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PRESS MENTION: Inquilinos demandan a casero: por estar ocho meses sin gas y por acoso

Screenshot of news coverage from NY1 Noticias.

Screenshot of news coverage via NY1 Noticias.

September 15, 2023
By NY1 Noticias

Antonio Flores dice que por años ha padecido acoso de parte del casero donde vive.

Y al igual que él, otras 5 familias mexicanas que viven en el edificio ubicado en el 28-18 de la Avenida 38th, en Long Island City, Queens, han demandado ante la corte de vivienda al propietario del inmueble por haberlos dejado sin gas durante 8 meses.

Y también aseguran, porque los vigilan cada paso que dan.

“El problema es que tenemos mucho acoso por un hombre que contrató el dueño, nos acosaba mucho, nos investigaba, a qué hora salíamos de la casa, sacaba fotos”, dijo Antonio Flores, inquilino.

Poco antes de la audiencia ante el juez, todos ellos acompañados de activistas protestaron frente a la corte, en espera que sus voces y reclamos sea escuchados y fallen a su favor.

Martín Hernández, quien también es inquilino, ya le demandó hace 10 anos por agresión física y ganó. Sin embargo, el acoso no ha parado, asegura.

“Eso fue a parar hasta la corte obviamente y se le pusieron cargos al super, y desafortunadamente al dueño no se le pudieron poner cargos por el poder que tiene y hasta la fecha sigue acosándome, esto no termina”, dijo Hernández.

Antonia Martínez no se queda atrás, pues dice que también ha sido blanco de injurias y hasta de amenazas.

“El dueño y sus trabajadores nos han hecho discriminación, nos amenazan con que si no tenemos los documentos legales nos van a intimidar diciendo que inmigración anda cogiendo a la gente sin documentos”, dijo Antonia.“El dueño y sus trabajadores nos han hecho discriminación, nos amenazan con que si no tenemos los documentos legales nos van a intimidar diciendo que inmigración anda cogiendo a la gente sin documentos”, dijo Antonia.

Viven constantemente con miedo, dicen los inquilinos.

“Nuestros hijos también tienen miedo de sus trabajadores y del dueño porque no se sienten libre de vivir en el departamento, y es muy estresante”, agregó Antonia.

Como estresante es la permanente vigilancia…

“Instaló cámaras, de hecho nos mandó fotos que cuando salimos, cuando botamos basura, a la hora que llegamos del trabajo”, dijo Hernández.

La demanda también exige la reparación por los meses sin gas en sus apartamentos.

“Los inquilinos están pidiendo una reducción de renta de la cuenta que se debe ahora, por la huelga por no tener gras por 8 meses, y también una reducción en la renta del futuro para poder quedarse en su hogar”, dijo Amy Collado, de Servicios Católicos de Migración.

Enviamos un correo al propietario, pero hasta el cierre de este reportaje no obtuvimos respuesta.


See the original news coverage via NY1 Noticias (en español): Inquilinos demandan a casero: por estar ocho meses sin gas y por acoso

JOB ANNOUNCEMENT: PARALEGAL, PRO SE PLUS PROJECT

 

 

 

 

 

JOB ANNOUNCEMENT: PARALEGAL, PRO SE PLUS PROJECT

 

Catholic Migration Services (“CMS”), an affiliated agency of Catholic Charities Brooklyn and Queens, provides high quality free legal services, community education, and advocacy for low- income immigrants residing in Brooklyn and Queens, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, or immigration status. CMS assists individuals with their immigration, housing, and employment legal needs. CMS is committed to “welcoming the stranger in our midst” by serving and working alongside underserved immigrant communities to advance equality and social justice in an ever-changing landscape.

The Paralegal will work in the Brooklyn office with our new Pro Se Plus Project (PSPP), a collaborative initiative of several non-profit legal service providers and community organizations that was developed to respond to the needs of newly arrived migrants from the southern border. PSPP provides support to immigrants representing themselves in immigration cases by providing community legal orientations, trainings for advocates, legal screenings, and pro se assistance with various immigration applications, both on a rolling basis and through scalable clinics and workshops. This is a unique opportunity for someone passionate about immigrant rights, energized to empower immigrant communities, and eager to participate in the development of an innovative project.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

  • Assist in planning, developing and coordinating community legal orientations, volunteer trainings, and clinics;
  • Conduct screenings, intake, and information collection regarding eligibility for immigration benefits;
  • Prepare a variety of immigration applications and motions, on a pro se basis, including changes of address, motions to change venue, applications for asylum and work permits; file such motions and applications with the immigration court, ICE and USCIS;
  • Participate in on-site and virtual PSPP events, which may take place on evenings and weekends, such as legal clinics, educational events, or workshops held throughout the five boroughs;
  • Assist with Spanish/English or Haitian Creole/English translation of documents and oral interpretation;
  • Assist in training, onboarding, tracking and maintaining communication with PSPP volunteers;
  • Maintain physical and electronic files for program participants; monitor the PSPP electronic interest form and PSPP waitlist; assist with internal and external reporting; and
  • Provide additional support as needed.

Qualifications:

  • Required
    • Bachelor’s or Associate’s degree;
    • Fluency in written and oral Spanish or Haitian Creole; .
    • Experience working with immigrant communities of color, including those who have experienced trauma;
    • Demonstrated ability to take initiative and work independently or as part of a team;
    • Strong, clear, and effective communication skills;
    • Excellent organizational and time management skills;
    • Meticulous attention to detail;
    • Excellent computer skills;
    • Availability to travel throughout the five boroughs.
  • Preferred, but not required:
    • Prior or related immigration experience;
    • Demonstrated interest in public interest work and social justice for underserved populations.

Diversity and Non-Discrimination Policy:

Catholic Migration Services values workplace diversity and welcomes applicants and employees of all backgrounds. CMS strives to create a positive, supportive, and inclusive work environment for all staff. CMS makes all employment decisions without regard to any applicant’s or employee’s protected characteristics, including their race, religion, color, national origin, immigration status, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, arrest conviction record, or marital status.

Salary and Benefits:

Salary is on a union scale based on years of experience. The salary range for an immigration paralegal with one to six years of experience is $49,939.20 to $56.181.60. CMS offers a competitive benefits package that includes medical, dental and vision insurance coverage, transit benefits, Flexible Spending Account (FSA) and a 403(b) retirement plan including employer contribution. We offer generous leave policies, including four weeks paid vacation, four paid personal days, fourteen paid holidays and the week off between Christmas and New Year’s Days, inclusive.

Union Representation:

This is a bargaining unit position represented for collective bargaining purposes by the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, UAW, Local 2325.

 Application Instructions:

Applications will be accepted immediately and will be considered on a rolling basis. Interested applicants should send a cover letter, resume, list of two professional references and a writing sample to: Raluca Oncioiu, Managing Attorney at roncioiu@catholicmigration.org. Please include “PSPP Paralegal” in the subject line.


Download this Fellowship Opportunity as a pdf: Paralegal, Pro Se Plus Project

PRESS MENTION: Zara Realty ordered to stop collecting excess fees from renters

Zara Realty ordered to stop collecting excess fees from renters

August 18, 2023
By CBS NEW YORK

NEW YORK — We have an update on a Queens landlord accused of tenant abuse.

It’s a story we first told you about on July 31.

Now, Zara Realty has been ordered to stop collecting excess fees from renters.

A judge granted the motion by the state attorney general.

Tenants in rent-stabilized units in Flushing say Zara Realty harassed and tricked them into paying predatory fees.

PRESS MENTION: New York Workers Are Waiting on $79 Million in Back Wages

New York Workers Are Waiting on $79 Million in Back Wages

(Courtesy of ProPublica)

 

The New York State Department of Labor still needs to recover 63% of stolen wages during a five-year period analyzed by ProPublica and Documented. The problem? An understaffed agency with poor tools for recovering wages and enforcing judgments.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with DocumentedSign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Saprina James was hopeful when she received a letter in 2019 about her wage theft claim against her former employer. The letter said the New York State Department of Labor had substantiated her claim and ordered Mugisha F. Sahini and his company, Riverside Line, to pay her more than $70,000 in back wages. “I was feeling good that the government was on my side, and that I would soon get paid,” she said.

James first started driving a van for Sahini in January 2016, taking people to medical appointments in Buffalo, New York. She often worked six days a week, usually helping dialysis patients who relied on walkers, and drove clients from 4:30 a.m. until 10 p.m. She didn’t mind the long hours — she assumed that her pay would ultimately reflect her hard work.

“It was very hard for me,” said James, who had a difficult time paying her rent and groceries, as well as taxes owed on her income as an independent contractor.

In late 2017, James quit and filed a wage theft claim with the Department of Labor, accusing Sahini and Riverside Line of violating the minimum wage law. She was later joined by her former co-workers, who also claimed minimum wage violations.

The agency substantiated the workers’ claims two years later, ordering Sahini to pay nearly $425,000 in back wages and $850,000 in penalties.

But the Department of Labor, which is responsible for both investigating wage theft claims and recovering back wages, has not been able to collect even a penny on behalf of James. Sahini flatly refused to pay for more than a year, James said, and then appealed the case, claiming that he wasn’t aware that the workers were earning less than minimum wage. The appeal has since been rejected, but James has yet to receive any payment.

About to turn 60, James said she’s now unemployed and running through her savings to pay her bills. “I’m so upset,” she said. “This is ridiculous. I don’t understand why it takes so long.”

Sahini did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

What happened to James is strikingly common among victims of wage theft in New York state, an investigation by Documented and ProPublica found. She and her former co-workers are among thousands of wage theft victims whose employers were ordered by the Department of Labor to pay, but for whom the agency failed to fully recover back wages, according to an analysis of the agency’s database of wage theft violations from 2017 through 2021.

In all, during the five-year period, the agency determined that at least $126 million in wages had been stolen from workers, the analysis shows. As of Feb. 21, however, the agency still needed to recover about $79 million of that total — or about 63% of the back wages.

Of the outstanding back wages, the agency hadn’t recovered at least $7.8 million because of “uncollectible” circumstances, such as businesses going bankrupt or investigators being unable to track down employers, the analysis shows.

The rest, about $71 million, was labeled by the agency as “pending payment,” which means either that no payments or only partial payments had been made, or that the cases were being appealed.

Of the thousands of businesses in the database, at least 95 with outstanding back wages were repeat offenders, each failing to fully pay in at least two cases during the five-year period, the analysis shows.

A case in point: The agency began investigating Brooklyn-based Reymond Construction in 2018 and opened three additional cases in 2019 based on claims filed by 12 workers. It eventually ordered the company to pay more than $31,950 in back wages, but as of Feb. 21 the payments were still pending. The owner of Reymond Construction did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Labor experts said it’s hard to compare New York’s wage recovery effort against those of other states because of the paucity of wage theft data. State labor enforcement agencies across the country either do not make such information publicly available or do not maintain it in a standardized format that allows for state-by-state comparisons.

National Mobilization Against Sweatshops, a worker-rights organization, is so frustrated with the Department of Labor’s wage recovery rate that it has mostly stopped sending workers to the agency. “It’s a waste of time,” said JoAnn Lum, the group’s director. “I’ve seen so many workers file claims, and they’re told that they’re owed so much in back wages — and then nothing happens.”

Advocates and labor lawyers, as well as eight former Department of Labor officials interviewed by Documented and ProPublica, said it’s critical for the agency to improve its wage recovery rate. But they said the agency has a number of problems that prevent that from happening: Its enforcement unit is chronically understaffed; it lacks a collections unit tasked with wage recovery; and its investigators, unlike their counterparts in other states, do not have legal authority to take actions against recalcitrant employers.

The former agency officials, some of whom had spent decades working at the Department of Labor, said these challenges often leave investigators incapable of enforcing the law against unscrupulous employers. One official — who still works in state government and did not want his name used out of fear of retaliation — put it this way: “If an employer said, ‘Fuck you,’” in response to a payment demand, “there’s not much the agency can do.”

The Department of Labor, which released wage theft data after Documented sued the agency over its refusal to do so, “works diligently to protect the paychecks of hard-working New Yorkers,” Aaron Cagwin, an agency spokesperson, said in a statement.

Cagwin said the agency is also “consistently making improvements to its wage theft investigations and wage recovery processes,” including improving how wage theft claims can be filed and expanding law enforcement partnerships.

Advocates said workers are the ones who suffer the consequences of the agency’s poor wage recovery rate: They are often forced to move on to other jobs, rely on their family for support, go on public assistance, or relocate to another state or, in the case of immigrants, back to their country of origin.

“Wage theft impacts the lowest-wage workers who need that money to pay the rent, buy groceries, take care of their families,” said Magdalena Barbosa, senior vice president at Catholic Migration Services. She noted that New York has strong labor laws that don’t “trickle down into enforcement — and you have workers waiting sometimes for many years to get a small piece of what they’re owed in back wages.”

Vincent Cao, an organizer with the Chinese Staff & Workers Association, said “it’s the cruelest slap in the face to award them back wages that take so long to arrive.”

On a bitterly cold morning in December, a former senior investigator with the Department of Labor was sitting in a coffee shop in Brooklyn, reflecting on his years at the agency. Bald and bespectacled, he raised his eyebrows and described a Sisyphean environment in which overworked investigators faced scarce resources, bureaucratic obstacles and unscrupulous employers and their lawyers while trying in vain to reduce a backlog of thousands of wage theft cases. “It feels hopeless sometimes,” he said, “but more than hopeless — it makes me angry.”

The former investigator’s assessment was echoed by the seven other agency officials interviewed by Documented and ProPublica. They all expressed their frustration with the agency’s chronic failure to fulfill one of its core mandates: to protect the state’s 10 million workers from wage theft.

The former investigator, who still works in state government and did not want his name used out of fear of retaliation, blamed New York’s political leaders for not prioritizing the agency’s mission and perpetually underfunding it.

Budget figures for the agency’s enforcement arm, the Division of Labor Standards — which the former investigator joined more than a decade ago — are available from 2008 to 2022, and they show that its budget went up by 17.8% from $28 million to $33 million during that period. Just to keep up with the inflation rate, the budget would have had to increase by an additional $5 million.

Some state lawmakers said the agency’s woes were particularly pronounced during the tenure of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who ran New York from 2011 to 2021. On the one hand, Cuomo launched two joint task forces made up of multiple agencies to crack down on industries, such as car washes and construction, where wage theft is prevalent. But he also instituted a spending cap that kept most state agencies from increasing their budget by more than 2% each year.

With the tight budget, the Division of Labor Standards reduced the number of employees from 282 in 2008 to 140 in 2017, while the number of open investigations climbed from 6,923 in January 2008 to 15,824 in January 2017, according to agency documents obtained by Make the Road New York, an immigrant-rights organization, and shared with Documented and ProPublica. The vast majority of the division’s employees are investigators, while administrative and support staff make up the rest.

Carmine Ruberto, who ran the Division of Labor Standards from 2007 to 2015, recalled the impact of the tight budget on staff morale and workload. “Do I think we could have done better under Cuomo if we had gotten more people? Sure,” he said.

Richard Azzopardi, a spokesperson for the former governor, said wage theft was “a huge priority” for Cuomo, but his administration’s hands were tied with limited resources.

“In 10 of the 11 years during his administration, we had structural deficits and we came in at the heels of the Great Recession where giant cuts had already been made. And we had to restructure government in order to make things right,” Azzopardi said. “I do understand that some people have different opinions on what the money should have been spent on. But it’s a balance.”

Under Gov. Kathy Hochul, the Division of Labor Standards saw its budget increase by $7 million, or 19.5%, in 2023, but the number of full-time employees now stands at 129 and has increased only by three since the governor took office in 2021.

Justin Henry, deputy communications director for Hochul, declined to comment.

The former investigator said the tight budget also meant that the agency couldn’t form a collections unit fully staffed with those versed in financial fraud investigation, asset tracking and locating employers, which could then be deployed for wage recovery — a task that Terri Gerstein, the agency’s former deputy commissioner, called “a crucial part of the process.”

Instead, the agency has been relying on senior investigators to handle the task, which adds to their workload and sometimes requires them to do tasks they’re not trained for, such as overseeing the payment plans of some employers, several former agency officials said.

The agency needs “a proper collections unit,” Gerstein said.

In addition to the lack of the collections unit, the former agency officials said the process is slowed down because each case has to be reviewed by several layers of officials.

For instance, once a claim is substantiated, the case goes to a senior investigator, who can sometimes take up to a year and a half to review it. Similarly, when an employer is unresponsive, the Division of Labor Standards issues an order to comply, but only after getting approvals from three more layers of officials.

The former investigator said the bureaucratic bottleneck helped create long delays in recovering back wages. “It’s not like we push a button and increase the speed of the machine and then the cases come out at the other end,” he said.

The analysis of the agency’s database appears to back up the former investigator’s claim. As of Feb. 21, the agency had recovered no wages in 8,300 cases — affecting about 29,000 workers — that were at least five years old, or more than a fifth of the total cases from that time period.

Two of the long-pending cases were filed by Fernando, a 49-year-old Mexican immigrant who worked as a delivery driver for two Brooklyn restaurants. He filed his claim against the first restaurant in 2009 and another claim with his co-worker against the second restaurant in 2015.

The agency substantiated the claims, finding that two restaurants owed Fernando and his co-worker a total of more than $380,000 in back wages. Fernando, who requested to be identified by only his middle name because he’s undocumented, said he has not received his back wages. “The most important thing is the DOL could resolve these cases quicker,” he said.

The former agency officials said that when investigators try to go after employers for back wages, they find themselves without effective enforcement tools to force quick payments.

The orders to comply, for instance, can be appealed at the state’s Industrial Board of Appeals, a five-person panel that can take months, or even years, to adjudicate a case. In the vast majority of the cases, the board eventually sides with the agency. But even then, former agency officials said, employers often continue to ignore the orders, knowing that they are unlikely to face any consequences from doing so.

The former agency officials also said filing judgments in court against particularly recalcitrant employers often fails to force quick payments: While it puts a mark on their credit report, employers can and do get around the judgment by conducting their businesses in someone else’s name or getting a private loan from their family and friends.

Advocates and labor lawyers agreed that this was common practice. “Just because you get a judgment doesn’t mean you can collect on it,” said Margaret McIntyre, a lawyer who represents wage theft victims.

Advocates and labor lawyers said New York could adopt a number of tactics that have been successfully deployed in other states.

In Maryland and Wisconsin, for instance, workers are allowed to place a lien on their employers’ personal property to secure the payment of back wages. This has proven to be effective, according to a 2015 report by the Legal Aid Society, Urban Justice Center and the National Center for Law and Economic Justice. “A wage lien not only encourages an employer to dispute the matter and play fair in court, but ensures that if the workers win their case, they may actually be able to enforce a judgment against the employers’ property and collect the wages they are owed,” the report said.

New York, in fact, has had a lien law for decades, but it only applies to certain workers in the construction industry. Industry pressure, especially from the powerful New York City Hospitality Alliance, which represents restaurant owners, has helped defeat legislation introduced in recent years to expand the law’s scope.

In June, after the latest lien bill stumbled in Albany, the Hospitality Alliance issued a statement, saying it would have been a violation of due process to allow an employee to place a lien on “the private property of the owners, investors and even managers of the business based solely on the accusation of wage violations.”

In California, businesses appealing the finding of wage theft violations are required to post a surety bond up to $150,000, which they forfeit if they fail to pay back wages after losing on appeal. Those who fail to post the bond can be and are prohibited from doing business in the state.

In New York, the state has a similar bonding rule, which was implemented in the wake of a 2015 New York Times exposé on working conditions in nail salons, but it only applies to owners of nail salons with at least two workers. New York City also has a limited bonding rule that applies to owners of car wash businesses. Advocates for nail salon and car wash workers said they didn’t have enough data to know whether the bonding rules have significantly helped reduce wage theft.

Some states and local communities have also used the licensing and contracting processes to their advantage.

In 2015, for instance, Cook County in Illinois took aim at violators of state and federal wage laws, disqualifying them from lucrative county contracts. In 2019, Santa Clara County in California also launched a pilot project that would suspend the licenses of any business for five days if it fails to pay back wages. Before the year’s end, the county suspended eight licenses, mostly from restaurants, and each led to the payment, according to the county’s Office of Labor Standards Enforcement. “Being closed for five days is really bad for a restaurant’s business, so they seek to avoid that,” Gerstein said.

Adopting these approaches “wouldn’t make wage theft disappear in New York, but it would make a difference,” said Rick Blum, staff lawyer at the Legal Aid Society.

Some workers have already lost faith in the Department of Labor — and this includes a young woman named Kirsten, who filed a wage theft claim with the agency in August 2020 against a downtown Manhattan bar that had repeatedly failed to pay her. Kirsten, who requested to be identified by only her middle name to protect her future employment prospects, said she submitted documents and pay stubs. She didn’t hear back for more than a year and a half, until a phone call and letter from an investigator in the spring of 2022 asking her for more information about the case.

To this day, Kirsten said she has not received her back wages and has given up altogether. The agency “has been useless to me,” she said. “It just feels hopeless, like workers are all alone.”

About the Data

Determining the prevalence of wage theft in New York is more complicated than in some other states, including California, Massachusetts and Texas, because its Department of Labor does not make the results of investigations readily available to the public.

Documented filed a public records request for that information in 2019. When the department refused to release it, Documented took the agency to court. The agency has since released to Documented and ProPublica its database containing information on nearly 97,000 cases that began and concluded from 2005 to Feb. 21, 2023. Department of Labor officials told us that they began using this database fully in 2008, so we only analyzed cases from that year onward.

The database provides a number of details on each case, including the names and addresses of businesses that committed the violation, the number of workers who were affected and cited labor law violations.

But the database only provides the dates of when cases began, so we focused most of our analysis on cases from 2017 to 2021.

To determine how many businesses had multiple wage theft cases and still owed back wages, we manually standardized business names and addresses and counted instances in which a company still owed back wages in at least two cases.

To determine the percentage of back wages recovered, we tallied the amount of collected back wages and divided it by the amount of outstanding back wages in all cases contained in the database. Our metric may overestimate the percentage of back wages recovered. In some cases, the recovered amount recorded in the database might also include “liquidated damages,” which are payments for the harm caused by the wage theft and interest. The database does not differentiate between these different types of collected funds. In cases where the recovered amount was greater than the outstanding back wages, we adjusted the recovered amount to equal the outstanding back wages.

The analysis does not take into account the cases reported to the U.S. Department of Labor, which also investigates wage theft in New York but does not make public any database showing how much back wages have been recovered by the agency.


Read the original story in ProPublica: New York Workers Are Waiting on $79 Million in Back Wages

Fellowship Opportunity for Fall 2024

 

 

 

 

FELLOWSHIP OPPORTUNITY: FALL 2024

Catholic Migration Services, a nonprofit provider of free legal services, and an affiliated agency of Catholic Charities Brooklyn and Queens, is seeking a candidate to sponsor for a post-graduate legal fellowship in our tenant advocacy or immigration programs starting in the fall of 2024 (applications to fellowship foundations due fall 2023).   Fellowship programs include the Skadden Fellowship Foundation and similar programs.

Qualifications:

  • Applicants should be rising third-year law students, recent law graduates with judicial clerkships beginning in the fall of 2024, or current judicial law clerks;
  • Admission to the New York Bar, or taking the New York Bar Exam not later than July 2024;
  • Proficiency in a second language is strongly preferred, including but not limited to Spanish, Kreyol, French, Mandarin, Cantonese or Arabic;
  • A demonstrated interest in public service, including but not limited to serving low-income immigrants or tenants is strongly preferred; and
  • Strong oral advocacy skills, as well as analytical and writing skills.

Application Process:

Please send a cover letter, resume, law school transcript and list of three references by email to Magdalena Barbosa, Legal Director, at mbarbosa@catholicmigration.org.  Inclusion of a fellowship project proposal (i.e., what work within the tenant advocacy or immigration arena you propose to do) is recommended, but not required.  Applications will be considered on a rolling basis through September 1, 2023.

Additional Information:

Catholic Migration Services values workplace diversity and welcomes applicants of all backgrounds. Catholic Migration Services makes all employment decisions without regard to any applicant’s or employee’s protected characteristics, including their race, religion, color, national origin, immigration status, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, arrest conviction record, or marital status. Catholic Migration Services is unionized under the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, UAW, Local 2325.


Download this Fellowship Opportunity as a pdf: Fellowship Opportunity for Fall 2024