What happened in Amherst should never happen again
TOM JURAVICH
Apr 30, 2022
MASSACHUSETTS NEEDS new legislation to curb wage theft because what happened in Amherst should have never happened and should never happen again. Nine undocumented Hondurans worked 10 hours a day, six days a week for five weeks in a row hanging sheetrock in a new apartment complex in Amherst. Collectively they were owed $50,173 for their labor – but they did not receive one penny in wages. …
Despite Beacon’s commitment to building affordable housing, their progressive social values did not guide the way the development was built. They relied on multiple subcontractors who used undocumented workers who were illegally misclassified as independent contractors. This allowed them to defraud the state by not paying taxes, unemployment insurance, and workers compensation.
Our recent study that examined the records of the Commonwealth found that more than one in six employees in construction are illegally misclassified, and that this costs Massachusetts as much as $82 million annually. And paying workers in cash as independent contractors has created a hothouse for wage theft, as we saw in Amherst.
Beacon Properties hired Keith Construction as the general contractor, which awarded Combat Drywall the contract to hang the sheet rock. Combat, however, has no employees to perform the work and subcontracted the work to Alvarez Drywall.
Alvarez is not registered with the secretary of state in Massachusetts as a business, has no website, no phone number, no real company identity. In fact, Alvarez is not a drywall company. It is simply a labor broker that brought undocumented workers to the job to work as “independent contractors” under Combat supervision. They were not employees and Alvarez would pay them in cash – or Alvarez was supposed to. …
The right to be paid for the work we do in a timely fashion is perhaps our most basic employment right in Massachusetts. No worker in the Commonwealth should ever have to suffer what the workers at the North Square apartments had to go through. We need to hold employers and lead contractors responsible and stop this kind of wage theft with the passage of H1959.
We should all be able to drive or walk through our communities and not have to worry about what is taking place at building and construction sites. As I drive by the North Square Apartments on my way to work now, it stands as a monument to the mistakes that we made and how this can never happen again.