Workers rallied downtown Friday to decry what they called unfair treatment by several employers and claim they were owed tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid wages—while one of the targeted employers claimed he was a victim of the workers’ manipulation.  About three dozen people rallied on the sidewalk at noon outside the College Street eatery, Downtown at the Taft. A former cook there, Naftali Palma (pictured), claimed that he and his three-man crew were denied overtime pay despite working over 70 hours many weeks.

One of the owners, Claudio San Francesco, said on Thursday that Palma had been hired on salary, not hourly pay.  “We were giving him the money and he was paying his own people,” he said, “and that was conditional to him to give us his social security numbers and all this information, which he constantly denied to give to us. It was the main reason why we had to get rid of him. Now he’s trying to go back to us and make it complicated. That’s why we had to get a lawyer to defend ourselves.

“These people are trying to take advantage to us,” he added, “that we’re trying to make a living ourself. We have to understand the reality—not all the time there is somebody taking advantage of Mexicans. Most of the time it is them—they are trying to screw you. We cannot hire illegals; it’s against the law. So that’s the main reason everything happened. We’re not here to screw nobody. We are very lucky when we have good people on board. Most of the time we are the one they are taking advantage of.” (click on link to read full story)