On This Sweep in Orange, Employers Were the Targets

The first sign of daybreak--a light orange glow off the hills in east Orange--was appearing when Timm Browne’s hand radio crackled.

It was only 5:25 a.m., but Browne, in a comfortable stretch van, and four other Orange police officers, driving plain sedans, were already scouring the alleys and streets of east Orange, looking for landscapers, masons and other small contractors.

The employers’ target: workers, most of them Latinos, who were making themselves available for a day’s work.

For more than an hour, hand radios blaring constantly, the five officers cruised parking lots and back alleys along busy Chapman Avenue. One would tail a truck for half a mile and then pass it on to another officer, who would follow it to its final destination.

The idea was to follow the truckloads of laborers to construction sites. Later, the officers returned to the sites with Larry Loughlin, a state Department of Industrial Relations inspector.

Loughlin was looking particularly for employers who were breaking any one of three state labor laws.

Under these statutes, an employer must have a license to hire, must provide workers’ compensation, and must deduct state, federal and Social Security taxes from wages, even those paid in cash.

Loughlin, a no-nonsense investigator fond of wearing a camouflage military cap, also advised the men, many of whom turned out to be illegal aliens, of their rights but assured them that the employers were the ones in trouble Thursday--not them.

Although Loughlin cited only two employers during the morning, he collected information from others that he would use later to determine if they were breaking state labor laws.

When the undercover officers began their search Thursday morning, sleepy-eyed men were just emerging from small apartments and houses and alleys near Chapman Avenue. Usually in pairs or groups of three or four, they marched quietly to street corners to wait for job offers.

Several weeks ago, before the Orange Police Department began citing Latino laborers for minor violations--and turning them over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service when they could not produce identification proving that they were legal residents--hundreds of men would congregate along the street each dawn.

The numbers have now been substantially reduced. Browne said 199 men had been deported since the crackdown began.

But Thursday morning’s pursuit of employers, not workers, represented a new Police Department tactic in dealing with complaints from residents about men congregating along the busy street.

When Loughlin joined the search at 7 a.m., Browne led him to a huge housing tract just off the busy intersection of Chapman Avenue and Newport Boulevard. There, Loughlin confronted a crew unloading a miniature bulldozer from a trailer.

Two of the men produced identification and told Loughlin that they had worked for the construction company for two years. The other man said he had just hired on.

The laborers told Loughlin that they get paid every Friday by check but that they are not given the stubs that indicate what is being deducted and the amount.

“If what they tell me is true, then we have very serious violations. But I will have to verify all this,” Loughlin said.

On the other side of the tract, Loughlin and the officers approached a man in a double-cab truck. One officer said he thought he had seen him pick up some men earlier on Chapman Avenue.

But Sal Navaratte, foreman of the 10-man landscaping crew, was prepared to prove that his employees were not hired illegally. All but two spoke fluent English. The foreman insisted that his crew was represented by a union.

“No way. We’re strictly union. We don’t mess around with cheap labor,” Navaratte said. “We don’t have time to teach (illegal aliens) how to do our work.”

Loughlin seemed satisfied but still insisted on writing down the names of the workers.

The inspector and the officers then left for Rancho Santa Margarita to rendezvous with another officer who was watching a three-man cleanup crew he had followed to a construction site.

There, Loughlin found David Sanchez, who told him that he had picked up Cresencio Rodriquez and Jesus Rodriquez (not related) every day in Orange for the past two months to perform cleanup work around the site. The men later said they received wages of $30 a day.

Sanchez told the state inspector that he paid the two men in cash and that he worked for a Whittier company. Loughlin placed a call to the company but got no answer. He then gave Sanchez a “stop-order” citation to prohibit the company from hiring anyone until it could prove that it was licensed with the state and provided employees with workers’ compensation.

“You give this to your boss, because there is no record of your company having a license,” Loughlin told Sanchez.

Loughlin explained later that employers cited have the option of correcting the alleged violation within a set period of time or contesting the citation before a state hearing officer.

The biggest case of the day came at a construction site in Laguna Hills.

By the time it was over, Roy L. McDaniel, who said he had just recently started his own dry-wall installation firm, had been given a $1,700 citation after Loughlin determined that McDaniel had hired four illegals for $4 an hour, had paid them in cash and had not provided them with benefits.

McDaniel, who runs Southern Counties Dry Walling in Newhope, said installing dry wall in the warehouse under construction was his first big job since he formed his company recently.

He admitted to Loughlin that he had picked up the men in Orange and said that it was the first time he had hired illegal residents.

But Aurelio Barrera, one of the four men working at the site, told a reporter that this was the second day they had worked for McDaniel. Later McDaniel, still not realizing that he was liable for a $100-a-day fine for each man that he admitted hiring, told Loughlin that he had hired illegal laborers for the past two weeks.

As Loughlin wrote out the citation, McDaniel expressed his concern.

“I’m a first-time offender,” he said. “I just got into business, and I know very little (about the law).”

Unimpressed, Loughlin gave him a stern lecture.

“You got no business hiring people until you get licensed. And you shouldn’t treat them that way,” Loughlin told him. “Deductions get taken out of my own paycheck, and I’ll be damned if someone is going to try and get away with it. You got to pay these people properly.”

Then Loughlin walked over to the workers and in broken Spanish told them that they “were not in trouble with me” and advised them of their rights when accepting a job.

For laborer Florentino Torres, the incident turned amusing, especially when he learned that he and his friends would not be deported. Torres said he had been among those deported a month ago in the first wave of Orange Police Department sweeps on Chapman Avenue.

“I expect to go to Tijuana every so often,” he said.