Donald Trump has built his run for the Presidency on the backs of undocumented workers, using them as a wedge issue to fire up a rabid pitch-fork wielding rabble of anti-immigrant sentiment. Yet 35 years ago when he was getting his foothold in Manhattan as construction for his signature Trump Tower began the young entrepreneur noticed something odd going on with some construction next door and decided to investigate according to Time Magazine.
With the approvals in hand, Trump set about preparing to build. One day in late 1979, he was inspecting renovation work being undertaken by a tenant in a building he owned next door to the site, and saw the Poles at work, according to testimony given to the court by the foreman overseeing the job. The foreman testified that Trump personally approached him to ask who they were. “Those Polish guys are good, hard workers,” court documents say the foreman recalled Trump saying. Soon afterward, Trump met with the workers’ boss, a man named William Kaszycki, at Trump’s lavish office across Fifth Avenue, Kaszycki later testified.
Kaszycki’s company specialized in window and job-site cleaning and had never done the heavy demolition work required to remove a 12-story building in midtown Manhattan. Kaszycki testified that Trump told him to start a new company to do the demolition work and directed him to get new and different insurance for the job. Kaszycki, who has since died, testified that he accepted Trump’s $775,000 fee offer flat out. And with Trump offering an additional $25,000 if the building came down quickly, Kaszycki promised him that the Poles would work day and night, seven days a week.
Trump has for years claimed he didn’t know that Kaszycki’s workers were undocumented, saying they were “hired through a sub-contractor” but the fact is Kaszycki was that contractor whom Trump specifically sought out in order to gain access to super cheap high risk labor and that it was Trump himself who suggested and guided him to “start a new company” for the job.
He made that sub-contracting company with his own actiona and words, they wouldn’t have existed if not for Donald Trump’s pathological need to cut his costs to increase his profits, but he’s been dodging the ramification and consequences of it for nearly 40 years.
Far from learning his lesson over the decades from this experience, the Washington Post has found that Trump’s project in Washington DC today includes undocumented workers on site.
Interviews with about 15 laborers helping renovate the Old Post Office Pavilion revealed that many of them had crossed the U.S-Mexico border illegally before they eventually settled in the Washington region to build new lives.
Several of the men, who hail mostly from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, have earned U.S. citizenship or legal status through immigration programs targeting Central Americans fleeing civil wars or natural disasters. Others quietly acknowledged that they remain in the country illegally.
“Most of the concern is that this escalates into a bigger problem,” said Daniel Gonzalez, 45, a sheet metal worker from El Salvador who crossed the border in the 1980s to escape his country’s civil war. He became a U.S. citizen after a federal immigration judge granted him asylum, he said.
“He might come one day and pretty much tell us to get the heck out of here,” Gonzalez said of Trump.
Now it might be argued that Trump probably isn’t personally aware of the immigration status of every worker at his DC project, but that wasn’t the case 36 years ago. And on top of that, the fact is that on his Trump Tower project they worked themselves nearly to death yet at the end of the day their dispute with Donald was that he still underpaid and stiffed them.
From January to March 1980, they sneaked over from the job next door and worked two shifts, one from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., the other from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. Some later testified that they worked 24-hour shifts. They were paid $4 to $5 an hour, court documents show, which at the time was less than half the prevailing union wage and just above the state minimum wage of $3.10 an hour. Tearing down walls, cutting pipes and pulling electrical wires is dangerous work, and unlike union workers who later joined the job, most of the Polish workers lacked safety equipment like hard hats, according to the testimony of several former workers. A large piece of steel fell on the arm of one worker, Albin Lipinski, breaking several bones and permanently disfiguring his fingers.
But it was a dispute about money, not safety and long hours, that would later cause Trump so much trouble. Five miles east of the Fifth Avenue job site, at a two-story tin-sided house in the heavily Polish neighborhood of Maspeth, Queens, a middle-aged lawyer named John Szabo started getting visits in March 1980 from undocumented Polish laborers who said they were not being paid for their work. Before long, he would have dozens of clients from the same job. Szabo contacted Kaszycki, who was spending much of his time in Florida, but couldn’t reach him. So in late March, Szabo called Thomas Macari, a vice president in Trump’s operation, according to Szabo’s testimony. Macari, who could not be reached for comment, was overseeing the demolition job on a daily basis, according to the testimony of the Poles, Kaszycki and others in the case. If his clients weren’t paid, Szabo said, he would serve Trump with a mechanic’s lien, a powerful legal device that gives a laborer partial claim to the title of a property on which he has worked.
It’s not like this was light and easy work. The building they were demolishing was laced with asbestos and they were removing it in some cases without gloves, without hard hats and without respirators. And still not getting paid the pittance they’d been offered for the job, after his hand-picked contractor guy Kaszycki had flittered off to Florida Trump did attempt to pay the workers directly but another problem appeared when it was discovered that their contributions weren’t being included in the pension fund.
Gradually things spiraled out of control with threats of violence, warnings that somebody was going to get “dangled out of a window” and so on. Szabo did submit the liens, three of them, and Trump responded with threatening calls from the mysterious “John Barron” from his legal department who said he would sue Szado for $100 Million if he didn’t drop he liens. It got pretty ugly.
Donald claims that it’s Hillary’s policies that are “bigoted” because they’ve supposedly kept African-Americans from advancing in America — an actually fairly progressive claim that systemic racism is at least partially at fault for the problems they face, even if he seems completely unable to name a single example of any such policy implemented by Clinton — it appears that it’s actually business practices like Trump’s of both undercutting good paying union jobs and then underpaying the undocumented scabs he’s brought in purely to improve his own bottom line that is a “bigoted” policy.
Eventually Trump settled and paid enough for everyone to simmer down, but despite his decades long claim he didn’t know that these worker were undocumented, even under oath, that isn’t what told his labor consultant Daniel Sullivan who he had called in to help him deal with situation.
Sullivan had been helping Trump negotiate a casino deal in New Jersey at the time, and he testified that he was shocked by Trump’s admission. “I think you are nuts,” Sullivan testified that he told Trump. “You are here negotiating a lease in Atlantic City for a casino license and you are telling me you have got illegal employees on the job.”
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Sullivan put it more bluntly in 1990 to People magazine. “It was disgusting how he used people,” Sullivan said. “I said, ‘Don’t exploit them like that. Don’t try to f-ck these poor souls over.’ It baffled me then, and it makes me sick even now that he knowingly had these Poles there for the purpose of Trump Tower at starvation wages. He couldn’t give a sh-t because he’s Donald Trump and everybody is here to serve him. Over time he became more and more monstrous and arrogant. I asked myself, ‘How long is it going to take for all of this to catch up with him?'”
How long? Not much longer now. I’m predicting somewhere around November 8th.