NOVEMBER 18, 2019
BY ADAM HERBETS
SALT LAKE CITY – It’s an illegal business practice that most people in the construction industry consider an open secret: “coyotes” smuggling people into the workforce.
It’s a problem one state senator describes as a “robbery” of our tax dollars on some of the biggest construction sites across Utah.
FOX 13 News has discovered hundreds of employees are being paid in cash under the table on a weekly basis instead of paying taxes.
Patrick Bieker, the lead union representative with the Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters in Utah, has been fighting for stricter regulations against anyone who encourages employees to work for cash.
“We refer to them as ‘coyotes,’ or labor brokers,” Bieker said. “They typically use fear to keep their workforce in line.”
According to the Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters, the manpower on most job sites does not come from the general contractor – or even the subcontractors. Instead, they say it comes from coyotes who help the subcontractors limit the amount of fees they pay per employee.
“They don’t pay the workers comp, the unemployment insurance, state and federal taxes. You know, any of the burden that a responsible contractor pays,” Bieker said. “It’s just a constant race to the bottom. Let’s make sure everybody’s getting screwed!”
Workers turn on their coyote… and blame the subcontractors who led them there
Since he learned of the problem, Bieker has hired a number of anonymous informants who work on large job sites across the state. They take pictures of their payments every week, typically large sums of cash handed to them in an envelope inside small office buildings across Salt Lake City.
One of the workers told FOX 13 he has been a legal resident in the United States since 1999. He said he has a green card, but when he tried to get a job with a local subcontractor, the company told him to call a man named Sergio Coronado instead.
“The first payment, envelope, cash. It was like three months, two months and a half I think,” the worker said. “I wanted to pay my taxes, you know?”