FEATURE
Justice in the Works
While anti-immigrant sentiment grows in Long Island, Nadia Marin-Molina and the workplace project are fighting back.
By: Marissa Rodriguez

Nadia Marin-Molina is in the midst of a battle. Soft-spoken and respectful, the 36-year-old Marin-Molina is executive director of the Workplace Project, or Centro de Derechos Laborales, a grass-roots organization that aids workers—regardless of their immigration status—in their fight for better wages and working conditions in the Long Island, New York area. The center, and Marin-Molina herself, have been at the epicenter of some of the most turbulent immigration and workerrights debates in the area’s recent history.

According to Marin-Molina, Long Island is the third most-segregated area in the nation and now finds itself home to thousands of new Latin American immigrants, most from Central America and Mexico. The transition has not gone smoothly. Plentiful work has attracted masses while a housing shortage and a high cost of living has left immigrants crowding small houses and has created a never-before need for affordable housing. Countless immigrants are subjected to discrimination, wage-skimming and growing anti-immigrant sentiment.

The Workplace Project is in existence, she says, to help support those who need to find legal assistance, government agencies and information about their rights.

However, some of Marin-Molina’s ardent opponents say that by helping undocumented workers, she is aiding criminal activity, supporting illegal immigration and helping to lower the quality of life and property value of the suburban community—something jealously guarded by local homeowners. The suburban area is also the birthplace of citizens groups bent on evicting immigrants and pushing local anti-immigrant legislation.

She and her organization are a part of the ongoing war for Latino immigrants’ rights Marin-Molina joined in the mid- 90s while an aspiring lawyer at New York University. During her first year of law school she volunteered for an immigrants’ rights center in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and logged hours putting together fact sheets, fieldiming telephone calls from people with a variety of problems from being unfairly evicted to being robbed of pay. It gave her the opportunity to experience firsthand the “extreme injustice people face,” she says. The experience made her study of law worthwhile.

Fueled by that summer internship and the sense of community responsibility ingrained in her by her Colombian parents, she decided to go into public service in lieu of a more lucrative private practice. In her second year of study, she joined the Workplace Project.

The center was founded in 1992 after Harvard law graduate Jennifer Gordon (now a law professor at Fordham University in New York) was alarmed by the working conditions of Latinos in the area. She created the center as a haven for workers with few other options for legal assistance.

“Sweatshops were coming back,” Gordon says. “People thought that this was something from the 1910s and 20s. If you ask ‘What is a sweatshop?’ Well, it’s low wages, long hours and poor treatment. Those were the conditions [Latinos] were working under. The government wasn’t enforcing the laws. Unions weren’t dealing with the problems of immigrant workers, at least not in suburban Long Island.”

At the Workplace Project the biggest challenge Marin-Molina faced was helping people who had not been paid for their work. Workers would be hired to clean homes, take care of children, work for contractors or wait tables and once payday came, the employer would either disappear or simply refuse to pay the agreed-upon rate, which is illegal regardless of employee’s immigration status. Workplace Project volunteers would call on behalf of the workers to try to negotiate payment. Often, employers would not return phone calls, or, once located, would deny they had ever hired or even knew the worker. When the volunteers would begin to play hardball and demand to see the work records, workers would be threatened with lawsuits or by deportation as retaliation. It is all part of the game abusive employers play, says Marin-Molina.

“You explain that [workers] have rights,” she says. “We then send a letter. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t. It is a question of persistence on the part of the worker to not allow the employer to get away with it.”

Unfortunately in Marin-Molina’s experience, if an employer has gotten away with it before, they are likely to do so again, especially when they face no legal action. Her first courtroom situation as an aspiring junior lawyer involved helping a worker take his employer to small claims court for approximately $1,000 in unpaid wages. She worked with the plaintiff and made sure he was prepared for court. The employer never showed, which led to their victory.

“The worker testified and the judge believed him and we won, but what does that mean?” she asks. “The worker got a piece of paper saying he was owed $1,000. We tried to enforce the judgment, but that proved to be impossible. We were left with an empty decision.”

Frustration in cases such as these was palpable. Whatever the small sum of money being fought over might not be much to the employer or to the government, she explains, but to a worker struggling to pay rent, it is. Although the time spent fighting the employer could be spent working another job, workers were more than likely willing to go to court and see the process through. When the legal system did not work, Marin-Molina
and workers would picket outside employers’ homes or businesses.

Their tenacity is reflective of Marin-Molina’s resolve to improve their quality of life. After a few short years of work at the center and with her new law degree in hand, she took over as the center’s executive director in 1999.

Under Marin-Molina, the project convinced the Nassau County district attorney to arrest repeat non-payers. Nonpayment of wages has always been a crime, but law enforcement officials had little impetus for apprehending such employers. In 2005, the DA’s office conducted the first round of arrests.

It was the unified front put up by an organized group that made the DA’s office realize that taking steps to arrest delinquent employers was crucial, she says. “The system is usually responsive to those that have access to it.”

Marin-Molina and her small staff of four full-time and one part-time employee make it their priority to help workers become a part of that system. On Tuesday nights the center hosts workshops where workers have an opportunity to express their concerns to the staff and receive basic instruction and advice regarding accidents on the job, what their rights are over payment and how workers can enforce them. At other workshops, workers are taught about the economy they participate in and how sometimes worker exploitation plays a part in that economy.

Slowly, small changes Marin-Molina hoped for are being made, but not without obstacles.

Last summer in nearby Brookhaven, government agencies began to evict immigrants from their homes. Up to 20 people were crowded into single-family homes. Those who resided in those homes would be forced to seek housing elsewhere, overcrowding other homes. Some resorted to sleeping in the woods. Officials cited safety and stated that overcrowding was a health threat. Marin-Molina was angered by the lack of process—
evictions were swift sometimes, giving the group only hours to leave.

“You don’t think the government is able to do something so inhumane, you like to think that they would not go that far, but they do,” she says. “If you are really concerned about safety of the tenants, then why would you kick people out into the street? Why would you put people out in a condition where they had to go live in the woods?”

Marin-Molina believes it was the combination of protests and a pending lawsuit against the town that pushed the local government to end the evictions.

Day laborers are another workforce the center assists. One employee explains worker rights on street corners where crowds of workers, who are also called esquineros, hope to be hired by contractors and landscapers. Critics have called the throngs of men dangerous and some have used intimidation tactics to get rid of the men.

In nearby Farmingville, the tense situation escalated into deadly violence. In 2003, a Mexican couple’s home was fire-bombed by white teens in a racially motivated incident. Just three years previous, two immigrant workers were picked up at a hiring corner by two white males who had given them the false impression that they were hiring. The men, later discovered to be white supremacists, lured them to a barn where they stabbed and beat the workers to death. The incident became the subject of an award-winning 2004 PBS documentary, Farmingville, and placed national attention on the area’s racial tensions. It was also the impetus for the creation of the Long Island Immigrant Alliance, a collective of immigrants’ rights groups that banded together under the principles that immigrants deserve human and legal rights, of which the Workplace Project is a member.

However a recent study revealed that day laborers still experience widespread abuse, discrimination and nonpayment, and that 70 percent do not know where they can turn for legal help.

“A lot of people don’t know what the process is or what they can do,” she says. “I think the actions we take as part of our work, are part of the debating process and part of a democratic society. Part of what we do is tell them they do have a right to meet legislators. They have a right to participate in the political process.”

Her efforts have been rewarded with accolades and awards. This year the mother of 5-year-old Lucas received the Public Citizen of the Year Award from the New York state chapter of the National Association of Social Workers. In 2001, the Ms. Foundation for Women bestowed her with the Gloria Steinem Award.

However, for Marin-Molina there is still more to do. Anti-immigrant groups are still a foreboding presence and consider her a formidable thorn in their side. Organizations like the Sachem Quality of Life and ProjectUSA seek to end illegal immigration and have fought to rid Long Island of immigrant workers in the name of maintaining a safe suburban area. Debates continue to rage between those who call for organizations such as Marin-Molina’s to cease assisting undocumented people and immigrant supporters.

“When we look at work we do, we ask ‘What is justice?’ Is it justice to say you are illegal so you have no rights, to me and to our organization, that is not justice,” she says. “It’s not just for people who have nice homes who hire domestic workers or who have food thanks to agricultural workers to then turn around to workers to say you have no rights and can’t live here.

“When you say ‘[undocumented workers] are criminals’ or ‘you are helping them,’ the argument is they have no rights, that they should not have rights. We should ask ourselves two things— whether it is fair and whether the U.S. really wants to have an underclass with no rights and that can be exploited with no recourse. If you look at the people who yell the loudest about it, [they, too] depend on undocumented workers. There is no way for anyone to say that they don’t benefit from the labor of these workers. Everything you eat has probably gone through the hands of undocumented workers. For anyone to say they are criminals is hypocrisy.” H

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