The Washington Post has an article today illustrating exactly the type of pro bono work I would want to take on after graduation. Many day laborers get swindled by employers who take them out and promise to pay them at the end of the week only to turn over a check with insufficient funds or promise to meet them somewhere with cash only to never return. It happened to one of my husband’s family members and, thanks to my advice that he visit a local legal clinic in his state, he recovered not only the earned wages but interest and penalties and hopefully taught the man a lesson. It’s disgraceful how used and abused these hardworking people are. This happens all the time because these employers know they can prey on the immigrants’ fear to prevent them from seeking legal advice. We occasionally hire day laborers to help with odd jobs/heavy lifting and hear horrible tales of non-payment. Like the men in this article, many of the laborers keep records of their hours and anticipated wages. They have the documentation to support their claim, but often no way to contact the employer. I often tell the laborers we meet to write down license plate numbers when they are picked up and give them some numbers of local legal clinics. The help is out there if they just reach out for it.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 11:32 pm and is filed under Law School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.