[Vision2020] Trump Paid Out Over $1 Million to Settle Polish Worker Suit

[Nicholas Gier]

The New York Times, Nov. 27, 2017

In 1980, under pressure to begin construction on what would become his
signature project, Donald J. Trump employed a crew of 200 undocumented
Polish workers who worked in 12-hour shifts, without gloves, hard hats or
masks, to demolish the Bonwit Teller building on Fifth Avenue, where the
58-story, golden-hued Trump Tower now stands.

The workers were paid as little as $4 an hour for their dangerous labor,
less than half the union wage, if they got paid at all.

Their treatment led to years of litigation over Mr. Trump’s labor practices
<http://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/13/nyregion/trump-says-he-didn-t-know-he-employed-illegal-aliens.html>,
and in 1998, despite frequent claims that he never settles lawsuits
<https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/us/politics/donald-trump-soho-settlement.html>,
Mr. Trump quietly reached an agreement to end a class-action suit over the
Bonwit Teller demolition in which he was a defendant.

For almost 20 years, the terms of that settlement have remained a secret.
But last week, the settlement documents were unsealed by Loretta A. Preska,
a United States District Court judge for the Southern District, in response
to a 2016 motion filed by Time Inc. and the Reporters Committee for Freedom
of the Press <https://www.rcfp.org/>. Judge Preska found that the public’s
right to know of court proceedings in a class-action case was strengthened
by the involvement of the “now-president of the United States.”

In a 21-page finding, Judge Preska wrote that “the Trump Parties have
failed to identify any interests that can overcome the common law and First
Amendment presumptions of access to the four documents at issue.”
Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/27/nyregion/trump-tower-illegal-immigrant-workers-union-settlement.html?emc=edit_th_20171128&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=29749741&_r=0#story-continues-2>

On the campaign trail and as president, Mr. Trump has made curbing
immigration one of his top priorities, seeking to close the borders to
people from certain Muslim-majority countries and to deport immigrants who
are here illegally. The settlement serves as a reminder that as an employer
he relied on illegal immigrants to get a dangerous and dirty job done.

Katie Townsend, litigation director of the Reporters Committee, called the
decision a major victory that goes beyond this one case. “It makes clear
that both the First Amendment and common law rights of public access apply
to settlement-related documents in class actions,” she said.

Lawyers for Mr. Trump were not immediately available for comment.

The documents show that Mr. Trump paid a total of $1.375 million to settle
the case, known as Hardy v. Kaszycki, with $500,000 of it going to a union
benefits fund and the rest to pay lawyers’ fees and expenses. According to
the documents, one of the union lawyers involved asked the judge to ensure
“prompt payment” from Mr. Trump, suggesting “within two weeks after the
settlement date.”

Mr. Trump jumped in to object. “Thirty days is normal,” he said.

At the time of the settlement, the court papers note, “this case has been
litigated for 15 years and has already required three rounds of discovery,
extensive motion practice, a 16-day trial and two appeals.”

Trump Tower was Mr. Trump’s second solo project after leaving his father’s
real estate company, which developed working- and middle-class housing in
Queens and Brooklyn. But before he could build a glassy condominium tower
on what he considered to be a “Tiffany” of locations, Fifth Avenue and 56th
Street, Mr. Trump had to demolish a venerable department store, the
12-story Bonwit Teller building.

For the demolition work, Mr. Trump hired an inexperienced contractor,
William Kaszycki of Kaszycki & Sons, for $775,000. Mr. Kaszycki specialized
in window and job-site cleaning. His company was renovating an adjoining
building for Bonwit Teller, where he employed undocumented Polish workers.

Mr. Trump would later testify
<http://time.com/4465744/donald-trump-undocumented-workers/> that he never
walked into the adjoining building or noticed the Polish workers. But a
foreman on the job, Zbignew Goryn, testified that Mr. Trump visited the
site, marveling to him about the Polish crew.

“He liked the way the men were working on 57th Street,” Mr. Goryn said. “He
said, ‘Those Polish guys are good, hard workers.’”

The demolition began in January 1980. It was hard, dirty work, breaking up
concrete floors, ripping out electrical wiring and cutting pipes while
laboring in a cloud of dust and asbestos.

A smaller group of union demolition workers, who were paid much higher
wages and, unlike the Poles, overtime, often made fun of their Polish
co-workers, according to the testimony of Adam Mrowiec, one of the Polish
laborers. “They told me and my friends that we are stupid Poles and we are
working for such low money,” he said.

In 1998, Wojciech Kozak described to
<http://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/14/nyregion/after-15-years-in-court-workers-lawsuit-against-trump-faces-yet-another-delay.html>
The
New York Times
<http://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/14/nyregion/after-15-years-in-court-workers-lawsuit-against-trump-faces-yet-another-delay.html>
the
backbreaking labor on the job.

“We worked in horrid, terrible conditions,” Mr. Kozak said. “We were
frightened illegal immigrants and did not know enough about our rights.”
Photo
Donald Trump posed with a model of Trump Tower in 1980. A group of
undocumented Polish laborers were hired to help bring down the building
that had previously stood on the site.CreditDon Hogan Charles/The New York
Times

Today, Mr. Kozak, now 75, lives at the O’Donnell-Dempsey Senior Housing
building in Elizabeth, N.J.

He has blue eyes and a strong handshake, but speaks through a special
device because he had a tracheotomy for cancer. He proudly showed off his
citizenship papers, dated Nov. 3, 1995.

Mr. Kozak still recalls the work, and seeing Mr. Trump at the site in 1980.

“We were working, 12, 16 hours a day and were paid $4 an hour,” he said.
“Because I worked with an acetylene torch, I got $5 an hour. We worked
without masks. Nobody knew what asbestos was. I was an immigrant. I worked
very hard.”
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But Mr. Kaszycki stopped paying the men, and they eventually took their
complaints to a lawyer named John Szabo. Mr. Szabo went to Thomas Macari, a
vice president of the Trump Organization, threatening to place a mechanic’s
lien on the property if the men weren’t paid.

According to testimony, Mr. Macari began paying the men in cash himself.
The delays and disruptions were adding to the pressure on the Trump
Organization to meet its deadlines.

One evening, Joseph Dabrowski testified, Mr. Trump arrived on site to tell
the workers that he was taking charge.

“I am telling you for the last time that Trump told us, ‘If you finish this
fast and I will pay for it,’” Mr. Dabrowski recalled in court.

Still, there were problems. Mr. Szabo filed the lien, prompting Mr. Trump
to ask for help from Daniel Sullivan, a labor consultant. Mr. Sullivan
later testified that Mr. Trump described his “difficulties,” and “that he
had some illegal Polish employees.”

Mr. Trump, however, testified that he did he not remember that there were
undocumented Polish workers on the job, or signing paychecks for the crew.
“I really still don’t know that there were illegal aliens,” Mr. Trump said
on the stand.

Mr. Trump did, according to Mr. Szabo, have his lawyer call Mr. Szabo with
a threat to call Immigration and Naturalization Service to have the men
deported.

Mr. Szabo got the Labor Department to open a wages-and-hours case for the
men, which ultimately won a judgment of $254,000 against Mr. Kaszycki.

Mr. Kaszycki had signed a contract with Local 79 of the House Wreckers
Union. But while Mr. Kaszycki or Mr. Trump paid into the union welfare
funds for the handful of union workers on the job, they had not done so for
the bulk of the work force, the undocumented, nonunion Poles.

A union dissident and former boxer, Harry Diduck, brought a case in federal
court in 1983 against Mr. Kaszycki and, eventually, Mr. Trump and others,
claiming that Mr. Kaszycki, the union president and Mr. Trump had colluded
to deprive the welfare funds of about $600,000.

A judge ruled that Mr. Trump was a legal employer of the Poles, but both
sides appealed elements of his decision, with the total the welfare funds
could get reduced to $500,000. On the eve of a second trial, Mr. Trump
settled.

Most of the records of the litigation were placed in a federal storage
building where Time Inc. unearthed them in 2016. But the settlement
documents remained under seal. After Judge Preska ordered them released, it
turned out that two of the documents had been destroyed in routine
housecleaning at the court.

Wendy Sloan, a now-retired lawyer who represented the plaintiffs in the
original case, had retained them, and provided them to the court. In one of
them, Ms. Sloan noted that “in light of the unusually high profile of
defendant Donald Trump, plaintiffs have agreed to confidentiality.”

Now that the documents have been released, Ms. Sloan said that “the
settlement we obtained recovered 100 percent of the maximum amount
plaintiffs could recover,” plus lawyers fees and costs.

“When you get one hundred cents on the dollar in a settlement, that is a
great settlement,” Ms. Sloan and Lewis M. Steel, another of the plaintiffs’
lawyers, said in an email.

-- 

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they
shall never sit in.

-Greek proverb

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.
Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance
from another. This immaturity is self- imposed when its cause lies not in
lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without
guidance from another. Sapere Aude! ‘Have courage to use your own
understand-ing!—that is the motto of enlightenment.

--Immanuel Kant
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