The Mission District is home to dozens of restaurants—a major source of employment for the many undocumented and marginal laborers who live and work here. But this combination of struggling, sometimes desperate, workers and small business owners in a competitive industry, who are fighting to stay afloat during a down economy, can often lead to labor rights abuses.
One recent example of an employer facing allegations that has resulted in a minor victory for workers is Panchita’s #3, a Salvadorian restaurant, which is not affiliated with the other Panchita’s restaurants in the Mission. The state recently ordered the restaurant to shut its doors, in response to worker complaints of wages as low as $200 a week, unpaid training and harassment at the hands of owner Johnny Marenco, who could not be reached for comment.
One of those employees is “Carla,” who asked not to be identified, citing concerns about her immigration status. Like the other Panchita’s employees, she has still not been paid for back wages—in her case totaling $13,776 for one year—the city and state have determined she and the others are owed.
“I’m suing him for failure to pay because I was told the salary wasn’t even a minimum per hour, that he was paying me nothing … I feel that is theft what he did to me,” she said. “We won the case, as they say, but we haven’t been paid.”
Marenco has since filed for bankruptcy.
Carla said that the treatment she received is not uncommon and that many new immigrants face abuse and wage theft at the hands of exploitative business owners.
“Most of the Latino business owners are like that, they like taking advantage of people. Sometimes you’re just barely arriving [to the U.S.] and you don’t know what work is like over here, that’s why we get treated bad,” she said, adding that Marenco was particularly willing to resort to abuse and intimidation. “The owner would always tell us that if we sued them, that he would call immigration, so he would intimidate us that way.”
Tiffany Crain-Altamirano, co-director of Young Workers United, the labor advocacy group that assisted the Panchita’s #3 workers with their campaign for restitution, said that the keys to addressing the issue of wage theft in the Mission are awareness and enforcement.
“Even though we have these really great laws, there is a need for more enforcement because there’s still a lot of businesses that aren’t respecting the laws and wage theft is still a part of everyday life,” she said. “It is a victory that the owner is no longer able to terrorize workers who have been so brave to bring their case forward, but they still haven’t been paid. A couple of them are owed $3,000 [for one year] and one is owed $15,000 for one … when you think about how much money that is for a minimum wage worker in a year, it’s a lot of [unpaid] hours.”
She added that the matters of verbal and sexual harassment also deserved serious attention.
“One particular worker, just over and over, got the kinds of things said to her that were definitely sexual harassment … a couple of times some of the workers just had to walk out, the amount of verbal abuse was so bad.”
“Mercedes,” another Panchita’s #3 employee who also declined to be identified because of her immigration status, said that the sexual and verbal harassment from Marenco and his brother Toni was pervasive.
“Even his brother was very disrespectful to me … one day the topic of virginity came up—whether you had been with another person before, but it was between me and another female worker, and [the Marenco brothers] overheard,” she said. “[Toni] said he would check, to confirm whether I was a virgin or not. And even one day he told me, ‘let’s go to the bathroom to check … and see if you’re really the little virgin of this restaurant.’ And they put a candle and said that I was the Virgin, that they would ask for a miracle.”
Crain-Altamirano said that several business owners have actually been quite cooperative with efforts to reimburse employees for back wages.
“[Often] we can negotiate with the owner and come to a very reasonable solution that usually involves a payment plan … this is not one of those cases,” she said. “On our website we have a restaurant guide that’s dedicated to those that are responsible and some of them are in the Mission.”
She added that it’s ultimately up to consumers to vote with their dollar and find out if the places they eat are treating their employees fairly. The best way to do that?
“Ask the workers,” she said. “If you go to a restaurant and see there is a surcharge for healthcare, ask a server or someone else working there about their healthcare.”