Construction Bosses Are Using Elaborate Schemes to Harm Workers - The American Prspect

[justaprogressive]

In 2020, Alejandro was working a construction job in the Madison, Wisconsin, metro area, doing texture, painting, and drywall on residential homes, when his boss asked him to do something strange. The boss gave Alejandro a check, and told him to go to a local bakery to cash it. He was then instructed to use that cash to pay himself and his co-worker for their labor. Alejandro, who arrived in the U.S. from Mexico in 2019 and is now 29, was unfamiliar with employment practices in this country and did as he was told, paying himself $800 every two weeks. He cashed the checks even though they were made out to someone else’s name.

Alejandro is going by a pseudonym to protect himself from retaliation, and he also requested I not name his former employer, to avoid any chance that his own identity could be revealed. The hours at the former employer were long—around 50 a week—and the wages were low. “They didn’t have a set schedule,” he explained through an interpreter. “It was random. They would sometimes pick me up at six, sometimes at five, and I would sometimes get back at six or seven.”

Alejandro continued to cash the checks at the bakery and distribute the money every two weeks, while sending as much of his own pay as he could back to Mexico for his wife, so she could buy food and diapers for their daughter. After a few months, the intense work began to wear on him. Then one of the checks bounced.

He has held onto that bounced check ever since, and showed it to me over our Zoom call—the last physical remnant of his victimization by a misclassification scheme.

Misclassification and paying off the books is rampant throughout the construction industry, where about 9 out of 10 workers in the private sector are not members of unions, and bosses frequently exploit an immigrant workforce that is far less likely to report wage theft, labor trafficking, and other wrongdoing. According to the Century Foundation, in 2021, between 10 and 19 percent of the construction industry workforce in the United States was either misclassified or “working in the underground economy.”

https://prospect.org/labor/2025-04-09-construction-bosses-schemes-harm-workers/

[Swede]

1. That's what their idol Trump would do.

Bone the working stiffs, while getting a bigger pile of gold.