In a 436 word article for The New York Times on September 13, labor reporter Steven Greenhouse covers a new lawsuit against cleaning contractors put forth by Legal Aid Society, Outten & Golden and Emery Celli Brinckherhoff & Abady on behalf of nine workers who cleaned buildings around the World Trade Center site after the attack of September 11.
The suit, filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, says the workers often put in 70 or more hours a week, but did not receive time-and-a-half pay for overtime, while the companies profited greatly.
What's missing?
Greenhouse covers the facts of the case, such as the actions of the contractors who demanded tens of hours of overtime without pay and the potential to create a 1,000 worker class action suit.
About a dozen companies are named as defendants, including Maxons Restorations, based in Manhattan; Crystal Restorations, in Port Chester; and Milro Services, in Freeport.
In a nutshell, cleaning companies bid on projects around the WTC site and then contracted laborers to do the hard and dirty work. The lawsuit claims that workers did not get their fair pay. This is a "just-the-facts-ma’am" story. There’s a lawsuit, this is what the plaintiffs claim, this is what the defendants say, and here is a likely result.
Greenhouse neglects to paint the picture of what was going with cleaners in Lower Manhattan shortly after the attack. First off, these were not typical clean up jobs in office buildings. Workers were clearing debris from the collapse of the World Trade Center. The debris field covered blocks and blocks of Lower Manhattan. Grey soot and concrete and ash were plastered on the walls of buildings. Further, Ground Zero was on fire for four months after the towers went down.
The circumstances for the cleaning workers were appalling. Cleaners lined the streets near the World Trade Center in informal worker centers, waiting to be picked up by contractors and brought to sites. They were not given any health protections: no masks, no gloves, no ventilation. And, on top of the hard and dangerous work, many workers did not get their fair pay. In fact, many people who cleaned up around the towers did not get paid at all. This story has been going on since shortly after 9/11/01.
How do I know all this? I was there, from Day 1. The organization I worked for, the National Employment Law Project, was located two blocks from what was Tower 2. When we saw what was happening with the building cleaners, we went out to help them organize. My role was to generate press interest. While the Times was sleeping, the New York Daily News put the workers on the front cover. We won remedial health protections for the cleaners and assisted them to advocate on the spot for their back-pay.
Without the benefit of the perspective of the last six years of government neglect, we found it outrageous that workers would be subjected to these conditions during a national disaster. Of course, we now know this was business as usual for Bush & Co. All of the people who worked on or near the disaster site were exposed to heinous working conditions and toxic chemicals.
While Greenhouse lays out the facts of the workers’ case, he neglects the sad back-story. Yes, this is a potential class-action over back-pay, but it’s also a case of America’s sweatshop labor conditions during a national tragedy.
For an excellent archive of stories about the conditions in Lower Manhattan after the disaster, see 9/11 Environmental Action.
- "What The Reporter Missed" is an Own the Press Semi-Regular Series Spotlighting the Neglected Back-Story.