NEW ORLEANS — When attorney Luz Molina met a worker on a street corner to talk about how he'd been stiffed of wages he was owed for helping install a roof, they weren't alone for long.
As they spoke, five other men approached Molina with their own stories of work they had not been paid for.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday September 28, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 3 inches; 100 words Type of Material: Correction
Unpaid hurricane workers: An article in Section A on Sept. 11 about migrant laborers not being paid for the post-hurricane construction work they had done said that before hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the U.S. Department of Labor had one investigating agent covering Louisiana and Mississippi. The article also said that although more agents were sent to Louisiana, they were mostly taking complaints and had not launched investigations. The Labor Department maintained a staff of 26 in the region before the hurricanes and since then has initiated several unpaid-wage investigations and recouped more than $2 million in back wages for workers.
"There's no talking to one without three or four coming up to you," said Molina, a law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans.
In the year since hurricanes Katrina and Rita, thousands of illegal immigrants have come to the region for the first time to work.
Most speak no English and often take under-the-table jobs without knowing even the names of those who hire them.
A cash-based reconstruction economy has taken root in New Orleans, and reports of worker rip-offs are common.
Molina spends her days trying to construct cases with enough detail to file in court.
"I describe it as the new Wild West of labor law, where lawlessness is absolutely tolerated," she said.
Last month, the National Immigration Law Center filed suit on behalf of 82 guest workers from Bolivia, Peru and the Dominican Republic against Decatur Hotels, a downtown New Orleans chain.
The suit alleges that the workers were recruited, went into debt to get here, then weren't given the work hours they were promised.
By law, they aren't allowed to work elsewhere.
"It's a system of slavery," said Luis Lopez, 34, who left a job in an architecture office in the Dominican Republic to come work for Decatur.
"You belong to the person who contracted you."
Partly to blame for the chaos, critics say, is a federal disaster-relief contracting system that breeds fraud and waste by allowing work to be contracted and subcontracted repeatedly, without much opportunity for public scrutiny of how taxpayer money is used.
Prime contractors often don't oversee how their subcontractors do the job.
The subcontractors who actually do the work, meanwhile, are so removed from oversight, critics say, that they're often tempted to hire illegal immigrants who have little recourse if they are not paid.
A case in point: suits filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center of Montgomery, Ala., against contractors Belfor USA and LVI Environmental Services, which had been awarded government reconstruction contracts.
The suits allege that the companies and their subcontractors did not pay dozens of illegal workers the wages and overtime owed them for cleaning hospitals and public schools.
