Hector Reyna had a hunch he was being duped.
One of hundreds of immigrant workers hired to disinfect New York’s subways at the height of the pandemic, the forty-eight-year-old from the Dominican Republic couldn’t ignore such a stark disparity between extraordinary needs of the moment and the low pay.
“I always asked myself the question,” he said. “Why so little money for such a risky job?”
Reyna was hired to clean trains and subway stations in Brooklyn and Queens in August 2020, three months after the New York Times published the names of one hundred thousand people in the United States who died from COVID, and two months before any vaccine was available.
Five years later, Reyna and hundreds of his coworkers will get their big payday after a $3 million settlement secured by City Comptroller Brad Lander. But at the time, Reyna worked through a series of rationalizations to explain his situation. At least his pay of $21 an hour was above both the city’s minimum wage and the state’s minimum wage of $14.50 an hour. “For me, it was a lot,” he says. But even so, the job was hard — and painful. Skin would peel off workers’ bodies from the harsh chemicals used to clean. The company later diluted them to make the solutions less acrid. The gloves provided were flimsy.
Reyna couldn’t reconcile these contradictions and had a feeling he was on the losing side of an existential ledger. He wasn’t alone making that cold calculus: work or starve. He counted his blessings and continued to work.
“I felt blessed because I was working during an extremely difficult time, when many people were out of work,” says Reyna. “But at the same time, I was consciously aware of the danger I was taking every minute, every hour, every day that I went to work.”
As I reported at the time for the American Prospect, contractors received a windfall of $371 million, but they subjected their workers to…
Auteur: Luis Feliz Leon
