On April 24, 2013, when their shifts were over, the workers of Jomar Car Wash in Flushing, Queens, voted in favor of unionizing under the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU).
They were mostly undocumented immigrants from Latin America and they had been forced to work 12-hour shifts, six days a week, without overtime pay. That night felt like a moment of liberation. It also represented a triumph for the immigrant-led labor movement in New York.
Jomar —its legal name, although its street sign reads Main Street Car Wash— was the sixth car wash in the City to unionize under RWDSU since 2012. Those efforts attempted to counter the pervasive abuse in the car wash industry: Two-thirds of the workers were paid less than the legal minimum wage, while three-quarters of them didn’t receive any kind of overtime pay, according to advocates. Some workers made as little as $4 per hour.
After that night in 2013, the labor movement won several more battles, with RWDSU unionizing a total of nine car washes in the City over the next three years. However, the backlash from car wash owners was fierce. Today, just two car washes keep their unions. Some of the car washes shut down while others forced a vote to decertify the union as recently as in November.
The last establishment to get rid of the union was Jomar, owned by Jose Pires, and co-owned at some point by Fernando Magalhaes and John Lage, who was dubbed the carwash kingpin by The New York Daily News.
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