The gap between rich and poor is at an all-time high in New York City. In 2005, low-wage workers made only two cents for every dollar earned by those at the top of the economic ladder. In New York City and much of the country, low-paying service jobs have largely replaced union manufacturing jobs and immigrant workers are often subject to serious exploitation. In these disconcerting times, Make the Road New York works on many levels to improve job opportunities for low-income New Yorkers throughout the city:

Forging an Innovative Partnership with the Retail Workers Union:
¡Despierta New York!
In 2005, Make the Road New York developed our latest and most ambitious workplace justice project, the ¡Despierta Bushwick! ("Wake Up Bushwick") campaign to stop the rampant exploitation of retail workers in our community. Thriving retailers are paying workers as little as $2.00 per hour, and almost no area employers provide paid sick days, holidays, vacation, or health benefits. Employees attending to sick children are regularly fired for unavoidable absences, and women who become pregnant are dismissed.

¡Despierta Bushwick! has grown into ¡Despierta New York!, as we have brought this successful model to Queens. ¡Despierta New York! is a collaborative effort of Make the Road New York’s Workplace Justice Project and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) to confront abysmal working conditions in the retail sector.

The goal: establish enforceable employment standards — including higher wages, paid sick days and vacation, and job protections for workers. Those businesses where workers want to organize a union will be organized into a new, democratic, local union. Those who choose not to unionize will benefit from targeted enforcement of their rights by MRNY and the New York State Attorney General’s office.

In the process, we hope to develop a model strategy that can be replicated in other places where community-based organizations have built a geographically-centralized, politically active membership.

Recent Victories
For two years, Make the Road New York organized a boycott and relentless protest of the Associated Supermarket on Bushwick's Knickerbocker Avenue retail strip. The supermarket executives failed to pay employees the minimum wage and outright refused to pay their baggers, whom the store executives claimed were volunteers, even though they worked as many as 70 hours per week. In October 2008, the New York State Attorney General responded to pressure from MRNY and arrested the two executives for cheating their workers and falsifying business records. The Attorney General also filed a civil lawsuit seeking close to $1 million dollars in illegally withheld wages and damages for employees at the store. Nieves Padilla, MRNY's Senior Workplace Justice leader told The New York Times, "These arrests send a strong signal to abusive employers throughout the state that the days of impunity for inhumane exploitation are over.

After years of paying workers a fraction of the minimum wage, the owners of Footco, a ten-store chain of sneaker and sportswear shops responded to pressure from MRNY's Workplace Justice Project and signed the Good Business Community Agreement, thereby promising to meet the minimum wage and provide health insurance to all employees. Through this agreement, the owners also pledged that they would not prevent their workers from unionizing and the workers subsequently negotiated a contract that protected them from unjust firings and ensured fair wages and benefits.

Legal Advocacy: Innovative Legal Services Protect Workers’ Rights
Make the Road New York is constantly innovating to improve our leverage and reach so that we can assist greater numbers of low-wage workers in New York City. We utilize a combination of federal court litigation, training workers about using small claims court and government agency complaint processes, and informal legal advocacy on behalf of workers who have been denied wages or been exploited on the job. In 2008, MRNY won over $6.5 million for exploited immigrant laborers who had worked in unsafe conditions or for as little as $3 per hour. Our Legal Department’s unique status as an integrated part of MRNY enables us to coordinate these legal strategies with workers’ collective action, consumer boycotts, media attention and other methods of pressuring unscrupulous employers. Visit our Legal Services page for more information.

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