In a Day's Work Page 2

  “There came a time when I told myself, ‘No more,’” she says. “I am seeing that this type of thing did not only happen to me. It was happening to many, many more women and if I stay quiet then it is going to continue happening. That is why I now prefer to talk about it. I hope that many people see themselves in me and they won’t stay quiet anymore.”

  Workplace sexual violence is not limited to immigrant women in low-wage jobs, but workers like Ladino have particular reasons for burying their experiences.4 Ladino thinks that the combination of undocumented immigration status and worries about losing a job serve as a powerful muzzle. “The biggest factor is fear,” she says. “Fear that the threats of deportation and the threats of losing our jobs will be real.”

  These fears have only expanded. The political and social climate has changed markedly since we first spoke to Ladino in 2013. President Donald Trump’s immigration-related agenda seeks to tighten our borders, limit immigration, and expel noncitizens. Immigration authorities are arresting people without papers at a faster clip at their homes, jobs, and courthouses. There is a greater tolerance for rhetoric that promotes white supremacy and sexism and a simultaneous rollback of labor policies that make it harder for workers to exercise rights meant to protect them from exploitation.

  In this context, the experiences of the immigrant women featured in this book become even harder to unearth. At the same time, it is more important than ever that they are heard. By speaking up when innumerable external forces demanded silence and secrecy, these women workers are a model of resilience and resistance worthy of emulation.

  If silence dominated before, we cannot allow it to prevail now.

  1

  Finding the Most Invisible Cases

  The Southern California sky dims as Vicky Márquez, one of America’s unlikeliest undercover workplace investigators, zooms southward along Interstate 5 in her Honda SUV. Syrupy Spanish love songs blast from her stereo as the GPS on her phone directs her toward a monotonous landscape of Orange County office parks.

  It’s a late winter day in 2015 and Márquez is racing against rush hour, slowed by red brake lights before the traffic inexplicably speeds up again. She looks to gain seconds by dodging between lanes, swerving with inches to spare. “I’m kind of a crazy driver,” she admits.

  She is also on something of a mission. Márquez works for the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund (MCTF), a little-known nonprofit with an unwieldy name and the pressing goal of fighting labor exploitation among janitors working the graveyard shift. That evening, Márquez is on the road to the first of a half-dozen office parks that she will visit that night to make sure that cleaners are being treated fairly by their bosses. With her glasses, curled-under bangs, and pastel sweaters, Márquez looks more like a retired librarian than a labor rights crusader. On tiptoe, she stands less than five feet tall.

  Márquez conducts surprise inspections in the heart of Southern California sprawl at least once a week. About a dozen of her coworkers are out doing the same throughout the state, but it is a job that few government agencies bother to do.

  It is work that Márquez believes in, a cause she has lived. For sixteen years, she worked as a janitor herself. She has a story that in many ways echoes what she hears from the women she meets during her undercover operations. She faced an economic dead end in her home country of El Salvador, which had endured more than a decade of war. She and her husband decided that one of them had to find work elsewhere to support their three children, and since Márquez wasn’t able to find a job at home, she was the one who made her way to California, where she had a niece.

  When Márquez arrived in Los Angeles, she didn’t speak much English—she still doesn’t—and for the first few months, she worked as a babysitter and then at a hair salon. She needed a steadier paycheck, so when someone told her about a job with a cleaning company, she took it. The work was rough, and she had to work more hours than she was paid for, but she managed to send some of the money back home. For a time, it was a necessary if imperfect solution. More than two decades have passed. Her children have grown up. She has made a separate life in Los Angeles, and now, toward the end of her working years, she has found a job that suits her.

  After forty minutes of frenetic driving, Márquez takes an exit toward the city center of San Clemente. Her target, a series of office parks, looms in the distance. During the day, these buildings are blinding in their blandness, but in the dark, they are almost beautiful in the way that they glow from within. Márquez circles the parking lot slowly, observing. She pulls into a parking space near the building deepest into the office park and thrusts a stack of papers into a bulging black bag that she swings onto her shoulder as she climbs out of the car.

  She tests the front door of the office building. She has arrived early enough in the evening that it swings open with ease, leading to a nondescript lobby and a bank of elevators. It’s not always so easy to gain entrance. If the doors are locked, Márquez has her strategies, which the organization she works for has developed over more than fifteen years of undercover work. She might, for example, station herself near the service exits or the dumpsters, where she knows the night-shift cleaners will eventually present themselves. In supermarkets or guarded high rises, she will sweetly ask for the janitor. If the person she’s talking to wants to judge her by appearances and assume that she’s looking for a job, so be it.

  Tonight she walks into the building without delay, her heels click-clacking across the shiny tile lobby. Márquez’s first move is to look for bathrooms or supply closets, two places she knows she is likely to find a janitor. She moves past the elevators to a rear hallway, where she finds María García, a cleaner holding a mop next to a bucket of murky, citrus-smelling water.

  Márquez greets the cleaner brightly in Spanish. García is on the clock and she responds brusquely, almost warily. Márquez knows from experience that every minute spent chitchatting means a later shift and a longer night. The inspector doesn’t waste time on small talk. Setting her massive black purse on the hallway drinking fountains, Márquez extracts a packet of papers that she passes to the cleaner. The investigator explains that she works for a nonprofit organization, the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund, which helps janitors make sure they get paid what they are owed and helps them solve problems with issues like immigration.

  García sets the mop aside. Her mother needs some immigration help, she tells Márquez. The petite investigator nods, flipping to a page in the packet with information about recent changes to U.S. immigration policy, and tells her that the organization can provide her with more resources.

  Now that she has García’s attention, Márquez asks a few more questions that will help her get a feel for whether the janitor is being treated fairly at work: Does García get paid in cash or with a check on a regular basis? A check every two weeks, García says. Márquez nods, approvingly. Is she given regular breaks? Yes.

  Does she have to pay for her own cleaning supplies? Well, García tells her, sometimes what the company gives her is not enough, so she has to buy a few more bottles of bleach. Márquez tells her that it’s the company’s responsibility to provide her with the supplies that she needs, and encourages García to ask for more bleach instead of buying it herself.

  Then Márquez goes in to close the deal. “Tu teléfono, mija?” Márquez asks, sweetly but firmly. As García recites her phone number, Márquez scribbles it into a black notebook. “Y tu dirección?” Márquez takes down García’s address next to the phone number.

  Gathering workers’ contact information is Márquez’s ultimate goal during these brief encounters. The Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund is one of only a handful of organizations in the country keeping careful tabs on the practices of non-unionized cleaning companies—some of which are largely untraceable, because they work entirely in the black market. Through these impromptu meetings, the organization has generated a database of workers who can give firsthand testimony about whether these hard-to-track
companies are following labor laws.

  García doesn’t know it as she stands in the hallway with her bucket and mop, but Márquez will call or visit her at home in the early afternoon when most night janitors have not yet left for work. At these follow-up meetings, Márquez will remind García that she is there to help solve problems she is facing at work. If García doesn’t pick up the phone or answer the door, Márquez will keep trying until she makes contact with her two and then eventually three times.

  It’s a process that can take months, but this is the long, slow dance that is necessary to build trust among workers who labor on the outermost fringes, in low-paying and invisible industries like night-shift janitorial work. In this way, Márquez and her coworkers have turned up problems among a group of workers unlikely to make formal complaints. They have found cases where workers weren’t being paid minimum wage or overtime, or where they weren’t given a single break during eight-hour shifts. Since 1999, they have helped collect more than $26 million for janitors who were being abused at work.

  In the past five years, Márquez has met hundreds of janitors and tried to help dozens of them with their job problems. She has discovered that a lot can happen in places where no one is looking. Still, she didn’t realize the extent of it until she met a young cleaner named Georgina Hernández.

  The day after a long night of visiting janitors throughout Orange County, Vicky Márquez is in her car again. This time, she is headed to a part of Los Angeles where corner stores sell tacos and the neighborhood grocery store bakery offers a dizzying array of pan dulce.

  She stops at a white corner apartment building, passing through the entrance to knock on the first door on the right. Hernández answers, wearing her long, straight hair tied back from her round, sweet face. Hernández’s four-year-old daughter runs out to say hello in plastic teal princess pumps.

  Hernández met Márquez three years ago when the inspector was making her weekly rounds through the city to visit janitors on the job. Hernández was working at a movie theater sweeping up popcorn between the seats. The two have stayed in constant contact, even after Hernández moved on to clean the warehouse where lunches are packaged for local public school students. Her conditions are much better than when she first met Márquez. She was earning a steady minimum-wage paycheck that adds up to a little over $17,000 a year. Her hours were stable, and she was being paid reliably for the hours that she worked.

  On her salary, Hernández cannot afford her own apartment, so she splits one with four other newcomers from Mexico who all have their own minimum-wage-or-less jobs. Even in its less populated state that day, the apartment is a display of immigrant industry. Racks of thrift store clothes block the front windows. In her off hours, Hernández sets up shop at a local church to sell blouses, kids’ clothes, and button-down shirts at a slight markup. Hernández has also tucked industrial-size pots away in the kitchen. A native of Puebla, the mole capital of Mexico, she has found that she can supplement her income by making big batches of the sauce for parties and weddings out of the little kitchen adjoining the living room. She parses her earnings as tightly as possible. In addition to the expense of living in California with her daughter, Hernández wires as much money as she can to Mexico to support the six children she left behind.

  The afternoon that Hernández first met Vicky Márquez, the cleaner was coming to the end of her shift at the movie theater. Hernández had many concerns to report. For the first month and a half on the job, she had never received a paycheck. The amount of work that her supervisor expected—sweeping the sticky floors of the theater, cleaning the bathrooms, vacuuming the expanse of hallway carpeting—took longer than the eight hours listed on her paycheck. “We worked against time,” Hernández says. And no matter how many hours she put in, the pay was always the same: $300 a week.

  All of this work made Hernández sleepless and anemic, but she hadn’t complained to anyone because it wasn’t clear whom she should talk to, and she didn’t have the time to figure it out. She also made the calculation that as someone without immigration papers, she was easy to replace.

  When Márquez found Hernández at the theater, Hernández remembers being struck by the way the investigator spoke to her, so gently and sweetly, like an aunt. Márquez seemed to understand so much about her without much explanation. When Márquez asked Hernández questions about whether she was getting paid regularly or whether she was getting extra money for working more than eight hours at a time, Hernández admitted aloud for the first time that she had not been. The cleaner added that the checks never seemed to add up to all of the work she was doing. Before Márquez left, she took down Hernández’s phone number and told the janitor that she would check in with her again.

  On her next visit with Hernández, Márquez looked at the cleaner’s pay stubs and compared them to the work hours that Hernández had written down in a notebook. They didn’t match up. When Márquez asked why Hernández hadn’t written down any time for breaks, Hernández said that it was because she wasn’t being given time to eat or rest during her shift.

  Márquez explained that all of this was against the law, and for Hernández, it was an affirmation to know that what had felt so wrong was actually illegal. “From then on I started to talk to Vicky,” Hernández says. “I would ask her, ‘What could I do? How can I find help?’ She would give me advice, little by little, about where I could ask for help and who I could talk to.”

  Márquez and the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund eventually helped Hernández and some of her co-workers file a complaint with California’s labor commissioner. It would take nearly a year but the two cleaning companies that Hernández worked for at the theater—one went out of business and another took over the contract—were eventually fined nearly $1 million by the state of California for failing to pay minimum wage and overtime, and for not giving their workers rest or meal breaks.1

  Hernández didn’t stick with that cleaning company for too long. It had assigned her to clean a hotel restaurant, where she had spent hours scrubbing a hotel restaurant, the adjoining bar, and its two greasy kitchens. She was supposed to work from 10:00 p.m. until 6:00 a.m., but “sometimes that was a lie,” Hernández says. “It wasn’t enough time to finish all of the work.”

  The janitorial supervisor for the company that cleaned the hotel itself said he’d noticed that she was a good worker, and he told her that he could give her a higher-paying job cleaning the lobby and the exterior of the hotel. Hernández hated scrubbing the oily kitchens and lifting the heavy rubber floor mats, so with his help, she filled out an application. He hired her soon afterward.

  That job came with bigger problems. From nearly her first day, she says, her supervisor flirted with her and tried to convince her to have sex with him. She rebuffed him, and he retaliated by giving her more work to do. When his advances didn’t stop, she hid from him in the bathrooms. Undeterred, he’d follow her into the women’s restroom or call her on her cell phone to find out where she was so he could talk to her.

  His demands quickly became violent. Less than a week into the new job, Hernández says her boss told her that he needed to talk to her privately about her work in his car. This made Hernández uncomfortable, but he said, “You need this job, don’t you?”

  He instructed Hernández to meet him on the upper level of the hotel parking garage. She tried to ward him off but he ignored her. At about 1:00 a.m., he called her and said that he was waiting for her. Worried about losing her job, she went to see him. When she got to the parking lot, he told her to get into his car.

  She hesitated but he was the boss. She did what she was told.

  The supervisor drove them to a higher floor of the garage, where it was darker and it would be harder to find them. After he parked, Hernández’s boss began to touch her legs, she says. She told him she didn’t want to go on, and he replied that he’d give her more days off and better pay. Hernández told him that she didn’t want more days off; she had taken the job because she wanted
to work for her paycheck. When he began touching her breasts, she became afraid. Then, she says, he took off her pants.

  As he forced himself on her, she panicked and her body froze. When he was done, the supervisor asked her to put in a request for an extra shift that week so that he could take her to a hotel and they could spend more than just a few minutes in a car. Hernández tried to protest and told him she couldn’t do it. He assured her that there would be perks to it. He would pay her for the shift and make sure she received seven shifts that week. “You’re delicious,” he told her before driving her to a lower level of the parking garage. He told her to go into the building first. He followed a while later to avoid detection.

  Hernández never requested an extra shift. She didn’t immediately tell anyone what her supervisor had done. The shame of it was too much, and she knew it would be a challenge to quickly find a new job as an undocumented worker who couldn’t read or write. And as someone who had been sexually abused as a teenager, she had learned how to push on after incidents like this.

  About a week later, Hernández’s supervisor told her to meet him again. When she said no and tried to quit, he threatened to hurt Hernández and her daughter, and added that if she wanted to stay in the country, she needed to keep him happy. This time he drove them to a motel.

  Her supervisor continued to exploit the pretext of work to abuse Hernández. On one of her nights off, he called her incessantly until she picked up the phone. He said he needed her to work that night and because Hernández didn’t have a car, he was on his way to pick her up. Hernández hurried to get herself ready for work, but once she was in his car, her supervisor didn’t take the freeway to the hotel as she expected. Instead, he drove to the motel. She cried and tried to climb out of the car, but he pulled her out of the car and into a room by her hair, where she says he forced her to have sex with him again.