Workers recover thousands in unpaid overtime
"When he was fired in 2007 from his job at a Hutto countertop factory after he and co-workers complained about not getting paid overtime, Ernesto Leyva harbored doubts about his legal rights. He heard pessimistic advice to forget it, that he wasn't entitled to overtime pay or that labor laws didn't protect someone like him.
But last week, Leyva looked confidently into television cameras and implored immigrant workers like himself not to be intimidated. U.S. employment laws protect workers no matter what part of the world they're from, said the soft-spoken 35-year-old from Veracruz, Mexico.
"Even if other people say no. Even if employers say they're more powerful than you. Those are lies," Leyva said before receiving a check for his share of $30,150 in unpaid overtime wages that he and three other workers received in a settlement of a lawsuit against his former employer, J & H Granite Inc."
JUAN CASTILLO* in the Austin American-Statesman.
* 2003 Western Knight Center Fellow, "Covering the Border."