Developer sued in U.S. over unfair wages.Byline: Business Staff ANOTHER Irish developer is facing a potentially crippling lawsuit in New York City New York City: see New York, city. New York City City (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. . Michael Mahoney has had a civil action filed against him in the State Supreme Court in Manhattan by the state attorney general Andrew Cuomo Andrew Mark Cuomo (born December 6, 1957, in Queens, New York) is the New York State Attorney General. He was elected on November 7, 2006. Previously Cuomo was the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Bill Clinton between 1997 and 2001. . It alleges that the Irish builder ran his business on apartheid-like lines, paying black and Hispanic workers a fraction of what his Irish builders earned. During the city's recent construction boom, developers could not build fast enough to meet the demand for luxury housing and hotels. Contractors often had more work than they could handle and many ordinary construction workers were making a lot of money. But, according to legal papers just filed in Manhattan, Mr Mahoney routinely shortchanged hundreds of American and immigrant workers and forced them to work as many as 70 hours per week. The affidavits lodged on Friday claim that the chief executive of EMC (1) (EMC Corporation, Hopkinton, MA, www.emc.com) The leading supplier of storage products for midrange computers and mainframes. Founded in 1979 by Richard J. Egan and Roger Marino, EMC has developed advanced storage and retrieval technologies for the world's largest companies. Construction instituted a three-tiered wage rate regime. Irish workers were paid $25 an hour, African-Americans around $18 and Latino employees just $15 an hour, the suit alleges. The lawsuit is seeking $4m in wages and overtime pay from ECM (1) (Enterprise Change Management) See version control and configuration management. (2) (Error Correcting Mode) A Group 3 fax capability that can test for errors within a row of pixels and request retransmission. and Mr. Mahoney's other companies, as well as bringing an end to what it alleges were 'blatantly discriminatory practices'. The workers did concrete and carpentry work for ECM and other companies controlled by Mr. Mahoney at around ten hotel and luxury apartment building sites in Manhattan. Several of these sites were owned by Sam Chang, a prolific developer who emerged in recent years as the budget hotel king of New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of . Mr Cuomo said: 'New York is supported by the hundreds of thousands of construction workers who have laboured tirelessly to build and maintain this city. 'To deny workers the wages guaranteed by this state, or to discriminate against them based on their race and ethnicity, is a gross violation of the law and a disgraceful abuse of power.' The attorney general's investigation began back in 2006 after several fist-fights broke out at three hotel construction sites on Manhattan's elite West Side between union organisers and EMC officials and riot-control police were called. The union had focused on what it said was 'the exploitation of immigrant workers by unscrupulous contractors'. The hotels were being developed by Mr Chang, whose construction company, Tritel, had hired ECM. Investigators say that the attorney general's inquiry is continuing and that they will review whether Mr Chang and others who hired ECM played a role in the matter. CAPTION(S): Lawsuit: NY Attorney General Cuomo |
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