Immigrant Workers Secure Historic $580K Settlement Against CA-Based Egreen Transport Corporation For Abusive Labor Practices

Dozens of workers who received local media attention after fighting back against their employer’s suspected labor trafficking practices have been vindicated, after a court approved a consent judgment with the U.S. Department of Labor requiring California-based Egreen Transportation Corporation to pay over $580,000 in unpaid wages, damages, and other penalties.

What happened?

The workers, all Chinese and Latino immigrants, were recruited to work at Egreen and denied pay for their work in California, Georgia, and New Jersey warehouses. Egreen coerced many of the Chinese workers into working 12-hour days, denied them payment, and housed them in overcrowded apartments—for which the Chinese workers were charged hundreds of dollars in rent. In response to workers’ repeated complaints, Egreen threatened retaliation and firing to silence them.

“This case is especially important under these current times where there has been an ongoing issue of fraudulent employment promises made to new, often desperate, asylum-seeking migrants. This case highlights those unscrupulous businesses and sends a clear message that they cannot prey on and exploit migrants with their illegal practices,” said Connie Chung Joe, former CEO of AJSOCAL.

Chinese and Latino workers held a series of strikes to demand unpaid wages. Egreen again threatened, intimidated, and ultimately fired the striking Chinese workers.

After months of investigation, the Department of Labor entered into a landmark consent judgment with Egreen and its senior employees. In addition to paying the workers $580,000 plus interest, Egreen is also required to provide notice to its employees of their rights under the Fair Labor Standards Act and implement employment law training.

The settlement is the first in a series of expected accountability measures Egreen is expected to face, as complaints of illegal practices remain pending before other regulatory agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The workers pursued complaints to federal agencies with the support of AALDEF, in partnership with Sur Legal Collaborative, Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Southern California (AJSOCAL), and the former Immigrant Justice Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Migrant Equity Southeast (MESE), a community-based immigrant rights organization in Savannah, and Tapestri, a non-profit organization in Georgia, supported the workers with immediate crisis needs and connected them to legal organizations.

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In 2014, Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California joined forces with community partners and other legal service providers to challenge the California Department of Social Services’ decision to send Medi-Cal renewal forms to its beneficiaries only in English. Without legally mandated translations of the forms into non-English languages—including Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Hmong, Cambodian, Arabic, and Farsi—many faced termination of their Medi-Cal benefits, simply because they had no way of knowing that they had to complete a renewal form.

Over 40% of Medi-Cal beneficiaries report speaking a primary language other than English, and before 2014, beneficiaries received renewal forms with non-English translations. Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California and its partners successfully obtained an emergency court decision to prevent the State from disenrolling any Medi-Cal beneficiaries based on the cancellation notices it sent only in English. Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California and its partners continue to litigate this matter.

In 2016, Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California and its pro bono co-counsel Latham & Watkins LLP obtained a $15.2 million judgment in favor of a group of eleven Filipino workers who were trafficked to the United States to work at L’Amande Bakery, a high-end French bakery in Southern California owned by Ana Moitinho de Almeida and her husband Gonçalo Mointinho de Almeida.

The workers were fraudulently lured by their employer to the United States from the Philippines on E-2 visas and then subjected to abusive and exploitative working conditions, including workdays as long as 17 hours and wages as low as three dollars an hour. The Almeidas used threats of debt, deportation, and financial ruin in the Philippines to maintain their economic exploitation of the workers. After the workers arrived in the United States, the Almeidas threatened them with a significant debt of $11,000 each unless they agreed to work under these illegal conditions for at least three years. Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California also obtained T visas for all of the workers, which provide victims of human trafficking temporary legal status and work authorization and allow them to bring their families to the U.S.

In 2014, Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights (OCR) against Temecula Valley Unified School District (TVUSD) on behalf of a concerned teacher for failing to provide its middle school English Learner (EL) students with adequate language support and, in some cases, eliminating all EL services.

OCR found evidence that many EL students in TVUSD middle schools were not receiving proper services, and some students received little or no support, preventing them from learning. OCR also found that TVUSD’s practices resulted in EL students missing the opportunity to receive special help in accessing the core curriculum, which was provided to non-EL students. Based on evidence gathered during its investigation, OCR added a third issue to its investigation: whether TVUSD adequately notifies parents who do not speak English fluently of information that is called to the attention of other parents. OCR did not complete its investigation because it entered into a resolution agreement with TVUSD.

Under the agreement, TVUSD will convene a coordinating committee comprised of an EL expert, EL teachers, EL parents, and a district administrator to revise the EL Master Plan to address deficiencies raised by the complaint and investigation, train teachers on how to implement the Master Plan effectively, and provide compensatory education for EL students who did not receive any ELD instruction. OCR will monitor TVUSD until it fulfills all requirements of the agreement.

In 2015, Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California, with the ACLU of Southern California, the Law Office of Robert Rubin, and Sidley Austin, LLP, sued the City of Fullerton for violating the California Voting Rights Act.

The lawsuit alleged that the city’s “at-large” system for electing city council members denied large segments of the community, especially Asian Americans, a voice in how their city is governed. “At-large” voting meant all eligible voters in the city selected elected officials from the same pool of candidates. In contrast, district-based voting divided the city council seats into smaller districts, which allows for a more local approach. Despite nearly a quarter of all eligible voters in Fullerton being Asian American, no Asian Americans served on the five-person city council.

Within just a few months of filing the lawsuit, the city of Fullerton agreed to change from an “at-large” voting system to a “district-based” approach, which ensured the vote of communities of interest, such as Asian Americans, was not diluted by folding it into a city-wide voting population. Today, Fullerton’s city council elections are district-based.

AJSOCAL joins the Wage Justice Center in representing 400+ Korean and Latino port truck drivers that had been misclassified as independent contractors; case settled for $5 million, victory over exploitative port trucking companies.

In 1995, 72 Thai workers were discovered during an FBI raid in an apartment in El Monte. They’d been lured to the US with promises of a good job and a green card, only to have their passports confiscated and forced to work behind barbed wire and armed guards. They’d been held captive for up to 7 years, forced to work 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, sewing clothing labels.  

AJSOCAL freed 72 Thai nationals held captive as garment laborers and sued the major manufacturers, retailers, and captors, securing a $4 million settlement. This groundbreaking case and subsequent state legislation resulted in sweeping sweatshop reform and labor protections in California.  Bureerong v. Uvawas in El Monte, California, is widely considered a wake-up call to human trafficking and modern-day slavery in the United States, leading to the reformation of garment industry labor regulations and the establishment of human trafficking immigration remedies.