Illegal workers often face exploitation, workplace dangers

They pick your produce and may have helped build your house. They clean your toilets, either at your home or in your hotel room, or cut your weeds. Their jobs are often menial and physically demanding, sometimes dangerous and often pay less than someone in the country legally gets for the same task.

And when something goes wrong, when they get hurt on the job or someone cheats them out of their pay, working illegal immigrants either don't know where to turn, or fear that complaining will lead to their getting kicked out of the country.

Paul, a 24-year-old illegal immigrant who builds homes in the Las Vegas Valley, knows he earns a lower wage than his legal co-workers. But he won't object to his boss.

Speaking through a translator, the Mexican national said he won't risk being deported or losing his job, which would force him to find new work at the bottom of the pay scale.

Working at wages discounted from the usual pay is only one form of exploitation many illegal workers face, according to various studies.

An AFL-CIO report published two years ago said immigrants nationwide are exposed more to environmental and occupational risks but are less likely to report those hazards.

They may not even know that government agencies are supposed to protect them, the report said.

Some industries have an almost insatiable appetite for illegal workers, if not an addiction to them.

In an Ohio State Law Journal article published last year, UNLV associate law professor Leticia Saucedo wrote that certain employers prefer these "brown collar workers," Hispanic immigrants defined less by their legal status than by the perception they are newcomers.

By hiring these workers in large numbers, those employers contribute to a popular view that Saucedo considers a myth: Immigrants take jobs no one else wants.

"Employers can choose the ethnic composition of their work forces when they, among other things, set pay rates and working conditions, rely on word-of-mouth hiring practices, and seek subservience for particular positions," Saucedo wrote.

"They preselect who will be interested in a job when they adopt such policies as allowing languages other than English to be spoken on the job in some positions and not in others."

In 2005, immigrants filled 24 percent of all farming jobs nationwide. They also accounted for 17 percent of all house and office cleaning positions, 14 percent of construction jobs and 12 percent of food preparation work.

Some efforts are being made to teach working immigrants about laws governing employment and their rights. And since language and cultural factors pose obvious barriers to training, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration conducts many classes in Spanish.

Twenty-three such classes on health and safety, mostly for the construction sector, were held for 850 workers statewide during the first five months of 2007. Most were held in Southern Nevada, according to Safety Consultation & Training, a state unit that runs the classes on behalf of the state's OSHA program.

A report issued this year by the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada says Hispanic immigrants comprise nearly 16 percent of the state's work force but capture only 9.2 percent of its earnings, indicating that they work in lower-wage occupations and may face wage discrimination.

The PLAN report does not distinguish between legal and illegal workers. Nor does a Congressional Budget Office report issued in May, which ties the pay disparity of some immigrant groups solely to low education levels.

On average, the CBO report said, the weekly earnings of men from Mexico and Central America working full-time were 55 percent of native-born men. Foreign-born women from those places earned about 60 percent of what native-born women did.

By contrast, immigrant workers from other countries had average weekly earnings similar to native-born Americans.

A 2005 study by the Nevada labor commissioner's office shows that some 60 percent of complaints about not getting the full wages they were promised, filed by walk-ins at its Las Vegas site, were made by people who speak primarily Spanish.

The commissioner's office enforces labor laws in the state, ensuring that workers in the private sector receive the amount employers agreed to pay them for the hours worked.

But Labor Commissioner Michael Tanchek said it was the issue of prevailing wages that led Nevada in 2003 to expand its definition of employee to include people unlawfully employed.

Prevailing wages are hourly rates which contractors are required by law to pay workers on construction projects funded by the government; they are set by a complex annual survey of wages in a locality, and often reflect union scale wages rather than those paid to most workers.

Former Commissioner Terry Johnson ruled in 2002 that a group of Spanish-speaking carpenters, including three illegal workers, were denied prevailing wages on a local project.

He determined that City Plan Development, a Las Vegas-based contractor, violated the state's prevailing wage law and ordered the company to pay a fine and back wages for most of the workers.

Tanchek said his predecessor's ruling, upheld by a Clark County District Court judge, sent a clear message that an employee's legal status would not be a consideration in such Nevada cases.

Legal status is a federal immigration issue, he said. "We're not going to let you use that as an excuse to undercut your competitors who are obeying the law, or cheat your employees."

Attempting to gain legal status also can subject Spanish-speaking immigrants to exploitation.

Local immigration attorney Kathia Pereira said illegal immigrants often pay high fees for poor advice from notarios.

In Latin America, lawyers can serve as notarios publicos, or notary publics. Some Hispanic immigrants in the United States incorrectly assume that notary publics here are also lawyers. U.S. notaries can administer oaths and witness signatures but must not give legal advice unless they have been admitted to the bar.

"There are tons of notarios in town," Pereira said. "You go anywhere, anywhere in the Hispanic community. They are all over the place."

And when immigrants follow bad advice?

"Not only do they pay all this money," she said, "they ruin their lives."