Rosa Ruiz Barrera

The dream shared by Rosa Ruiz Barrera and Nacario B. Garcia -- of creating a farm in their native Guatemala, where they could grow corn and raise their three children -- was shattered late on a November afternoon.

Ruiz Barrera's broken body lay on Route 1 in South Kingstown, next to the wrecked van that had taken her from the Narragansett fish processing plant where she'd worked that day to her home in Providence's Elmwood neighborhood. Garcia, also a fish-processing worker, was in a similar van, which came upon the scene 15 minutes later.

"Tons of cars" were in front of them. Then he saw the wreck, beer cans strewn around the ground, and the van driver, staggering nearby as if drunk. Friends rushed to Garcia. And, finally, he saw the body of Ruiz Barrera, his 22-year-old wife. Garcia felt faint and helpless, with one thought running through his mind: their four- and seven-year-old daughters and three-year-old son, back in Guatemala, would never have a mother.

In the days that followed the accident on November 19, 2001, grief spawned anger.

Members of the family went to a trusted worker at their Catholic parish, St. Teresa's Church in the Olneyville section of Providence, and they began sharing secrets that had never been whispered outside their tight-knit Guatemalan/Mayan Indian community. For years, they say, immigrant workers had been exploited by some factories within Rhode Island's fabled $713 million seafood business and by the temporary employment agencies that supplied workers to the plants.

The workers charge they were paid less than the state-mandated $6.15 minimum hourly wage, sometimes as low as $5.75, to unload boats, thaw cargo, slice open raw fish, and freeze and pack the seafood that ends up on dinner tables and in restaurants across the world. They claim to have put in as many as 70 hours a week, with schedules that sometimes stretched six or seven days in a row. But despite state law requiring overtime to be paid after 40 hours of weekly work, the workers say, they received no premium pay.

They were paid in cash, they add, so that no deductions were made for taxes, disability, Social Security, and other needs. And although the van drivers who shuttled them between Providence and Galilee village in Narragansett played a critical role, the workers say they didn't know the names of the agencies that employed them. The drivers recruited workers and served as paymasters at week's end, doling out the cash wages -- minus $5 a day for transportation.

Workers' rights advocates were stunned by the allegations, and by what they felt was the courage of the immigrants to speak out. The Rhode Island Workers' Rights Board, an independent group of government, labor, church, and community officials allied with the reform organization Rhode Island Jobs with Justice, decided to air the allegations.

On December 19, 2001, one month after the accident, the self-styled review board took what it called "testimony" at a public meeting at St. Teresa's Church, with several of the workers speaking out. "They were very strong," said Mario Bueno, director of the United Workers' Committee of Progreso Latino, the Central Falls-based advocacy organization for Hispanic residents. "They spoke out very passionately. I felt emotionally tied to what they were saying."

The board then wrote a report, detailing what it had heard, and sent it to a half-dozen government agencies, demanding that the alleged wrongs be put right. In the movie version of this story, this is the point where the cavalry arrives: publicity and outrage would prompt government agencies to investigate and set things right. If the charges were confirmed, workers would receive thousands of dollars in back wages and the companies would face possible fines.

In fact, the National Labor Relations Board, the US Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA), the attorney general's office, and the state departments of labor and taxation are examining aspects of the case. The outcome thus far, however, is stark.

Officials with the two fish processing plants in Galilee that have been most mentioned by the labor groups steadfastly deny any connection with substandard work practices. But 35 workers at one of the plants -- including Nacario Garcia -- lost their jobs after speaking out about their work conditions. One of the temporary agencies in question is hard to trace since its address is a commercial postal box in Pawtucket. And the driver of the van in the fatal single-vehicle accident -- whose blood allegedly tested at more than three times the state's drunk diving limit -- vanished after felony charges were filed.

The web of employment relationships -- van driver, temporary employment agency, fish-processing plant -- is so tangled that it's difficult to determine where and for whom Rosa Ruiz Barrera was working on the day she died.

Most of the people interviewed for this story would not discuss whether some of the fish-processing workers are in the country illegally. It's not a stretch to conclude, though, that those with immigration issues are more vulnerable to exploitative work conditions since they could face sanctions themselves.

State Representative Paul E. Moura (D-Providence), who is a national AFL-CIO union representative assigned to Rhode Island, says he doesn't know the immigration status of the workers who lost their jobs. But such questions are irrelevant, he says, to charges of workplace abuses. "Undocumented workers are covered by labor law just like documented workers," he says.

This policy may be changing, however. A closely divided US Supreme Court ruled last week, five-to-four, that illegal immigrants weren't due back wages after a California plastics company fired them for supporting a union. Supporters of immigrants say this decision simply makes it easier for law-breaking companies to hire illegal aliens, who will be all the more reluctant to speak up about exploitive conditions.

Meanwhile, advocates for the fish-processing workers, troubled that the Olneyville hearing may have led to the loss of their jobs, have diverted some of their energy into fund-raising to help the workers' families pay rent and buy food. And the Guatemalan workers are bitter about their treatment and so scared that they won't come forward with what could be their most startling secret: That despite the reports, publicity, and notice to government agencies, some immigrants may still be working for less than minimum wage pay and no overtime.

THERE'S NO LACK of anger about the death of Rosa Ruiz Barrera and the alleged working conditions her death exposed.

"This is outrageous, it's really bad news," says Lee H. Arnold, director of the state Department of Labor and Training, of the initial reports. Arnold, who has assigned top aides to investigate, says, "I want to determine whether people are hiding behind legal niceties."

OSHA, which levied $115,500 in fines after a 40-year-old Guatemalan worker was slashed to death during a 1998 accident at a fish-processing plant in New Bedford, Massachusetts, has started inspections of Rhode Island's 80 fish processing plants. Kipp Hartmann, director of the federal agency's Providence office, says the campaign has been in the planning stages for three years and, coincidentally, was scheduled to begin soon after the November 2001 accident that claimed Ruiz Barrera's life.

The use of temporary employment services to supply workers to some industries came into fashion in recent decades and has been controversial, in part, because they often pay low wages, without health and other benefits. The agencies also make it harder to pinpoint blame for illegal practices, including responsibility for such things as income and other payroll taxes.

Are workers employed by the agencies, or by the companies where they perform the actual work? In an attempt to clear this up, Rhode Island requires newly formed employment agencies to post a bond. Agencies must be certified by the state Division of Taxation as to having paid their taxes and other obligations. Companies that hire uncertified agencies are themselves liable for unpaid taxes.

Progreso Latino's United Workers' Committee and others backed a law passed a few years ago requiring temporary agencies to inform workers in writing of job descriptions and work conditions when they get new assignments. Still, "It's pretty difficult to enforce the law," Bueno concedes, "and a lot of workers aren't inclined to complain about stuff like that because they don't want to get blacklisted."

Against this background, the circumstances of Rosa Ruiz Barrera's final day have been difficult sort out.

According to the Workers' Rights Board report, Ruiz Barrera and others were hired by several temporary agencies. In turn, those agencies sent the workers to several Narragansett fish companies. Much of the board's focus has been on a company named The Town Dock, in part because after the board's hearing, 35 Town Dock workers lost their jobs. But Town Dock denies that Ruiz worked there that day. "That had nothing to do with us," Town Dock president Noah Clark says in a brief phone interview. Media reports, he adds, "presented it all wrong. She was working some place else."

The general manager of the competing Point Judith Fishermen's Co., which is across State Street from Town Dock, contradicts this. "My understanding is that she worked for Town Dock," says Lawrence Rainey, noting that his Point Judith Fishermen's workforce has been supplied by one particular agency, whereas Town Dock used several.

Neither the driver of the van, Juan Larios, 37, of Providence, nor the vehicle's owner, Jorge Tino, 33, has publicly shed light on the situation. Larios has disappeared. Tino says he was home sick that day.

But according to documents on file at Washington County Superior Court, South Kingstown police clarified some of the details as part of their accident investigation. Police interviewed Tino, who told them he worked as a fish processor and was employed by Action Manufacturing Employment Agency, a Pawtucket-based temporary agency. Action Manufacturing, Tino told investigators, paid him $250 weekly for gas and insurance so he could drive workers to their assignments. Additionally, each commuter paid him $5 a day.

Tino indicated to police that he had links to Town Dock. He says it was a Town Dock official who told him to report to South Kingstown police to be questioned. But on the day of the accident, Tino told police, he was sick and paid Larios $20 to make the afternoon run to pick up workers in Narragansett and drive them to Providence.

According to court reports, one van passenger told police that Larios drank two cans of beer and was drinking another kind of alcohol. Motorists told police they saw beer cans falling out of the vehicle as it crashed; police officers and hospital workers could smell alcohol on Larios' breath, the reports said; and an officer found a half-empty bottle of vodka under the driver's seat. Court files say tests showed "presence of 0.329 percent ethyl alcohol by weight" in Larios's blood, more than three times the state standard for drunkenness.

In early January, the attorney general's office charged Larios with driving under the influence of alcohol, death resulting. Court files also say that he was an illegal alien from Guatemala, and that the US Immigration and Naturalization Service was investigating whether to deport him. But after he was charged by the attorney general's office, Larios disappeared. A warrant has been issued for his arrest. So for whom were Larios, Ruiz Barrera, and the others in the van working that day?

One source says the investigation first linked the van to Action Manufacturing Employment Agency. Later, an official of Action Manufacturing told authorities that his company regularly supplied workers to Town Dock, but he didn't know circumstances of the accident. A Town Dock official told investigators that a van with workers did arrive that day, but because of lack of work, he sent them to the neighboring Point Judith Fishermen's Co.

Point Judith officials, according to this same source, told investigators they did not know the names of the workers in that van.

Action Manufacturing is listed with the secretary of state's office as having a business address at 545 Newport Ave., Number 276, in Pawtucket, which is actually a Mail Boxes Etc. outlet. A clerk behind the counter said the man listed as the company's president, Sengchay Lo, has picked up mail in the past, although not recently. Action Manufacturing's telephone number is answered with a message that the phone is "not in service for incoming calls." A pager number, provided by a Cranston man listed by the state as an "agent" for the company, is temporarily not in service.

THE INTERNATIONAL Boston Seafood Show is where the world's fishing industry puts on its best face. More than 750 exhibitors from some 70 countries attended this year's event, filling three floors of the Hynes Convention Center, in early March. "Booth babes," as one PR rep described them, offered platters of hors d'oeuvres to fellow exhibitors (the event is closed to the general public). The aroma of hundreds of seafood concoctions filled the air as vendors showed off their product.

Major players in Rhode Island's seafood industry were there. The show is important for maintaining ties with current customers, as well as to try to lure new ones. And the state has much to brag about. The Rhode Island Seafood Council, estimates that $71 million worth of fish is brought ashore each year; businesses that process domestic and imported fish have annual sales of more than $460 million. Overall, the industry brings $713 million into the state.

Ralph Boragine, seafood council director, says about 8000 people work in the industry -- many of them independent fishermen. A state report several years ago said about 550 work in the processing end, although it said specific figures are hard to come by because many of those workers are immigrants hired through temporary agencies.

At the Boston show, Blount Seafood Corporation of Warren laid out a large spread that took up much of one aisle, including lobster bisque and lightly breaded North Atlantic sea scallops. Blount, Boragine says, differs from some other processors in that it has its own permanent workforce.

Several aisles away was a small booth with a bold blue banner proclaiming "The Town Dock," serving up its "tender, versatile and easy to prepare" calamari or squid. But when a reporter, who was wearing a large convention press pass, approached the four or five men manning the booth, they were uncommunicative. One said he had no time to talk because, "I've got a big customer coming."

Back in Galilee, officials of Town Dock and Point Judith Fishermen's Co. say they have appropriate work practices. The two companies, which operate boxy, industrial-style plants on opposite sides of State Street, are among a half-dozen major plants in the fishing port. Others, some with as few as four workers, are scattered around the state in Smithfield, East Providence, and North Kingstown.

Lawrence Rainey is general manager of the Point Judith Fishermen's Co., which was known as the Point Judith's Fishermen's Cooperative before it was taken over by M. Slavin & Sons of New York in 1996. In a telephone interview, Rainey says Point Judith believes that its workers are properly hired and paid by its employment agency, A.M. Temp.

The temporary agency has regularly produced a document from the state, which certifies that the company is paying its taxes and workers' compensation insurance, he says. "Based upon that, these folks abide by any laws they are supposed to, and they are paying taxes," Rainey says. (A listing for A.M. Temp, however, couldn't be located in phone books or state records). Nonetheless, Rainey says the workers' behavior indicated they felt the working atmosphere was acceptable. "I think if conditions weren't right," he says, "or they weren't happy year after year, they wouldn't be coming back to us."

Town Dock has been more tight-lipped. Calls to the company have been referred to Mary McLeod, a Wakefield lawyer, who sent a copy of the brief statement she had supplied prior to the Workers' Rights Board hearing: "Town Dock, a local business in the Galilee fishing community for many years, denies these unfounded accusations. We are saddened by the news reports of the tragic automobile accident and extend our deepest sympathy to the Ruiz family in this difficult time."

When Noah Clark, Town Dock president, was reached, his only comment was that Ruiz Barrera had not worked there.

ON NOVEMBER 19, the day of the accident, Rosa Ruiz Barrera, 22, got up at 3 a.m. -- as she had in the two months since she had come to Providence from Guatemala -- to make breakfast. She and her 24-year-old husband, Nacario B. Garcia, ate together, then she went outside of their apartment on Congress Street to wait for the 5:30 a.m. van. Garcia says he took a different one 15 minutes later. By then, Garcia says, he had been working at Town Dock for two years.

Wearing an apron and rubber gloves that were supplied fresh every day in what he described as a scrupulously clean work area, Garcia would take fish that had just been cut open and cleaned by other workers and he would carry the filets to packers. While it might not have been his first choice of work, it was by now familiar and steady. It had taken months to find this job -- word passed through the community of his fellow Mayans that an employment agency could get him a job.

Garcia had followed his father and other family members to Providence two years earlier. In turn, he was joined last year by Rosa, who had been raising their two girls and one son, back in the Guatemalan town of Zacualpa, El Quiche. Economic conditions were frightful, worsened by civil war in the '80s, in which Mayans had been slaughtered in a Central American version of ethnic cleansing, he says.

After joining Nacario, Rosa also went to work at Town Dock, he says. This was their plan: they would work two more years. And with Nacario's four-years' worth of savings, and Rosa's two, they would go back to Guatemala, buy a house and some land and grow corn.

On this day, Nacario Garcia went to work as usual at Town Dock. But he says that the van carrying Rosa was diverted to Point Judith Fishermen's Co. -- the first time she'd worked there -- because of a lack of work at Town Dock. Later, after workers spoke about the low pay and other conditions at the Workers' Rights Board hearing, one of the "bosses" at Town Dock, told him that he was fired. Company officials said that they had seen workers' names in a newspaper account, and a supervisor told Garcia, "This can't happen."

Andrew Wilkes, president of Workforce Unlimited, an employment agency later hired by Town Dock, said in a recent interview that the former workers weren't "fired," but displaced by his workers. "I had an opportunity to take over a significant account," Wilkes says, explaining that he filled about 30 slots with "my best-known, proven people." Wilkes says he wasn't surprised to get the new business, because he'd been courting Town Dock for months. But he says he didn't know of the controversy until after he got the contract.

Later, some of the former workers filled out applications, which he said he still has on file. But he says there's been little turnover to create vacancies. Officials with a third agency mentioned in the dispute, the New England Employment Services, couldn't be reached for comment.

But the Workers' Rights Board report said that the New England Employment president had "testified" at the December 19 hearing that she had been regularly supplying eight workers to Town Dock. She told the hearing that she was paid $7 an hour per employee, who she, in turn, paid $5.75 an hour, the rights board reported.

Bueno, the Progreso Latino official, said if that was the case, a company using the agency should have known that workers were being paid less than minimum wage. Seven dollars an hour would not cover pay and other employer costs, plus a reasonable profit, Bueno maintains.

One person who agrees with the theory of shared responsibility is Sheldon S. Sollosy, president of Manpower Inc.'s operation in Rhode Island. With nearly 50 years in the temporary hiring business, Sollosy says badly run businesses stain legitimate operations like his -- and that clients who use "fly-by-night" agencies know what they're doing. "It takes two to tango," Sollosy says, "and the companies know what they are doing and know who they are doing business with, and the reason they are getting very low rates of pay -- because they are paying people under the table."

There is an element of suspense as to what will happen next.

Will the attention focused on the death of Rosa Ruiz Barrera confirm that workers are, in fact, being employed at substandard wages? And if abuse is proved, will wrongdoers face sanctions? So far, beyond the loss of 35 jobs and the charging of the missing van driver, there's been little visible result.

Moura, the state representative who's a member of the Workers' Rights Board, is a co-sponsor of a bill that would re-create a joint legislative commission, with subpoena powers, to probe the temporary job services. "I need a forum to get some questions answered," he says. "With all the good work that people on the Workers' Rights Board did, they don't have legal authority and can't force someone to come in and answer questions. I would hate to do that -- but I won't hesitate to bring people in."

More than four months later, it's still difficult for Nacario Garcia to talk about the accident that he discovered on his way home, 12 hours after he'd last seen his wife.

"Every time he talks about it," says a translator who helped with an interview at St. Teresa's last week, "it brings up much sadness. And it hurts so much, finally losing the job, and the lack of respect of the company, and it's all very painful."

The state victims' compensation fund, and money raised through the church
and from friends, paid to take his wife's body back to Guatemala City, then to their town.

Later, it took Garcia three months to find another job, and it's only three days a week. The months of unemployment were a "tremendous drain and a struggle," he says.

Nacario Garcia says he's trying pick up pieces of his and Rosa's dream. He'll try to keep working, then go back to Guatemala, buy a house and a farm and raise their three children. In memory of Rosa, he says, he has to do that.