For many workers in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the possibility of receiving the legally required time and a half for overtime, even when they work 80-hour weeks, seems as likely as winning the lottery. "They always told us work faster, faster, and the money was really bad," said Deisi Cortes, who worked as a stocker at Super Star 99 until April when she was fired, she said, for being pregnant. "We'd ask for a raise, and all they'd say is, 'Maybe later on."'Knickerbocker Avenue is in many ways the face of New York's traditional retail life outside of central Manhattan's wealthy shopping locales, with bodegas, low-cost stores, and ethnic restaurants jumbled together in a confusion of awnings and blaring signs. Immigrant shopping strips like this one in Bushwick and others in Corona, Jamaica, Sunset Park and Washington Heights not only serve the working class but just as often exploit it with widespread wage violations, according to economists, sociologists, immigrant advocates and community groups."
New York is like the wild, wild West," said Annette Bernhardt, a senior policy analyst with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School. "The violations are on such a scale that nobody can monitor all of them." She said widespread violations in Bushwick mirrored those in many businesses that rely on immigrants -- greengrocers, laundries, restaurants and garment factories. The large number of unskilled immigrant workers, many of them here illegally, helps create a fertile climate for wage violations on streets like Knickerbocker. In addition, many immigrant storeowners are unfamiliar with wage laws and not much concerned about them, and the government has been less than vigorous in enforcing them."It's pretty stunning the extent to which stores here break wage and hour laws," said Deborah Axt, a lawyer with Make the Road by Walking, an immigrant advocacy group in Bushwick. "The violations seem epidemic." Robert C. Smith, a sociologist at Baruch College, said recent interviews and surveys he conducted showed that half of New York's illegal immigrants were paid less than the minimum wage, partly because many are too scared to speak out.
But many legal immigrants also face wage violations, and some say storeowners offer them less than the minimum wage if they do not speak passable English.It might seem odd that federal and state officials demand that employers pay the minimum wage to illegal immigrants. But officials say enforcing wage laws, even for those workers, is important to prevent the exploitation of any employees, legal or not, and to discourage employers from hiring illegal immigrants for cut-rate wages when jobs might have gone to Americans or legal immigrants at $7 or $8 an hour. In addition, wage enforcement helps deter off-the-books work that deprives the government of tax revenue. Concerned about the high rate of wage violations, Make the Road by Walking and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union have adopted an unusual strategy. They are collecting information about violations from scores of workers on Knickerbocker Avenue. The two groups plan to confront storeowners with this evidence and give them a choice: either face a lawsuit or government action seeking maximum back pay, or agree to unionization and face a less aggressive push for back pay.
Bushwick teems with newcomers from Mexico, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic, and Knickerbocker Avenue, as with many immigrant-dominated retail strips, is characterized by low prices, low wages and shoppers with low incomes. At stores like National 99 Cent or Less, LaCasa Discount and Barato Variety, shoppers can find cans of Coke for 49 cents, flower-print bedspreads for $14.99 and pinstriped suits for $79.99. At Minimax, a discount store at 437 Knickerbocker, Sofia Campos said she earned $3.80 an hour until she was fired when she missed work one day because her daughter had a high fever. Other Minimax workers said they also were getting $3.8o an hour for 63 hours of work before the owners paid $65,000 last year to settle a lawsuit over wage violations. The workers said the store now paid the minimum wage. Emilio Cortes said he received $320, or $4.38 an hour, for his 73-hour workweeks at S & S Farms before it reached a $28,000 settlement in March with the state attorney general, Eliot Spitzer.
Mr. Cortes said he was paid $6 an hour now.Morris Cohen, the owner of Minimax, did not respond to three phone messages, and Khubib Masoud, the manager of Super Star 99, declined to comment. The owner of Footco, the sneaker store, did not return two phone calls, but workers at the store refused to give their names because they feared they would be fired for complaining. A manager at Nuevo Mexico restaurant denied any wage violations. Some storeowners acknowledged that the intense competition on Knickerbocker Avenue created pressure to flout wage laws to save money."Some new people, they come, and they try to squeeze people," said Adelo Jreige, who has owned Adelo's Shoes for 20 years, making him a respected veteran on the ever-changing avenue. "Rent is going crazy, and it's hard to operate, and people do what they can to manage."Mr. Jreige said he complied with labor laws. "I have people making $7 an hour, $6.50 and $5.75," he said, apparently unaware that on Jan. 1, New York's minimum wage rose to $6, from $5.15.Steve Kim, the manager of Morris Discounts, at 348 Knickerbocker, acknowledged that his store paid some workers $5 an hour in cash.
"If you make $6 on the books, wouldn't it be smarter to make $5 off the books?" he said. "Some people prefer to get cash. It's good, and they don't pay taxes." The retail union and Make the Road by Walking say that a half century ago, half of Knickerbocker Avenue's stores were unionized, but that just two were now. The groups assert that unionization would be preferable to occasional back-pay settlements because it would mean long-term improvements in wages and benefits. "The State Department of Labor is completely overwhelmed and doesn't seem to have enough commitment or resources to do the job properly," said Andrew Friedman, a co-director of Make the Road by Walking. "My sense is many folks are very scared to stand up and complain because they worry about losing their jobs and because they have a perception that the State Labor Department isn't interested in protecting the rights of immigrants." Robert Lillpopp, the department's spokesman, said its investigators pursued complaints, regardless of a worker's immigration status.
He noted that the agency recently expanded the mandate of its Apparel Industry Task Force to include many low-wage industries.But Julia Ortiz, a Dominican immigrant, faulted the department's investigation of the discount store where she worked. In November, Ms. Ortiz and a coworker, Consuelo Echeverry, protested to the department, saying the store, Save Smart, paid them $35 for 11-hour workdays, equal to $3.18 an hour. Shortly after the state sent investigators to the store, Ms. Ortiz said, the manager fired her and Ms. Echeverry because he was angry that they had complained to the state. Ms. Ortiz said that when she complained to the Labor Department that it had violated its promise to keep their names confidential, officials told her their identities had been divulged at the store owner's insistence. "We felt totally betrayed," Ms. Ortiz said.Ali Hamad, Save Smart's manager, declined to comment. Mr. Lillpopp said the investigators would not have disclosed the names because state regulations bar officials from revealing the identities of complaining workers while investigations are in progress.