Illegal hiring for airport construction?
By Steve Visser

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Friday, April 30, 2010

Jose Alvarez first asked about a bricklaying job with M&D Masonry at the Atlanta airport in March, and the foreman assured him that being an illegal immigrant wouldn’t be a problem.

“Do you have a picture ID?” said Bob Beaty, hiring foreman for the Americus-based masonry company working on the new $1.4 billion international terminal.

“But it’s not legal,” Alvarez told him.

“I know, I know, none of our guys are, but if you have a picture ID, you can get on here,” Beaty said. “Everybody turns in a Social Security number and we take taxes out for that number. I know none of those numbers are right.”

Alvarez, however, was not an illegal immigrant. He was working for a labor watchdog group, Jobs for Georgians, and he was secretly recording his conversation with the foreman to prove illegal hiring was taking place on the massive project.

When The Atlanta Journal-Constitution played the tape for Beaty this week, he said he wasn’t sure why he made such a comment to Alvarez, who had given him the name Miguel Hernandez.

When the AJC pointed out that Alvarez had returned with another “illegal worker” and Beaty had made similar comments, also taped, the genial 50-year-old foreman said he never had any intention of hiring them.

“I told them what they wanted to hear to get them out of my face to tell you the truth,” Beaty said.

Jobs for Georgians, an organization formed by construction unions, says hiring of illegal immigrants not only violates the law but enables other workplace violations, such as misclassifying employees as “independent contractors” or paying them off the books to avoid paying taxes and unemployment or workers compensation insurance.

Dave Weldon, co-owner of M&D Masonry, denied ever intentionally hiring illegal immigrants. He said his company verifies the Social Security numbers or immigration status of all applicants. He said if a number comes back as incorrect, the employee is given a chance to provide the correct one.

Both Weldon and Beaty said they’ve tightened their hiring processes on the airport job recently.

“We want IDs and Social Security numbers but especially in the last couple of months, we’ve become a lot more careful in what we’ll accept,” said Beaty, who added in a later interview this week, “I’ve had to send away three or four in the last couple of days because they didn’t have proper ID.”

John Kennedy, spokesman for the city of Atlanta’s Aviation Department, which runs Hartsfield-Jackson International, said it is up to the general contractor to ensure subcontractors follow hiring laws. The city only investigates complaints to the city’s Office of Contract Compliance, Kennedy said, adding there have been “no such complaints.”

Alvarez, who also works for the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers in Washington, said union officials met in March with one of the Mayor Kasim Reed’s top deputies, who said he would look into M&D’s hiring at Hartsfield-Jackson, Alvarez said.

On April 1, M&D sent a letter to the general contractor that said all employees provided documentation to show compliance with the Immigration Reform & Control Act of 1986. The letter does not say whether the company verified documentation and social security numbers, as required by both state and federal law.

Reed’s office issued a statement late Thursday. It said the mayor “takes workforce eligibility very seriously and is committed to ensuring fair access to jobs for all qualified workers.”

Alvarez said he targeted M&D because a number of its workers at the airport told him they were illegal immigrants and that some were paid off the books, which made him suspect they were being treated as “independent contractors.” That makes the employee responsible for all tax payments, with no workers comp or unemployment insurance protection.

Weldon said it had been “years” since his company treated brick layers as independent contractors.

John Doherty and Harry Galloway, presidents of Pyramid Masonry Contractors of Decatur and Galloway Masonry in Conyers, respectively, said the hiring of workers off the books or paying workers as “independent contractors” — whether they are illegal aliens or American citizens — is a huge problem in Georgia on both private and public-sector jobs. The practice undermines both the ability of honest contractors to compete for work and legal protections for workers, they said.

The contractors can pay such masons $12 or $13 an hour rather than $18 to $20 an hour when they list them as independent contractors because they don’t take out taxes, Doherty and Galloway said. That allows them to cut bids by 20 percent or more.

Doherty and Galloway said no one in state government is policing classification.

“Years ago they used to check but now they don’t check anything,” Galloway said. “The federal government puts all these rules on us but when federal and state money gets on a job and they do their own building it seems like they throw their own rule book away.”

Keith Thomas, business manager for the North Georgia Building and Construction Trades Council, an umbrella group for construction unions that formed Jobs for Georgians, blamed the state Labor Department for not auditing employers to ensure proper classification of workers.

Thomas said he took Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond evidence of misclassification on the new Cobb County courthouse project. He said wrongdoing continued until union officials informed the Cobb County Commission, which then notified the general contractor, who fired the offending subcontractor in February.

Thurmond’s spokesman, Sam Hall, said the department investigates credible complaints, but results are confidential. The agency also randomly audits 2 percent of Georgia employers each year, but only has authority over unemployment violations, Hall said.

Other boards and agencies have authority for tax and worker compensation violations, and the federal government has responsibility for immigration violations, he said. Hall said Thurmond has told the Legislature his agency would audit government construction projects to ensure that they were properly checking for illegal workers if the state funded it.

“We have not received one penny of funding and we have no authority to provide enforcement,” Hall said.

Alvarez, the Jobs for Georgia worker who taped the airport conversations, thinks the government should be doing more if it’s serious about enforcing immigration law and protecting legal workers’ jobs. He moved to the United States from Mexico more than 20 years ago, and he said he has watched employers push wages down and force more workers to lose their protections by hiring them as independent contractors. Employment of illegal immigrants exacerbates this practice, he said.

“I’ve been an American citizen for 10 years and before that I was a resident for 10,” Alvarez said. “I went through the process and worked hard to become a citizen and I was paying my taxes from day one.”

HERE