NY Times, May 31, 2004 Rewards of a 90-Hour Week: Poverty and Dirty Laundry By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
For the many New Yorkers who dread spending two hours in a noisy, often smelly laundry washing and drying their clothes, it is a godsend that most laundries will handle that unpleasant chore for them, and for as little as $5 a load.
But few customers pay attention to the thousands of "wash and fold" workers - most of them women from Mexico - who actually handle their laundry. They are among the most anonymous laborers in New York. In humid basements and backrooms around the city, they shovel clothes in and out of washers and dryers, matching socks and folding hundreds of towels and undergarments each day.
Most laundry workers earn less, often far less, than the minimum wage of $5.15 an hour. Gabriela Mendez, a veteran of six Manhattan laundries, said one paid her $230, or $3.19 an hour, for a 72-hour week, while at another she earned $220, or $2.45 an hour, for a 90-hour week.
She and other workers boil over with tales of oppressive conditions or abusive bosses. Some said their employers hit them for taking a long lunch or fired them for being out sick for a day; others said they saw co-workers collapse from the heat.
"The laundry pays us less than they're able to," said Inriqueta G., an illegal immigrant who works at a laundry in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. She would not give her last name.
"They say they can't pay us more because we don't understand English," she continued, speaking through a translator. "But we work just as well as other people."
In recent months, the wages and working conditions of laundry workers have begun to attract outside attention. The state attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, has begun cracking down on a handful of laundries, winning tens of thousands of dollars in back wages for the workers and pressuring some laundries to begin granting paid sick days and one-week vacations. Several immigrant advocacy groups have taken up the cause of laundry employees, and an effort has begun to unionize some workers.
"There's an industrywide problem about failure to pay the minimum wage, and these workers are almost never paid time and a half," said Patricia Smith, director of the attorney general's Labor Bureau. "When we ask owners why they're paying so little, they say, 'That's what everybody else pays.' "
Ms. Smith added that at a majority of the laundries investigated by the office, there have been allegations of oppressive working conditions, including sexual harassment, physical and verbal abuse and poor environmental conditions, like the use of harsh chemicals.
Avenue B Cleaners, a laundry on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, agreed last month to pay $23,000 in back wages and damages after several workers complained to the attorney general that they had been paid less than $250 each for a 72-hour work week. Anyone who works a 72-hour week - or 12 hours a day, six days a week - should receive at least $453.20 a week if paid the minimum wage and overtime. Government officials noted that minimum wage laws also apply to workers who are in the country illegally.
Avenue B's lawyer, Samuel Ahne, acknowledged the company's failure to pay the minimum wage, but he said that should not be surprising. "The reason people are being underpaid is there is a lot of financial stress over all on the owners," Mr. Ahne said, citing property tax increases, soaring rents and intense competition from immigrant entrepreneurs.
James B. Levin, a lawyer for Bright Laundry, a laundry on East 84th Street that agreed last September to pay $18,200 in a settlement with the attorney general, had a different explanation for the wage violations. "There aren't enough jobs available for people, and they'd much rather work for less than the minimum wage than not work at all," he said. "And, remember, a lot of these workers aren't legal."
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/31/nyregion/31laundry.html
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