by ALLAN APPEL | Oct 6, 2017 8:35 am
A “fat cat” in a plush three-piece suit dangled and strangled a working guy in a yellow construction helmet on Grand Avenue the other day.
The cat and worker were 15-foot-tall cartoon characters full of compressed air and bobbing in the breeze. But the display was no joke no joke. The blow-up figures were deployed Thursday afternoon by members and supporters of the New England Regional Council of Carpenters (NERCC) in support of Terail Slaughter, a non-union carpenter who had been employed helping to build the tower buildings of the Housing Authority of New Haven’s Farnam Court Townhouses rebuilding project.
About a dozen carpenters and their supporters were on the corner of Grand Avenue and Hamilton Street for two purposes, according to lead organizer Ernest Pagan: to support a wage theft complaint, and to encourage other workers to step forward and make similar complaints when necessary.
The Complaint
Slaughter has lodged an $18,000 wage theft complaint against Palmucci Rivera Construction Concepts (PRCC), a carpentry subcontractor managed by Haynes Construction. The Seymour-based company is a general contractor on the $42 million redevelopment project of the 75-year-old troubled housing complex.
The complaint, which was filed with the state Department of Labor in mid-summer, documents that Slaughter, a nine-year veteran carpenter who had also been a starting guard at Wilbur Cross, was paid $14 an hour. The “prevailing wage” – that is, the nationally mandated wage for a carpenter in Connecticut working on a publicly funded project, is $56 an hour.
Slaughter began work in January 2016. In April he met Pagan, who had come to fact-find and organize. Pagan urged Slaughter to ask for a more appropriate salary. Slaughter eventually took the advice, and PRCC, without acknowledging wrongdoing, raised his hourly wage to $46.
That, however, is the prevailing wage for a laborer, not for a carpenter. This alerted Pagan that, in addition to theft of wages directly, PRCC’s move was misclassifying Slaughter into a lower-paying category than he deserved.