For years, 42-year-old Hermes Diaz has seen fellow construction workers like him — many of them undocumented immigrants — leave their worksites emptyhanded.
“Do you know what it’s like to work all day from 6 a.m., sometimes without a sip of coffee, many times with no lunch break, and then not having the money to take the train?” Diaz said in Spanish.
For Diaz, it happened in New York in 2015 after a contractor hired him on a job at the rate of $150 a day. “She started to miss payments or pay me late, and then she stopped paying me altogether,” Diaz said.
Years after filing a Department of Labor complaint, he and two coworkers are still owed money — even after the contractor agreed to pay out some $10,000.
Employers steal billions of dollars from workers like Diaz every year by withholding wages and benefits. Low-wage immigrant workers are uniquely vulnerable, and getting their money back is complicated, time-intensive and often doesn’t work.
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But Diaz got some money back. He sought legal help from the New York-based advocacy group Make the Road. Together, they built a case against the contractor. The process was time-consuming and required filling out extensive paperwork.
Now, a new online platform tries to streamline that process to make it easier to recoup stolen wages.
The bilingual platform, called ¡Reclamo!, which means “reclaim” in Spanish, is a user-friendly...
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