Report from the pushcart wars
from the NYT:
Pushcart Vendors Gain Victory in a Labor Deal
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: November 23, 2004
Themistoklis Makkos, who immigrated from Athens in 1974, began building his pushcart empire with a solitary pretzel cart on West 34th Street.
With the help of his sons, he expanded to several more, and thanks to the Parks Department's decision to let companies bid for vending spots, he now controls most of the pushcarts in Central Park, a few blocks from his Fifth Avenue apartment.
But many Central Park vendors who work for Mr. Makkos's company - most of them from Bangladesh - say it has repeatedly broken wage and hour laws. They say they are not paid overtime, even when they work 80-hour weeks. They also complain that the company, M & T Pretzel, does not give them 30-minute lunch breaks, as required by state law, and requires them to pay Health Department fines or police summonses, even when the violations are the company's fault.
Several vendors took their complaints to the New York State attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, who is expected to announce a $450,000 settlement today with Mr. Makkos's company. As a result, some vendors are expected to receive $10,000 each.
Mr. Spitzer's investigators found that for several years, M & T had paid the vendors only $60 a day, even when they worked 14-hour days, often from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. during the summer. This meant that they often received less than the $5.15-an-hour minimum wage.
"No one should have to work from sunup to sundown for $60 a day," said Patricia Smith, director of the attorney general's labor bureau. "It's illegal, and it's wrong."
Jafar, a Central Park vendor who refused to give his last name, fearing that M & T would fire him for speaking out, complained that he was still earning the minimum wage, after years on the job.
"I work seven days a week, 84 hours a week, for a simple reason," he said. "I have a family to support, and I am paid so little. I do this for eight years, and I still get the lowest salary in New York City."
Quazi Rahman, who was the first Central Park vendor to complain to Mr. Spitzer's office, said he was fired last year when M & T refused to rehire him after the winter slow period.
"They said I was a troublemaker," he said. "The people who work for the company are very scared to speak. If you speak up, they say shut your mouth."
Neither Mr. Makkos nor his sons, Thomas and George, who are executives in the business, returned several calls made yesterday to M & T. The company's lawyer, James H. Tully Jr., said M & T did not realize that it was breaking the law by not paying overtime or providing rest breaks.
"The problem was that for these vendors in Central Park, the work is very seasonal, and the way M & T operated for a while was to have the people work longer hours during the heart of the season and lesser hours during the low period and not at all during the coldest months," Mr. Tully said. "M & T certainly didn't mean to break the law. They thought they were operating as seasonal operators were supposed to and didn't have to pay overtime."
He said that once the attorney general's office explained the situation, "I explained the law to M & T, and they worked out an arrangement where a fund has been established" to pay workers overtime that had been wrongly denied.
Ms. Smith, of the attorney general's office, said that under state law, the only seasonal workers exempt from overtime pay are counselors at children's summer camps.
As customers bought his $1.50 hot dogs and $2 ice cream sandwiches, Jafar, who was a rice merchant in Bangladesh, said his cart sometimes sells $4,000 in food and drink on busy summer days. Some carts gross more than $400,000 a year.
So great is the demand for the vendors' pretzels and sodas that the Makkos family bid a total of $536,100 in a Parks Department auction for the right to have pushcarts for a year at two choice spots in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The company first won many prime locations two decades ago by being among the first to realize their financial potential, outbidding smaller businesses in a move that made the family wealthy. The family also won the right to run the park's carousel and outbid Donald J. Trump to operate the Wollman Skating Rink.
For several other Central Park pushcart spots, M & T pays $50,000 to $100,000 a year. The company operates 42 of the park's 70 carts, for which it will pay the city $2.1 million this year.
"This company is making a lot of money on the backs of these poor workers," said Sean Basinski, director of the Street Vendors Project at the Urban Justice Center, a nonprofit advocacy group. "And the city is making a lot of money from M & T's bids. If M & T paid its people properly, it couldn't pay as much for these sites, so in a sense the city is also making money off of these poor workers."
Jafar and several other Central Park vendors said that when they need to run to the bathroom, usually several blocks from their pushcarts, they have to leave their carts unattended. As a result, the vendors said, passers-by often steal some sodas, and they, not M & T, have to absorb the cost of that theft.
Jafar said he had lost many days of work - and pay - going to court to fight summonses. He said the police have given him several tickets for not having a seatbelt while he stood in back of an M & T flatbed truck with several vendors as it ferried them and their pushcarts to Central Park from the company's headquarters on West 37th Street.
Ms. Smith said the company had acted illegally by making the vendors pay for the stolen items. She also said M & T had broken the law by not reimbursing them for fines and summonses that the workers paid even when the company was responsible.
She said the attorney general's office was looking into allegations involving other pushcart companies doing business in the New York City park system.
Mr. Basinski of the Urban Justice Center faulted the Parks Department for not uncovering these wage violations, which he said had gone on for years.
"Obviously there was no investigation whether the concessionaires were violating the law," he said. "It would have taken only someone to stroll through Central Park and ask a few questions."
Warner Johnston, a spokesman for the Parks Department, said: "This is the first time we've heard of the issue. If we had been notified of the problem, we'd take immediate action by making inquiries into the practices."
Posted by Sam at November 28, 2004 03:24 PM
