Immigrant Workers in Chicago File Lawsuit Seeking Wages Withheld by Temp Agencies
As Total Immigration has been reporting with some regularity, the efforts of the Department of Homeland Security together with local law enforcement officials to crack down on businesses who hire undocumented workers have been escalating over the past year or so. Theoretically, this enforcement is good for both immigrant and native U.S. workers, since it leads to improved working conditions as companies who exploit immigrant workers are stopped in their tracks.
However, companies looking to pay workers very little without the responsibility for providing suitable working conditions will always find ways to lure them into low-paying, unglamorous work. They just have to find effective ways to skirt the existing laws and the stepped-up enforcement of commercial penalties and sanctions.
Some immigrant workers have turned to temp agencies for help finding work, including a group of ten workers who have made headlines in Chicago over a lawsuit claiming that they were not paid wages owed to them by the agencies that hired them. Ideal Staffing Solutions and eight other temp agencies are named in the workers’ rights lawsuit that seeks compensation for unpaid overtime and other unpaid wages.
Many of the immigrants participating in the lawsuit were arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare airport during a federal raid conducted to catch workers illegally occupied at tarmac and cargo areas and other secure working areas there. At the present time, several of the immigrants have been criminally charged for using fake IDs to gain employment, while others are in the middle of immigration proceedings.
The lawsuit seeks joint compensation from the various companies that contracted work from the arrested workers. One worker quoted in the Chicago Tribune claimed that he did not know the badge given to him by Ideal Staffing Solutions was not valid, and that he was never reimbursed for two weeks of work moving cargo for Alitalia Airlines.
Using temp agencies to hire workers allows companies such as the contractors at O’Hare to gain the benefits of cheap, immigrant labor while avoiding liability for hiring them; instead, the liability falls to the temp agencies.
It also complicates the chain of blame by adding extra links. The airlines can pass the blame to the contractor; the contractor can pass the blame to the temp agency; the temp agency can pass the blame to the immigrant worker; and the immigrant worker, in a foreign country with likely little understanding of U.S. legal protections, typically has little recourse available.
While immigration lawyers seek to help these workers gain what compensation and wages are rightfully theirs, these ten are surely just a small fraction of the many immigrant workers placed in similar situations.
Though it may not help them gain compensation unrightfully held from them, the visibility of this case could serve as a further reminder of the need for immigration reform to improve the working conditions and employment laws for immigrants in the United States.