When Ramos saw a new apartment building going up, he did what he usually does: shaped up, hung around, talked to the foreman. The next day, he showed up with his tools, and started work.
City Limits Magazine
Ramos would have to tell his coworkers that if they didn't stick around, they were risking their jobs. "It made me a little uncomfortable, 'cause a few things were said not proper, and I had to say exactly how he said it," he says. For example, if a man said he had to go pick up his children from school, Ramos would have to translate the reply: "'Well, that's not my problem. Go get the materials--and if you don't do it, it will cost you your job.'" It was usually another couple of hours before Ramos and the others could go home.
Ramos says they did substantial amounts of overtime for which they never got paid. "Every Friday, when they would get the pay--and it wasn't even a check, it was cash, they used to bring it to us in a little envelope--I complained: 'Listen, what about my overtime hours, and what about the last time, and the week before?'" he recalls. "And they would say, 'Oh, we'll get you next time.' And I would say, 'Look, I asked you at least 15 times out of the week, and you said that last week.' And it never happened."
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Ramos is part of the underground workforce that builds New York City's affordable housing. You'll find them gathering at dawn on the sidewalk outside a construction site--they call it "shaping the job"--on the off chance that somebody will hire them. Some are highly skilled; others are demolition men who earn minimum wage or less. Quite a few are highly qualified union members, minorities who can't get work on regular union jobs. Many are immigrants--Latin, Caribbean, some African, though there are still some African-Americans and a smattering of whites.
They have one thing in common: Their cheap, sometimes off-the-books labor is what puts the "affordable" in affordable housing. Most of them are working for subcontractors, or even sub-subcontractors, at the bottom of a contracting chain. At or near the top of this chain are nonprofit community development groups, organizations that exist to make life better for poor people. But for the poor people at the bottom of this chain, their pay and treatment are the dirty little secret of the housing world.
"It's exploitative in many ways," says Susan Friedland, director of housing development for the Fifth Avenue Committee, a nonprofit that builds affordable housing in Park Slope and Red Hook. "I think a lot of contractors, subcontractors, see that there's a high-skilled labor pool, that there's high unemployment--it's cheaper to hire someone and not pay them properly, or pay them, take their wages out and do it all under the table."
Lavon Chambers, who used to be a construction worker on affordable housing projects in Harlem, says conditions on these jobs are some of the worst he's ever seen. "I would challenge any one of these officials who work for these affordable housing agencies to walk with me on most of these sites," says Chambers, who as a community affairs officer for the Mason Tenders District Council of the Laborers Union is now one of a handful of union leaders tackling that market. "The conditions are this: The workers get paid cash. There's no taxes taken out. There's no real record that the workers ever worked there. And if somebody gets hurt, there's no kind of benefit package. If somebody gets hurt, or somebody gets ill, there's no workmen's comp. It's like the Dodge City section of construction."
