This story is published in partnership with New York Focus.
Victor Ballast was looking for a job. It was January of 2018, he had four children and a wife to support, and he’d had trouble finding work since moving back to the Bronx from Florida. A friend suggested he look into becoming a flagger, a worker who helps keep construction highway projects safe by directing traffic around work sites. Another friend said he was making $42 an hour as a flagger and was in a union. Ballast enrolled in a flagger certification course and jumped into the industry with both feet.
Ballast started working on Con Edison construction sites for the Manhattan-based Griffin Industries LLC. At just $13.50 an hour, the pay was far lower than he’d expected, and he received no benefits. But he had ambitions to grow with the company. He completed two courses for construction workers adding up to 46 hours of training and set his sights on joining a union. “My thing was to make it to the union. My thing was not to sit at $13 or $15 an hour,” he said.
But Ballast’s enthusiasm for the job soon faded as he came to realize that higher pay was nearly impossible to secure, and he says he – like thousands of nonunion construction workers around the state, including many flaggers – was a victim of wage theft. Although he didn’t know it at the time, state labor regulations require flaggers working on government projects in New York City to be paid at least three times what he was making.
Until June of 2018,...
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