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Trump Used Undocumented Workers Building Trump Tower, Court Documents Show [1]

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Date: 2024-10-17  

On the campaign trail presidential candidate Donald Trump rails against undocumented workers and promises mass deportations. He claims to be a staunch supporter of American workers. Trump, however, does not tell his audiences that he actually employed illegal labor to build his signature property and when they sued him for unpaid wages, he tried to have them deported.

In 1979, Trump had managed to secure the lease on the old Bonwit Teller building at 56th Street and Fifth Avenue, eventually signing a 50-50 deal with the property owner to develop what would later become New York City’s tallest glass structure. Facing zoning restrictions, Trump made large donations to politicians and curried favor with powerful members of the New York Board of Estimate, which approved a zoning variance that allowed the project to go forward.

Trump needed to clear the site that would become Trump Tower. Notoriously stingy, Trump did not want to pay union wages for the dangerous work of demolishing the site, so he turned to undocumented Polish workers, many of whom had overstayed their tourist visas and had no legal right to work in the United States. Many of these workers were so desperate to earn money that they worked removing asbestos or doing demolition without the correct safety equipment.

Years later, Trump’s role in hiring the undocumented Polish workers would be entered into court testimony. One day Trump was inspecting renovation work when he saw the Poles hard at work, according to court testimony 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,” the foreman recalled Trump saying. Soon, Trump met the workers’ boss, a man named William Kaszycki, and asked Kaszycki if the men could do demolition work, even though Kaszycki’s firm had never done that kind of work.

Kaszycki testified Trump told him to start a new demolition company 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.

From January to March 1980, the undocumented Poles sneaked over from the job next door and worked two shifts, one from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., and the other from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. Some workers testified that they even worked 24-hour shifts. They were paid $4 to $5 an hour, according to court documents, 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 and masks, according to the testimony of several former workers. They also had to remove carcinogenic asbestos but did not even receive masks.

Those of you who know Trump can figure out what came next. Trump did not pay the workers regularly and by the Summer of 1980, the Polish workers’ unpaid wages totaled over $100,000, a huge sum of money for them. It was at this point that Trump asked labor consultant Daniel Sullivan for advice about the Polish laborers. “Donald told me he had difficulties …,” Sullivan later testified in the case. “That he had some illegal Polish employees on the job.” Sullivan, who had been helping Trump negotiate a casino deal in New Jersey at the time, testified that he was shocked by Trump’s admission. “I think you are nuts,” Sullivan 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.” Sullivan persuaded Trump to fire the Poles and rely only on union workers to take the building down. “I told him to fire them promptly if he had any brains,” Sullivan testified.

A lawyer for many of the unpaid Poles demanded that the workers be paid or else he would serve Trump with a lien on the property. One Polish worker even went to Trump’s office to ask him for money in person, according to sworn testimony and a deposition filed under oath in a court case. Worried the Poles would never get paid, Szabo put a second and third lien on the property. On Aug. 8, he called Macari and told him that because Trump had been paying the Poles, he was legally their employer. That meant that under the Fair Labor Standards Act, Trump couldn’t sell any space in the tower until Szabo’s clients were paid.

Forty-five minutes later, Szabo testified, he received a call from a man who identified himself as a Mr. Barron from Trump’s legal department, who said Trump was going to sue Szabo for $100 million for wrongful filing of mechanic’s liens. At trial, Trump admitted that both he and a senior executive at the company had used the name Barron as a pseudonym. “I believe I occasionally used that name,” said Trump. But in this case, Macari said under oath that it had been he who called Szabo while posing as Barron; Szabo testified he didn’t recognize “Barron’s” voice. Szabo wrote a long letter defending his actions and laying out his case under the law and sent it to “Barron” on Aug. 18. A few days later, Szabo testified, he received a call from a real lawyer for Trump, Irwin Durben, who said Trump was threatening to ask the Immigration and Naturalization Service to have the Poles deported.

Eventually, the New York State Department of Labor investigated. In the end, Szabo and the Labor Department won a judgment of $254,523.59 against Kaszycki. Trump never had to pay the Poles another dime. None of this history would have been preserved at the federal court storage facility near Kansas City, Mo., but for a separate fight over money and Trump’s use of the Polish workers. According to the contract Kaszycki had signed with Local 95 of the House Wreckers Union, he and Trump were supposed to pay into the union’s pension and welfare fund a percentage of every man-hour worked on the project, whether it was done by union or nonunion workers. The documents prove beyond a doubt Trump’s use of illegal workers.

For decades, Trump has denied using undocumented workers in 1980. Senator Marco Rubio even raised the issue of undocumented Polish workers during a Republican primary debate in 2016. Trump prevaricated, denied the allegation saying, “I hire a contractor. The contractor then hires the subcontractor,” he said. “They have people. I don’t know. I don’t remember, that was so many years ago, 35 years ago.”

For years, the court documents never saw the light of day, but they were later released. The documents show that Trump sought out the Polish workers when he saw them on another job, instigated the creation of a company that paid them, and negotiated the hours they would work. Witnesses testified that Trump repeatedly toured the site where the men were working, directly addressed them about pay problems, and even promised to pay them himself, which he eventually did.

Testifying at a 1990 trial where he faced a charge of participation in a breach of fiduciary duty, Trump told a federal judge he “still didn’t know” if the workers were undocumented, arguing that he had hired a subcontractor who employed them and that he personally “wasn’t very involved in that whole process.” His lawyers also questioned the credibility of Sullivan, who had been convicted of tax evasion in a separate case.

When contacted by TIME Magazine for comment on the allegations, Trump replied with an emailed statement. “The laws were totally different thirty-five years ago. “The building, Trump Tower, turned out to be one of the most successful and iconic buildings ever built. Do you have nothing better to write about than a story that is 35 years old and filled with half-truths and false information?”

I hope someone reminds Trump that he made his fortune thanks in part to undocumented workers. It is the height of Chutzpah and hypocrisy to rail against undocumented laborers when he hired them himself.

https://time.com/4465744/donald-trump-undocumented-workers/

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