Low-Wage Workers Press Pols For Action

Maria Ferrer was fired from her job cleaning a downtown laboratory building just for speaking with her colleagues about low pay and overtime abuse.

The local housekeeper shared that story of hard work and employer retaliation at a labor rights roundtable hosted by U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro and state Attorney General William Tong in the Aldermanic Chambers on the second floor of City Hall.

The event gave attention to new fronts of labor organizing here and nationally, among immigrant low-wage wage worker and gig-economy ​“independent contractors” like Uber drivers.

Joining New Haven Legal Assistance Association (NHLAA) labor attorney James Bhandary-Alexander, Ferrer and two fellow local victims of employer discrimination and job instability petitioned the top elected officials to carry their stories with them to Hartford and Washington, D.C. as they fight against wage theft and for pay equity.

Ferrer, along with nursing home labor organizer Stephanie (who declined to share her last name or be photographed) and rideshare labor organizer Rosana Olan, gave testimony to the precarious nature of working class women in an economy largely eroded of private sector union membership and its concomitant protections.

“I implore both of you to fight for workers,” Ferrer said in Spanish, as translated by Bhandary-Alexander. ​“Fight against discrimination. Against retaliation. For equal pay. Fight for equal wages. For all of us.”

“We have to establish the new norms,” DeLauro replied, ​“and the new benefits so that people are not thrown out on their own.”

As the top-ranking Democrat and chair of the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee, DeLauro said, she plays an instrumental role in funding and overseeing the federal Department of Labor.

She said that the funding package that the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed for the DOL would allow for the hiring of 500 new Wage and Hour Division inspectors. That the Paycheck Fairness Act passed by the House would help level the playing field between men and women in the workplace. That the Wage Theft Prevention and Wage Recovery Act and the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, both of which DeLauro has helped introduce and champion, would give workers stronger rights to fight against employer exploitation.

But even the bills passed by the House, she admitted, have virtually no chance of clearing a Republican-controlled Senate without a nationwide movement of workers and labor organizers backing them.

“I’m challenging our advocacy organizations [throughout the country] to draw attention to these issues,” she said. ​“We have much more work to do in this area to protect workers.”

“It Wasn’t Easy”

Ferrer, a New Haven resident, said that she has been employed cleaning medical laboratories in town for the past five years.

Her most recent assignment took her to a six-story building downtown where she worked five nights a week, by herself. She would start her workday at 10 p.m., and then work straight through to 7 a.m., cleaning the floors, the pharmacies, the bathrooms, the offices. Preparing the building for the hundreds of workers who filled its rooms every weekday.

When New Haveners looked downtown at night and saw a building lit from the ground floor to the top floor, they were looking at her job.

“I made about $11 an hour,” she said, through Bhandary-Alexander’s translation. ​“That is obviously not a living wage, and it wasn’t easy.”

She said she almost always worked over 40 hours per week, but was never paid any overtime premiums. ​“All I did was work,” she said. Even though her employer, on his official time-keeping records, noted that she took a one-hour lunch break every shift, sometime between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.

Then, earlier this year, she was fired. All of a sudden. Simply for talking with fellow employees about how much she made per hour and how she was never paid overtime.

Through her representation by legal aid, she said, she now knows there’s a state law against firing workers for talking about their pay. ​“With the help of my lawyer,” she said, ​“we’re pursuing justice.”

She implored DeLauro and Tong to fight for workers like her as they go back to D.C. and Hartford.

“We will fight,” DeLauro promised.

“We Have To Fight For Every Inch”

Stephanie, a certified nursing assistant from West Haven, then gave her testimony about her experience working for two different nursing homes: one unionized, one not.

Reading almost verbatim from a Hartford Courant op-ed she had penned several days earlier entitled ​“Why I Am A Union Organizer”, she said that the workplace culture and employee pay and benefits at the two different nursing homes were as different as night and day.

One had retirement plans, decent health insurance, and just-cause termination standards for employees. ​“The girls were together and fought for what they believed was right.”

The other ​“was all over the place, with bad pay, bad benefits, low morale and no security at all for the workers.”

So Stephanie spoke with her non-union colleagues, and decided to organize a union at one of the nursing homes. Management pushed back hard. They brought in an anti-union consultant, she said, ​“to scare the hell out of everybody, saying that the union would take too much money in dues, that the union is an outsider, that everyone will get a raise once everyone votes no and the campaign is over.”

The consultant was effective. The union drive lost. Stephanie and some of her fellow union organizers were subsequently fired. But the National Labor Relations Board and the NHLAA have taken up the case.

“I have learned what I cam capable of,” she said.

“No one’s ever going to give us anything,” Tong said in response about what he found so inspiring about Stephanie’s story. ​“We have to fight for every inch.”

“Hard Workers Trying To Make Ends Meet”

Olan, a local Uber and Lyft driver who is also an organizer with the Independent Drivers Guild of Connecticut, shared testimony about just how difficult it has become to cobble together a stable paycheck as a fulltime rideshare driver.

“I became a ride hail driver after being laid off from my previous job here in Connecticut,” she said. ​“I had heard from my neighbor that driving for Uber was a good way to make money. And at first it was.”

When she first started driving, she said, she could make $200 in five hours. But then, in November 2018, Uber slashed driver pay and changed the structure around surge fees and bonuses.

“Connecticut riders were still paying a large fare,” she said, ​“but suddenly driver pay was slashed.” She said she is currently working longer hours than when she first started, but making 75 percent less in pay. And she still has to cover the cost of her car payments by herself, let alone her rent and other bills.

“In the last year,” she said, ​“the app companies have upended our world to grab more and more of each fare out of the hands of Connecticut drivers to further enrich millionaires and billionaires.” And she is still treated as an independent contractor, with no paid sick leave time or other health benefits provided through her work.

“There are thousands of drivers in Connecticut just like me,” she said. ​“Hard workers trying to make ends meet. Mothers, fathers and family just trying to put food on the table for their families.”

“The desperate cry for help is palpable,” DeLauro said. ​“If there is ever a time when there’s a role for government to play,” she said, it is now and here, in intervening on behalf of workers structurally disadvantaged from building stable, middle-class lives.

Bhandary-Alexander argued that the state should create a working group of where workers and worker rights’ activists can talk with elected officials and state labor regulators about workplace conditions in Connecticut.

“There is an atmosphere of intimidation,” he said, that can only be countered by hearing and sharing the stories of those workers who stand up and speak out.