evidence to support the WaPo story that any of the 15 Hispanic people standing around on the street in front of the Trump new hotel in DC with hard hats on worked for Trump or had anything to do with his operation, let alone that they were illegal aliens.

I figured these were the two "histories" you were referring to but wanted to be sure.

Originally Posted by Judy

There's no evidence to support the WaPo story that any of the 15 Hispanic people standing around on the street in front of the Trump new hotel in DC with hard hats on worked for Trump or had anything to do with his operation, let alone that they were illegal aliens.

I heard they were working in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico and decided to fly up and have lunch at the Trump Hotel.

Trump Paid Over $1 Million in Labor Settlement, Documents Reveal


The Bonwit Teller building in 1980, as it was being demolished to make way for the new Trump Tower.CreditAssociated Press

Image
The Bonwit Teller building in 1980, as it was being demolished to make way for the new Trump Tower.CreditCreditAssociated Press

By Charles V. Bagli

• Nov. 27, 2017

In 1980, under pressure to begin construction on what would become his signature project, Donald J. Trump employed a crew of 200 undocumented Polish workers who worked in 12-hour shifts, without gloves, hard hats or masks, to demolish the Bonwit Teller building on Fifth Avenue, where the 58-story, golden-hued Trump Tower now stands.

The workers were paid as little as $4 an hour for their dangerous labor, less than half the union wage, if they got paid at all.

Their treatment led to years of litigation over Mr. Trump’s labor practices, and in 1998, despite frequent claims that he never settles lawsuits, Mr. Trump quietly reached an agreement to end a class-action suit over the Bonwit Teller demolition in which he was a defendant.

For almost 20 years, the terms of that settlement have remained a secret. But last week, the settlement documents were unsealed by Loretta A. Preska, a United States District Court judge for the Southern District, in response to a 2016 motion filed by Time Inc. and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Judge Preska found that the public’s right to know of court proceedings in a class-action case was strengthened by the involvement of the “now-president of the United States.”

In a 21-page finding, Judge Preska wrote that “the Trump Parties have failed to identify any interests that can overcome the common law and First Amendment presumptions of access to the four documents at issue.”

On the campaign trail and as president, Mr. Trump has made curbing immigration one of his top priorities, seeking to close the borders to people from certain Muslim-majority countries and to deport immigrants who are here illegally. The settlement serves as a reminder that as an employer he relied on illegal immigrants to get a dangerous and dirty job done.

Katie Townsend, litigation director of the Reporters Committee, called the decision a major victory that goes beyond this one case. “It makes clear that both the First Amendment and common law rights of public access apply to settlement-related documents in class actions,” she said.
Lawyers for Mr. Trump were not immediately available for comment.

The documents show that Mr. Trump paid a total of $1.375 million to settle the case, known as Hardy v. Kaszycki, with $500,000 of it going to a union benefits fund and the rest to pay lawyers’ fees and expenses. According to the documents, one of the union lawyers involved asked the judge to ensure “prompt payment” from Mr. Trump, suggesting “within two weeks after the settlement date.”

Mr. Trump jumped in to object. “Thirty days is normal,” he said.

At the time of the settlement, the court papers note, “this case has been litigated for 15 years and has already required three rounds of discovery, extensive motion practice, a 16-day trial and two appeals.”

Trump Tower was Mr. Trump’s second solo project after leaving his father’s real estate company, which developed working- and middle-class housing in Queens and Brooklyn.

But before he could build a glassy condominium tower on what he considered to be a “Tiffany” of locations, Fifth Avenue and 56th Street, Mr. Trump had to demolish a venerable department store, the 12-story Bonwit Teller building.

For the demolition work, Mr. Trump hired an inexperienced contractor, William Kaszycki of Kaszycki & Sons, for $775,000. Mr. Kaszycki specialized in window and job-site cleaning. His company was renovating an adjoining building for Bonwit Teller, where he employed undocumented Polish workers.

Mr. Trump would later testify that he never walked into the adjoining building or noticed the Polish workers. But a foreman on the job, Zbignew Goryn, testified that Mr. Trump visited the site, marveling to him about the Polish crew.

“He liked the way the men were working on 57th Street,” Mr. Goryn said. “He said, ‘Those Polish guys are good, hard workers.’”

The demolition began in January 1980. It was hard, dirty work, breaking up concrete floors, ripping out electrical wiring and cutting pipes while laboring in a cloud of dust and asbestos.

A smaller group of union demolition workers, who were paid much higher wages and, unlike the Poles, overtime, often made fun of their Polish co-workers, according to the testimony of Adam Mrowiec, one of the Polish laborers.

“They told me and my friends that we are stupid Poles and we are working for such low money,” he said.


In 1998, Wojciech Kozak described to The New York Times the backbreaking labor on the job.

“We worked in horrid, terrible conditions,” Mr. Kozak said.

“We were frightened illegal immigrants and did not know enough about our rights.”

Donald Trump posed with a model of Trump Tower in 1980.

A group of undocumented Polish laborers were hired to help bring down the building that had previously stood on the site.CreditDon Hogan Charles/The New York Times

Image

Donald Trump posed with a model of Trump Tower in 1980. A group of undocumented Polish laborers were hired to help bring down the building that had previously stood on the site.CreditDon Hogan Charles/The New York Times

Today, Mr. Kozak, now 75, lives at the O’Donnell-Dempsey Senior Housing building in Elizabeth, N.J.

He has blue eyes and a strong handshake, but speaks through a special device because he had a tracheotomy for cancer. He proudly showed off his citizenship papers, dated Nov. 3, 1995.

Mr. Kozak still recalls the work, and seeing Mr. Trump at the site in 1980.

“We were working, 12, 16 hours a day and were paid $4 an hour,” he said. “Because I worked with an acetylene torch, I got $5 an hour. We worked without masks. Nobody knew what asbestos was. I was an immigrant. I worked very hard.”

But Mr. Kaszycki stopped paying the men, and they eventually took their complaints to a lawyer named John Szabo. Mr. Szabo went to Thomas Macari, a vice president of the Trump Organization, threatening to place a mechanic’s lien on the property if the men weren’t paid.
According to testimony, Mr. Macari began paying the men in cash himself. The delays and disruptions were adding to the pressure on the Trump Organization to meet its deadlines.

One evening, Joseph Dabrowski testified, Mr. Trump arrived on site to tell the workers that he was taking charge.

“I am telling you for the last time that Trump told us, ‘If you finish this fast and I will pay for it,’” Mr. Dabrowski recalled in court.


Still, there were problems. Mr. Szabo filed the lien, prompting Mr. Trump to ask for help from Daniel Sullivan, a labor consultant. Mr. Sullivan later testified that Mr. Trump described his “difficulties,” and “that he had some illegal Polish employees.”

Mr. Trump, however, testified that he did he not remember that there were undocumented Polish workers on the job, or signing paychecks for the crew. “I really still don’t know that there were illegal aliens,” Mr. Trump said on the stand.

Mr. Trump did, according to Mr. Szabo, have his lawyer call Mr. Szabo with a threat to call Immigration and Naturalization Service to have the men deported.

Mr. Szabo got the Labor Department to open a wages-and-hours case for the men, which ultimately won a judgment of $254,000 against Mr. Kaszycki.

Mr. Kaszycki had signed a contract with Local 79 of the House Wreckers Union. But while Mr. Kaszycki or Mr. Trump paid into the union welfare funds for the handful of union workers on the job, they had not done so for the bulk of the work force, the undocumented, nonunion Poles.

A union dissident and former boxer, Harry Diduck, brought a case in federal court in 1983 against Mr. Kaszycki and, eventually, Mr. Trump and others, claiming that Mr. Kaszycki, the union president and Mr. Trump had colluded to deprive the welfare funds of about $600,000.

A judge ruled that Mr. Trump was a legal employer of the Poles, but both sides appealed elements of his decision, with the total the welfare funds could get reduced to $500,000. On the eve of a second trial, Mr. Trump settled.


Most of the records of the litigation were placed in a federal storage building where Time Inc. unearthed them in 2016.

But the settlement documents remained under seal. After Judge Preska ordered them released, it turned out that two of the documents had been destroyed in routine housecleaning at the court.

Wendy Sloan, a now-retired lawyer who represented the plaintiffs in the original case, had retained them, and provided them to the court. In one of them, Ms. Sloan noted that “in light of the unusually high profile of defendant Donald Trump, plaintiffs have agreed to confidentiality.”

Now that the documents have been released, Ms. Sloan said that “the settlement we obtained recovered 100 percent of the maximum amount plaintiffs could recover,” plus lawyers fees and costs.

“When you get one hundred cents on the dollar in a settlement, that is a great settlement,” Ms. Sloan and Lewis M. Steel, another of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, said in an email.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/27/n...ettlement.html

SURPRISE! SOME WORKERS BUILDING TRUMP’S NEWEST HOTEL REPORTEDLY CAME TO U.S. ILLEGALLY

Needless to say, they’re all unhappy about his comments on Mexicans.

BY TINA NGUYEN

JULY 7, 2015 12:02 PM

By Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images

Despite his recent statements about the types of undocumented Mexicans who come over the border, and his stubborn refusal to walk those statements back as he’s seen business deals crumble, a Washington Post article on Tuesday revealed that Donald Trump may be reliant upon undocumented-immigrant labor to construct his latest real-estate development.

The Post interviewed several construction workers and day laborers working on Trump’s new $200 million Washington, D.C., hotel, and discovered that some were undocumented immigrants, afraid for their jobs in light of Trump’s announcement. Others, who agreed to be interviewed on the record, said they were once undocumented immigrants who obtained legal status, and expressed “disgust” at Trump’s disparaging comments.

“The majority of us are Hispanics, many who came illegally,” Ivan Arellano, a mason who originally came from Mexico and eventually gained his legal status through marriage, told the Post. “And we’re all here working very hard to build a better life for our families.”

Daniel Gonzalez, an El Salvadorian who was granted asylum, worried that Trump’s anti-Hispanic sentiment would jeopardize their jobs: “He might come one day and pretty much tell us to get the heck out of here.”

Others pointed out that they were endangering their lives for the construction of Trump’s hotel, and that they’d been law-abiding residents since they arrived in America. “Do you think that when we’re hanging out there from the eighth floor that we’re raping or selling drugs?” Ramon Alvarez asked rhetorically.

During his presidential announcement speech, Trump accused the Mexican government of allowing “rapists” and drug dealers across the border into the U.S., comments that prompted several large businesses—Macy’s, NBC, Univision, and Serta among them—to drop him as a partner. So far, Trump has adamantly refused to apologize.

Trump’s legal counsel told the Post that the workers were all hired by Lend Lease, one of the largest construction contracting companies in the world, to build Trump’s hotel. A spokesman for Trump told the Post that the Trump Organization never had any issues involving illegal hiring practices, and said it was Lend Lease’s “obligation” to ensure that their contractors were documented. Lend Lease declined comment to the paper.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015...ld-trump-hotel

Originally Posted by Judy

The Polish workers in New York worked for a contractor, not for Trump.

There's no evidence to support the WaPo story that any of the 15 Hispanic people standing around on the street in front of the Trump new hotel in DC with hard hats on worked for Trump or had anything to do with his operation, let alone that they were illegal aliens.

I figured these were the two "histories" you were referring to but wanted to be sure.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest Trump knew the polish workers were illegal. As for the illegals working on the hotel, what advantage could they hope to gain by making up such a story? Most folks that read the full stories will see the truth for what it is.

Trump has shown a strong propensity for hiring foreign labor in his operations. It's not difficult to see a connection between the many legal foreign workers he hires now and the possibility that he knowingly allowed illegal foreign labor to work on his job sites in the past.

LOL!! Like I said, I thought those were the two "histories" you were talking about but I just wanted to be sure. Fizzle. Fizzle. Fizzle.

Originally Posted by Judy

LOL!! Like I said, I thought those were the two "histories" you were talking about but I just wanted to be sure. Fizzle. Fizzle. Fizzle.

No need to be patronizing.

Originally Posted by MW

No need to be patronizing.

Patronizing means I'm being nice to you, which I am.

Fizzle.
Fizzle.
Fizzle.

Originally Posted by Judy

Patronizing means I'm being nice to you, which I am.

Fizzle.
Fizzle.
Fizzle.

Are you indicating that you don't have a problem with illegals as long as it is Trump who is reaping the benefits from cheap labor?