By CAROLYN SZCZEPANSKI
Flooded Cedar Rapids.
In the last week of June, 170 day laborers from Kansas City boarded a bus headed for eastern Iowa. They were bound for flood-ravaged cities like Cedar Rapids, where hundreds of workers from other states flooded into the region to help with the recovery.
The Kansas City workers had been hired by a local firm called One Source Staffing and Labor to do the dirty work of cleaning homes and businesses that were drowned in the storm. Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, agreed to house the temporary employees in their dorms while the company arranged hotel accommodations.
But after just a few days, the small, religious school's chaplain, Catherine Quehl-Engel, was confronted with frustrated workers who claimed they were being underpaid and overworked -- some to the point of hospitalization. Now, she and other religious leaders are calling for the mistreatment to stop.
Catherine Quehl-Engel
Quehl-Engel says her concerns about worker mistreatment surfaced early. Workers told her the company required them to work shifts as long as 12 consecutive hours up to seven days a week. Some told Quehl-Engel that they hadn't eaten in 14 hours.
When they got to the dorms, they were surprised to learn that the company wouldn't provide sheets or shower items. The day laborers told Quehl-Engel that the company gave them debit cards to pay for food and hygiene items before their first check, but the cards weren't activated for several days.
Prompting further health concerns, Quehl-Engel says the company didn't give employees tetanus shots, which would protect them against infection while they worked in possibly contaminated waters.
Two workers from Kansas City hired by One Source -- Amanda Ebbs and Terrance Hamilton -- told the Cedar Rapids Gazette that, as soon as they got off an all-night ride on the bus, they were taken directly to the city of Waterloo to work. According to the newspaper, Ebbs was told they would be making $100 per day with free transit to the work site and $25 daily for meals and hygiene. Instead, they were being docked $7 per day for transport, being paid $7 per hour and only getting a $15 daily stipend. (The Pitch was unable to reach the workers for comment.)
That was enough to prompt Quehl-Engel to call a meeting with One Source management. "I didn't want to become complicit in how they were being treated," the chaplain says. "So we sat down with the company with a five-page contract and said, 'If you want to continue to have workers at the college, this is how they need to be treated in terms of safety and health.'"
After that meeting, though, she still worried about the safety of the workers. Providing pastoral care each evening, the chaplain says she encountered workers who were exhausted and hungry. One woman, she says, had a gash that had become a staph infection. Another woman, who's name she didn't want to reveal for privacy reasons, had to be rushed to the hospital.
"She had just come off a 12- or 14-hour work shift, working in that toxic filth, and she was just exhausted and angry and frustrated, and that led to a heart attack," Quehl-Engel says. "I was on the ambulance with her when she stopped breathing. They did resuscitate her, but she died [for a few moments]."
Rodney Martin, director of operations for One Source in Kansas City, Kansas, doesn't deny one woman was rushed to the hospital. But he says hospital records show she was released 12 hours later, which isn't typical for a heart attack victim. The chaplain's other criticisms aren't fair, either, he says.
The employees, Martin says, knew up front that the job would be tough, entail long hours and require work seven days a week. "It's a flood," he says. "This isn't like drawing a bath on a Saturday night and you forgot the bath was running and the bathroom floor gets all wet. This is a tragic event. They're going into homes that were submerged in water, where everything is covered in mud, and they're hauling out into the street what they can save. The working conditions, in that way, aren't the best, but it's there, and someone needs to come in and do the job."
As for claims that workers went hungry on the long bus trip, Martin says they had plenty of opportunity when the vehicle stopped for gas. "But, OK, you have to actually get up and go do it," he says sarcastically.
He bristles at the concerns about pay, too. According to Iowa state law, he could be paying workers $6.35 for the first 90 days. Instead, One Source is paying $7.25 per hour, plus time-and-a-half for any work past 40 hours per week, he said. Even in Kansas City, he adds, workers have to chip in for the price of gas when they don't have their own transportation to a work site. And if the workers don't like the conditions, he says, they're free to leave -- and some have.
"Some people want the money and don't mind," Martin says. "Some people are like, 'I don't want to work.' So we send them home."
Quehl-Engel acknowledges that, given the extreme circumstances, even companies like One Source are having a tough time keeping up with the high demand for labor and the ravaged settings of towns decimated by Mother Nature.
"We want to make sure [the workers] aren't exploited, that they're protected," she says. "We don't want these people's bodies and spirits paying the price."
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