Construction workers on the Silvery Towers project downtown were held in squalid conditions
By EMILY DERUY
PUBLISHED: January 31, 2019 at 6:00 am
Months after it surfaced that workers on a high rise in downtown San Jose were held in captivity and forced to work without pay, the City Council is expected to consider stronger wage protections to prevent companies from refusing to pay employees what they deserve.
In a memo to the city’s Rules and Open Government Committee, several members of the San Jose City Council – Raul Peralez, Chappie Jones, Magdalena Carrasco and Sergio Jimenez – suggested broadening the city’s current wage theft protections to cover construction workers on both public and private projects. They also said developers proposing construction projects involving more than 5,000 square feet of floor area should have to disclose wage theft violations by their contractors and subcontractors. If companies are found to have unpaid wage theft claims, the council members argued, they should be disqualified until the claims are paid.
In July, the U.S. Labor Department announced that more than a dozen immigrants working on the Silvery Towers project at the corner of N. San Pedro and W. St. James streets were held in squalid conditions in a Hayward house and forced to work on projects across the Bay Area.
The changes, the council members wrote, “will ensure that another Silvery Towers does not occur again and that the city is not blindsided by another atrocity.”
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Construction workers and labor groups urged the council to make broadening its wage theft policy a priority. However, business groups warned doing so could create demanding new regulations for developers and hamper the city’s aim of adding thousands of new affordable homes in the next few years.
“It is the ethical and quite honestly the honorable thing to do,” said Steve Flores, with the group Santa Clara County Residents for Responsible Development, adding that the update would close “gaping loopholes” that leave construction workers fending for themselves.