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Wal Mart (and ftl_ian) Love Illegal Immigration!

Started by Grunt, January 28, 2005, 12:15 PM NHFT

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Grunt

Immigrants say they were Wal-Mart's secret
Store will review their legal status
by Brian Donohue

The Wal-Mart janitors report to work as the final customers are checking out.

If a floor waxing machine breaks down during the night, or they need some new mops, they call a phone number and leave a voice mail message asking for supplies. And at the end of each week, a paycheck appears beneath the battery charger in the maintenance closet to be cashed by the crew leader and split among the crew.

Several of the more than 300 illegal immigrants arrested in a nationwide sweep of Wal-Mart stores Thursday described a shadowy multi-tiered management system in which groups of illegal immigrants work for bosses they've never met and for companies some cannot name.

Most important, they said, no one ever asks whether they're in the country legally.

"No one from Wal-Mart knew we were illegal. They never ask. They want to think we are all legal aliens," said Victor Zavala Sr., a Wal-Mart janitor whose son and daughter-in-law were arrested outside a store in Old Bridge. "But it's really just an out-loud secret."

Federal agents raided 60 stores and the Arkansas headquarters of the nation's largest retailer Thursday in the largest immigration raid in years.

Wal-Mart officials said all the workers arrested, including 13 in New Jersey, were employed by private companies hired to clean the stores.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said yesterday it will review all of its workers and fire any who are illegally employed.

Investigators told the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity that they gathered recordings from wiretaps that indicate Wal-Mart executives knew the company's subcontractors used illegal workers.

Wal-Mart denied the accusation yesterday.

"We have seen no evidence from the INS that anyone from Wal-Mart was involved in this," said company spokeswoman Sharon Weber in a telephone interview yesterday. "We do not condone the use of illegal workers at Wal-Mart or anywhere."

Weber said the company did not have the names of the companies hired to clean the stores or those whose employees had been arrested.

Among those arrested Thursday morning were Victor Zavala Jr., 28, and his wife Eunice Gomez, 26, of Red Bank. The pair crossed the Mexican border on foot three years ago and reunited with Zavala's father, Victor Sr., an illegal immigrant who said he has split time between the U.S. and Mexico since 1963.

Like his father, Zavala Jr. and his wife said they found work on the Wal-Mart cleaning crews and quickly became bosses of their own crews, working as sub-contractors for the cleaning companies contracted by Wal-Mart.

Each boss hires a crew of five or six people and is put in charge of cleaning a single Wal-Mart store, the workers said, arriving at closing time and making sure the floors are mopped and dried by sun-up.

Zavala Jr., who worked in the Wal-Mart in Piscataway, said he found his crew at the Red Bank train station, where groups of Mexican men gather looking for work each morning, and at the local Laundromat, where men chat while they wait for their clothes to dry. He knows most by their first names only, he said.

His wife assumed the same job as the leader of a five-person crew that worked from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. each day cleaning the Wal-Mart in Old Bridge.

At the end of each six-day week, the workers said, a check was left for the crew chief in the store's maintenance closet. They said they cashed it, pocketed their own cut of $350 and paid their fellow workers in cash.

The three workers said they met supervisors only periodically, were never formally introduced and never knew their names.

"If you asked me the name of the company, I wouldn't know," said Zavala Sr. "If you asked me what my boss looks like, I wouldn't know. I'm not playing with you."

Unlike his father, Zavala Jr. said he knew the name of his employer, which he identified as Facilities Solutions International. Officials with the company, based in Clarksburg, did not return repeated phone calls yesterday.

After completing his shift at the Piscataway store Thursday morning, Zavala Jr., with four workers in his Ford Explorer, stopped by the Old Bridge location to pick up his wife and five other workers for the return commute to Red Bank. As they were leaving the parking lot, he said, their car was cut off by federal agents, who ordered them out of the car and put them under arrest for being in the country illegally.

At the Newark offices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the workers were grilled by immigration agents, who Zavala Jr. said spoke no Spanish, but clearly did not believe him when he told them he did not know the name of his boss.

"They told me to stop lying," Zavala Jr. said.

The two were released and ordered to appear in three months before an immigration judge who may order them deported.

Gomez and Zavala Jr. said if they are ordered, they will pull their three children out of Red Bank schools and return to live with their families in Mexico City.