LOS ANGELES TIMES
Moday, April 22, 2002
Los Angeles, CA, USA: Employers Test Ruling on Immigrants.
Labor: Some firms are trying to use Supreme Court decision as basis for avoiding claims over workplace violations.
By NANCY CLEELAND
TIMES STAFF WRITER
Employers across the nation are testing the limits of a recent Supreme Court decision to deny back pay to an undocumented worker, seeking to use the ruling to avoid minimum wage and workers' compensation awards, even asking for the documents of a worker who complained of sexual harassment, according to advocates for low-wage workers.

The swift employer response, along with widespread misunderstanding of the court's intent, has heightened a sense of distress building in immigrant communities through months of recession and the war on terrorism, the advocates said.

"Everyone is reeling from this," said Della Bahan, a Pasadena attorney representing immigrant janitors in a class-action lawsuit alleging wage and hour violations. "It's created a lot of confusion and a lot of fear. However it's ultimately interpreted, the overall message is, 'You complain at your peril.'" On March 27, the high court ruled 5 to 4 that because he was undocumented, a worker at a chemical plant in Paramount could not collect thousands of dollars in back pay after he was illegally fired for union-organizing activities. The court determined that the worker's violation of immigration law overrode the employer's violation of labor laws.

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