Like many jobseekers, Ramon Rivas started out in construction in an entry level job. He had just arrived in the U.S. from Honduras in 2022 and found his way to a 12-story commercial office building project in Vienna, Virginia, in the Washington, D.C. region.
Rivas was hired as a laborer by subcontractor Christian Siding, a company with approximately 30 years in business. “I walked onto their jobsite on a Friday and spoke with a supervisor, who told me I could start Monday,” Rivas said.
He would haul materials, do cleanup work and learn higher-level skills from experienced workers. For months, Rivas worked in D.C. and elsewhere on Christian Siding job sites. Some projects were privately owned while others were funded by government agencies, which meant that the company was expected to pay “prevailing” wages.
From the beginning, Rivas says he was never told by the company what his pay would be. “My co-workers explained that I would get paid $125 per day for a 10-hour day, with no overtime pay.” Rivas said.
At $12.50 per hour, Rivas would be earning less than Washington D.C.’s minimum wage, which was more than $16 per hour in 2022.
Every Friday the crew was paid with a company check, but no deductions were taken for income taxes, Social Security or Medicare.
“It was less than I was hoping for, but I had to accept it,” Rivas said. “I knew nothing about my rights or the laws. Everybody felt the same. We were trapped.”
Rivas scraped by, paycheck-to-paycheck, barely making ends meet while sharing rent with roommates and getting around on public transportation. “In some ways, my co-workers who had cars had it worse,” he said, given the costs of car ownership.
“if you got sick with a fever, you just had to deal with it; if we didn’t work, we didn’t get paid,” Rivas said. “People were always worried about their family responsibilities.”
Working on Christian Siding jobsites was “like a roller coaster,” Rivas said. The company provided safety vests, hard hats and safety glasses—but no dust masks, even though workers were installing siding made with concrete and other materials that produced dust.
“Sometimes there would be a complaint and then the company would scramble to do better for a while,” Rivas said.
It was when representatives of the Eastern Atlantic States Regional Council of Carpenters (EASRCC) visited Rivas’s worksite that things began to change—not because the company saw the light, but because workers learned about their rights.
They learned that, although the company was supplying materials and directing their work, Rivas and other crewmembers were not treated as employees. Instead, the company allegedly wrongly classified many of them as independent contractors, which is a common practice in the construction industry that deprives workers of proper pay and benefits—and may deprive the government of payroll tax revenue.
Rivas joined with co-workers to stand up for their rights and complain to the company. They were allegedly met with threats of being fired, Rivas said, but he called a Telemundo reporter and the company backed off.
“About half of us decided to do whatever we needed to get our proper pay,” Rivas said. “But the other half were afraid. They worried that the company would always have the upper hand and they would have zero income. Some of them had fears because of their immigration status,” Rivas said.
The union helped the Christian Siding workers in several ways, including connecting them with an attorney and helping them compile information for a private lawsuit in Federal District Court. Rivas was a lead plaintiff in the suit and worked hard on behalf of his co-workers, who had helped build an affordable housing project in Washington, D.C. The company agreed to pay $900,000 to settle the suit’s claims for unpaid wages and legal fees against both itself and developer/general contractor Foulger-Pratt Contracting, LLC.
The union also filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board that resulted in helping several workers improve their immigration status.
Perhaps most impactful publicly, District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb’s office initiated a major probe of Christian Siding after receiving documentation that had been collected by EASRCC representatives.
As a result, the Office of Attorney General (OAG) alleged that the workers “were not paid overtime wages when they worked more than 40 hours in a week, did not receive paid sick leave and were not protected by unemployment insurance or workers’ compensation.”
The resulting $725,000 settlement last December includes pay for restitution and damages to more than 200 construction workers who were allegedly misclassified or underpaid.
The company cooperated with the investigation and, pursuant to the settlement, agreed to “significantly” reform its practices and submit to two years of compliance monitoring by the OAG.
Rivas is currently driving a delivery truck and hopes one day to have his own business, “where I can hire people and treat them like human beings, not the way we were treated,” he said. “That’s my dream.”