Group helps low-wage workers

Monday, June 18, 2001 | 10:28 a.m.

Nine years ago, Jose Isaac Silva-Ontiveros, 27, crossed the border from Mexico with the help of family who had lived in Las Vegas since 1976.

Since then, he has moved around the state and has worked in several neighboring states. When his wife recently gave birth to their second child, he settled in Las Vegas, where he found a job in landscaping.

Nine months later, he's among the unemployed. Along with three fellow workers, he represents one of the 100-plus cases the Dolores Huerta Center for Worker Rights has opened since January, when it began operations.

The center is an offshoot of the Las Vegas Interfaith Council for Worker Justice, an organization that includes 20 area churches and temples. Its funding comes from several local unions and national foundations, and its goal is to help immigrant and low-wage workers, most of whom are Hispanic.

"In Nevada today, thousands of Hispanic and Asian-Americans are working for employers who routinely violate state and federal employment laws," Mike Slater, executive director of the council, said.

"When we started this project six months ago, we stepped into a void. Before we came along, these people had no one to turn to," he said.

The complaints the center is helping Silva-Ontiveros and his fellow workers register with the appropriate government agencies range from not being paid overtime after months of 12-hour days to working with lawn mowers and trimmers lacking safety guards.

Attempts to reach the workers' boss, Daren Moran, owner of Ground FX Landscaping, were unsuccessful. But Moran did leave a message on an answering machine at the Sun, in which he explained that he closed his company June 1.

"I'm foreclosing on my house and my credit cards are 90 days past due," Moran said. "As for the complaints lodged by my workers, all the repairs and stuff weren't brought to my attention at first, and some of it I didn't even know about. It was a big struggle to work with them, and they were inconsistent about showing up."

Through May the Worker Rights Center had received more than 200 calls, about half of which have been taken on as cases to be solved through lodging complaints with state and federal offices. These include the U.S. Department of Labor, Nevada Legal Services and the Office of the State Labor Commissioner.

Together, wage and discrimination complaints make up half of the cases, as in the example of Silva-Ontiveros.

Three-quarters of the cases opened have been from Hispanics, and at least 40 percent have been from undocumented immigrants. The immigration status of a quarter of them is unknown, though Slater estimates that most of this figure is made up of undocumented immigrants.

Most complaints come from the construction, maintenance, landscaping and service sectors, Worker Rights Center Project Director Mark Stotik said.

Both Stotik and Slater said the calls to the center keep increasing.

"In a place like Las Vegas, where the Latino population is growing rapidly, the potential exists for employers to take advantage of this population -- both because of language barriers and because those who are undocumented fear that they could be deported if they speak out," Hector Villagra, staff attorney for the L.A.-based Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said.

Marc Sanders, assistant officer in charge at the Las Vegas office of the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service, said his office has met with the center and is not actively pursuing those undocumented workers -- both because they have limited staff and resources, and because it is not top on their list of priorities.

The U.S. Labor Department also has spoken with the INS and has filed a memorandum agreeing not to release information on any of their cases.

"We've had an increase in complaints from Las Vegas," Pam Yerger, district director of the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division, said. Her office handles cases related to non-payment of minimum and overtime wages and violations of child labor and government contracting laws.

Yerger's office has entered what she calls a non-traditional partnership with the Dolores Huerta Center, after seeing that many workers were unwilling or unable to seek help from the Department of Labor and other government offices, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

She also said her agency is entering into these sorts of partnerships elsewhere in the United States, as it becomes clear that more immigrants are being taken advantage of in the workplace and do not seek government assistance.

"They're afraid, because they're undocumented, or intimidated by the language barrier or even government buildings," Yerger said.

"So we saw we needed to link up with civic groups like the center to reach out to workers in places like Las Vegas," she said. Most of her office's cases are from Hispanic workers, and all four of her local investigators are Spanish-speaking.

At least one of these investigators will be looking into Silva Ontiveros' case in the coming weeks and possibly months. The former landscaping foreman plans to stay out of work in the meantime, in order to be on hand for meetings and questions.

"I believe that you can find justice here," he said.

Once his case is solved he would like to borrow some money, and go into business for himself.

"Then I'd hire others like myself, and treat them as the law says they should be treated," he said.