Hispanic workers accuse the Tina job placement agency in Manhattan's Chinatown of continuously exploiting immigrants like themselves. The agency charges them in advance for finding them jobs, which often come with deplorable working and living conditions.
In a recent interview, workers said that the Tina Agency charged them $50 for finding them employment. This is against the law, according to Jonathan Mintz, the New York City Commissioner of Consumer Affairs.
"Charging a client money before they have found him or her a job is illegal," explains Mintz, who adds that in the past year his agency has recovered some $76,000 in illegal fees paid to various employment agencies in the city.
Several Hispanic workers also denounced the poor working and living conditions at jobs referred by this agency, located on Doyers Street.
"They tell you one thing in the agency, and what you find in the Chinese restaurants where they send you to work is a completely different thing," says Ramón Morales, who was back out on the Chinatown streets after only three days working at a Chinese restaurant in Pennsylvania.
The jobs usually involve 12- to 15-hour days. The monthly pay varies from $1,200 to $1,500 and includes lodging and three meals a day.
But many Hispanic workers claim angrily that sometimes the working conditions are so unbearable that they cannot last even a week, and they quit. Often they are stuck without a dollar in their pockets after they've paid their bus ticket back.
Living amid bedbugs and garbage
Porfirio Amaya, a Mexican immigrant worker who for the past two months has been living in Chinatown on $16 a day, assures us: "They treat you like a dog, they give you a lot more work than they do to others, and they put you in a room full of bedbugs, garbage or water, and that's where you're supposed to sleep."
This living and working system has been a practice in Chinatown since the 1980s, when Chinese immigrants from Fujian arrived. The Hispanic workers can sleep in an Internet café for $7, eat lunch for $3.50, and take a shower for $5.
Amaya says that a Hispanic worker he knows recently quit his job at a Chinese restaurant in New Hartford, Connecticut, after working for six days, and the owners did not pay him.
"That happens all the time; they don't pay us and we end up coming back here. The people at Tina don't give us back our money, and then we have to pay more so they'll find us another job," Amaya complains.
Lorelei Boylan, of the New York State Labor Department, explains that the employers are violating a number of labor laws. If the employee works more than 40 hours a week, the extra hours are supposed to be paid at a rate of $10.87 instead of the $7.25 paid for the first 40 hours.
"They are supposed to be paid a total of $2,725 a month for working six twelve-hour days a week," Boylan assures us, and also points out that the most they can be charged for their meals is $2.40 per day.
Boylan says that if employers do not pay their workers at the time the workers leave a job, they are obliged to send them their money no more than seven days after the workers leave.
"We can get the back money which they are owed, but we need for them to report the restaurants, giving us the name of the restaurant, its address and a list of the hours they worked," Boyle says.
The agency owner, who identified herself only as Tina, told El Diario/La Prensa that the accusations by the workers are due to a misunderstanding.
"I do return them their money," the owner said, explaining that the money can be retrieved only between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. "I tell them that when they come, but they don't understand," she added.
