A garbage industry union thrives, and employees say they keep the bag

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A garbage industry union thrives, and employees say they keep the bag













					


			    





When Carl Orlando began working as the driver of the private trash transporter Liberty Ashes in July 2015, the work quickly turned out to be punishing. His turn ran from around 4:30 p.m. at 9 a.m., he said, sometimes up to six days a week. His commercial business garbage collection route took him through three of the five boroughs of New York City.

"You were a truck trying to do the work of three trucks," Orlando said.

After three months at work, Orlando estimated that he accumulated about 77 hours a week, but was shortened by the payment of overtime. Orlando said he asked another driver how he could go collect the money he was owed. Technically, the driver was his delegate, but that did not mean much in Liberty Ashes. Orlando had heard that there was a union in the company and that someone would sign it up, but it had not happened. The driver told Orlando that he would make a call and communicate with him, Orlando said.

Liberty Ashes has been in the garbage hauling business for decades, and today is managed by brothers Michael and Stephen Bellino from a warehouse in Jamaica, Queens. It has approximately 3,000 customers, 17 trucks and not the most impeccable safety record. Federal records show that the company's trucks have been cited in recent years by defective brake inspectors, broken axles and worn tires. In a truck with problems, three workers lost their fingers in accidents, found ProPublica.

Later that day, in October 2015, the store manager returned to Orlando on his complaint of overtime. He would not be seeing more money. Instead, according to Orlando, he was told he had been fired.

The union in Liberty Ashes is known as LIFE 890. It is called an independent union, which means that LIFE 890 is not part of national teams like the Teamsters. Several current and former workers at Liberty Ashes say LIFE 890 is a union in name only. Their leaders never assume the cause of the workers, they say, and the unions with the owners in their place. Some workers join the union; others, like Orlando, do not. In fact, some workers do not even know the name of the union in Liberty Ashes.



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A current worker said that during his many years with the garbage hauler, he had never spoken to any union representative and had only seen one once. He did not know her name, but he remembered that she was handing out free pens.

LIFE 890 is one of the largest unions in the private garbage industry in New York, representing the workers of many of the major companies throughout the city. An 11-month investigation conducted by ProPublica revealed that LIFE 890 has worked with the owners of the garbage company to reach agreements that embolden employers and short-term employees, according to workers, labor advocates and decisions of the National Board of Labor Relations. The workers said they never saw union representatives and did not know how they kept low wages and low profits. They said garbage haulers were allied with LIFE 890.

ProPublica has tried to talk to the leaders of LIFE 890 since last December. None have responded to calls, emails or detailed questions sent by fax and mail. The union's lawyers also did not answer the questions.

ProPublica recently visited the LIFE 890 headquarters, a residential home in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with a seasonal fall crown at the front door. A man named John Mongello Jr. bought the house in Brooklyn 30 years ago, and since then he has managed the union.

Mongello pleaded guilty in 1985 to federal criminal charges for making false statements after workers at a Bronx nursing home claimed they had been forced to join a union he was directing. A decade later, Mongello was indicted in a federal lawsuit filed by members of his own union for using the union's benefit fund to pay large salaries to his family members and not providing workplace representation or benefits. medical attention to the range. He resolved the claims by paying hundreds of thousands of dollars. And in 1999, judges with the NLRB. he found that the Mongello union had "maintained a false collective bargaining relationship" with the owner of a New York garbage company, and that his union "was not concerned about the working conditions of the employees."

Mongello is not the only person connected to LIFE 890 with a problematic past. The union's payroll includes a former garbage hauler and a convicted felon, according to ProPublica on thousands of pages of Labor Department records. The union official, Vice President Stephen Capone, received a payment of $ 142,000 in various capacities since 2014. Years ago he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit postal fraud in a federal bribe scheme involving payments to officials at a Staten Island landfill to evade dumping quotas. The union has also delivered tens of thousands of dollars in business to a company owned by Daniel Todisco. In 1997, Todisco pleaded guilty to attempted corporate corruption, and his companies pleaded guilty to restriction of trade as part of an offensive against the illegal mafia-run cartel run by the city's private garbage industry. To this day, the garbage companies authorized to operate in New York City are prohibited from doing business with Todisco and Capone, as the regulators consider them to be convicted criminals.



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In response to his various legal challenges, Mongello has denied any crime. And the business, both for him and his family, has been booming.

LIFE 890 now has almost 900 members, with agreements in effect in important companies such as Five Star Carting, Boro-Wide Recycling and Century Waste. (Five Star Carting, Boro-Wide Recycling and Century Waste did not respond to requests for comments).

In 2016, the LIFE 890 benefits fund paid Mongello $ 239,000 as its administrator; He paid his daughter, Jessica Mongello Gambino, $ 103,000. In all, eight members of the Mongello family have been in the union and in the payroll of the benefits fund in the last two decades. The union benefits fund pays the Mongellos $ 90,000 per year in rent for the use of the Bay Ridge home. In addition, the union pays an additional $ 24,000 per year under a sublease agreement for the use of "office space" within the home.

Sean Campbell, president of Teamsters Local 813, said he and other union leaders who work in the private garbage industry have complained for years about LIFE 890 before the Business Integrity Commission (BIC), the city agency in charge of overseeing the private garbage industry and rooting corruption Campbell said they claimed that LIFE 890 was a fake union, with no real office and with representatives who rarely visited workplaces. They affirmed that LIFE 890 conspired with the owners of the company, who installed LIFE 890 in elections that were not free and fair. The union signed what Campbell and others have called "cariño" contracts in which workers had no participation, and those agreements, Campbell said, came with safety standards and lower wages.

At Liberty Ashes, for example, the LIFE 890 contract recently negotiated calls for members to receive an increase of only 17 1/2 cents per hour.

The Bellino brothers at Liberty Ashes did not respond to requests for comment.

ProPublica sent detailed questions about Mongello and LIFE 890 to the BIC. In a statement, Daniel Brownell, BIC commissioner, said: "BIC has no regulatory authority over the unions that represent workers in the commercial waste industry. When investigating allegations of corruption, we work closely with law enforcement agencies that have oversight powers over labor unions, including the United States Department of Labor (Office of the Inspector General). We are currently working with our law enforcement partners to investigate unions that do not represent, protect rights or endanger their members adequately. Therefore, we will not comment on open investigations. "

Past nights in races along long routes with mountains of commercial garbage leave some workers scared for their health and safety. Frustration with inadequate union representation does not help.
(Ryan Christopher Jones for ProPublica)


On December 1, 2015, Orlando filed a lawsuit against Liberty Ashes in a federal court in Manhattan, requesting payment for overtime. Since then he has joined other former workers who say that they did not pay them extra hours either.

In response, Liberty Ashes has argued that workers can not sue the company, but must address any wage claim through arbitration. It turns out that LIFE 890 had negotiated those terms with the company, 13 months after Orlando filed a lawsuit. The company has argued that the terms are applied retroactively.



LIFE 890 was born in a scandal at the end of the nineties.

Mongello, who then ran Laborers Local 445, a union affiliated with the AFL-CIO, decided to start his own union by effectively kidnapping Local 445. Mongello secretly met with garbage companies and renegotiated the union's contracts, eliminating the Local 445 workers and installing their own union in their place He called it LIFE 445, the League of International Federated Employees.

Mongello admitted all this when the Workers filed a complaint with the NLRB. He said in an affidavit that he had indeed made an explicit effort to hide his parallel business with garbage companies, although he said he intended to rejoin the Workers umbrella organization once LIFE was in place. The LIFE lawyer argued that the complaint should be dismissed because the statute of limitations had passed.

The panel of judges handling the case for the NLRB rejected the LIFE claim. Instead, the judges found that Mongello had created LIFE through an illegal transfer of members of a union that the ruling called "fraudulent concealment."




What's more, a federal lawsuit filed by the Laborers alleged that Mongello had abused his authority for many years before his attempt to separate from LIFE. Years of self-sufficiency are alleged by Mongello and other union leaders, many of them members of the Mongello family. When the Mongello bought the house in Brooklyn in 1988, for example, they billed $ 440,000 in medical assistance benefits from Local 445 for improvements to the buildings; In 1996, when the union had a negative cash balance, Mongello earned $ 220,000, according to the lawsuit. In 1997, the Laborers "imposed an emergency fiduciary administration" in the Mongello operation and were "unable to locate the books and records of Local 445," according to the lawsuit.

Mongello and his co-defendants finally settled with the Laborers and agreed to pay $ 320,000 plus legal fees, according to the benefit fund's filings with the Department of Labor.

But despite all the damning findings and the expensive payments, LIFE 445 survived as a new union, with Mongello in charge. After a few years, he doubled the number to 890.

In the past two decades, independent unions like LIFE 890 have become commonplace in the private garbage industry, accounting for about a third of all workers, according to leading labor leaders.

Occasionally, the authorities have acted on workers 'complaints related to some of these unions, and NLRB judges have discovered that the owners of garbage collection companies illegally interfered with workers' rights. In 2013, the NLRB. he found that the management of a major garbage company in the Bronx illegally threatened to fire workers who opposed the independent union that the company favored, Local 124. The union for years was led by James Bernardone, who was identified by the police as a soldier in Genoese crime family. In another case, the NLRB in 2004. he found that a New Jersey garbage company violated federal labor law by trying to impose "LIFE 890 as a" bargaining representative "and firing nine workers who were on strike.

The union organizers have been frustrated for a long time by what they consider the playbook used by many of these independent unions in the garbage industry, including LIFE 890 and the companies that do business with them.

"We started an organization campaign [at a company], and the next thing you know is that they have an 890 contract. "Workers do not even know they have a contract," said Michael Hellstrom, commercial manager of Laborers Local 108.

Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, said unions like LIFE 890 are also known as "cariño" unions or "company" unions because they work hand in hand with the owners. She said the goal of her game is simple: keep away legitimate unions that will fight for higher wages and protections for workers.

A block of high traffic is 32nd Street, between 5th Avenue and Broadway, in the Koreatown of Manhattan.
(Demetrius Freeman for ProPublica)


The responsibility of supervising the thousands of labor unions in the country lies with the federal Department of Labor. By law, all unions must submit annual financial presentations to the Department's Office of Labor Administration Standards (OLMS). The office audits the unions and has criminal investigators with subpoena power who can investigate things like fraud and embezzlement by filing charges through the Department of Justice. Jobs that are not filed and overpayments to friends and family members for services, for example, generally qualify as theft of union funds.

The Department of Labor has taken enforcement measures against some independent unions in other industries in recent years, with criminal convictions in 2014, 2016 and 2017 involving schemes of embezzlement by union officials.

But OLMS compliance staff has declined over the years, and the office now performs about one third of the number of audits as it did a decade ago. The office conducted 775 union audits in 2007, but only 256 in 2017. However, the figures also suggest that the agency has focused more on compliance. There were 80 convictions in 2017 compared to 118 in 2007, which means that the agency today receives approximately twice as many convictions per audit. (The Department of Labor did not respond when asked about the performance of the office).




At the national level, there are about 850 independent unions, according to the 2017 submissions received by the Department of Labor. "Some of them are legitimate," said Michael Hayes, who led the OLMS during the Obama administration. "But then you have the kind of unions you're seeing." LIFE 890 and its peers, he said, are "endemic" to the garbage industry and other historically corrupt industries, particularly in New York and New Jersey. However, a union that acts for the benefit of employers instead of workers, Hayes explained, is not necessarily breaking the law in ways that fall under the competence of the Department of Labor. Investigators "have to show that money goes to places it should not," he said.

The Department of Labor, in fact, audited the LIFE 890 health care benefits fund, the Life Benefits Plan, from 2004 to 2007. The agency concluded in 2010 that the plan had granted a loan to Mongello that the Department of Health Work considered a "forbidden transaction". as indicated in the annual presentations of the benefit fund. However, apparently no criminal charges were filed, and Mongello resolved the matter without penalty by paying the loan plus interest, according to the presentations of the fund's Labor Department.

The other agency responsible for supervising the unions and their relations with employers is the NLRB. Under the federal labor law, workers have the right to freely choose their own union, and it is illegal for companies to create or support an employer-controlled union. The NLRB can investigate complaints and force a union controlled by the company to be dismantled in a particular workplace. But that is a difficult task: workers must be willing to serve as witnesses against their bosses.

It is also illegal for companies to fire or threaten workers for supporting a union such as the Teamsters or the Workers. And it is illegal for companies to help set up a union like LIFE 890 through coercion. But Bronfenbrenner, the Cornell scholar, said the power of the NLRB to punish employers is limited. Often, companies that have acted illegally are obliged simply to put up a poster that reaffirms the rights of workers and commit to comply with the law in the future. "Employers are not punished under our legal system," Bronfenbrenner said.



For 40 years, the mafia ran the private garbage industry in New York. There were mafiosi and mafia associates as officials in both garbage companies and industry unions. What resulted was an illegal cartel, totally controlled by organized crime.

Beginning in the 1980s, federal prosecutors persecuted the unions and obtained formal agreements from the main workers' organizations, the Teamsters and the Workers among them, to purge their mafia lists and their cronies. Although it would take years to achieve it, there were real successes. Local 813 of Teamsters, for example, expelled more than 70 members for corruption or being associates or members of organized crime, according to John Skala, who served as the investigating officer under the federal agreement.

In the remade labor landscape, independent unions began to proliferate. A number of people expelled from the Teamsters or the Workers, said Skala, formed or joined independent unions. But as independent unions became more frequent, it became increasingly unclear who, if anyone, was responsible for monitoring their behavior.

Today, some important union leaders and elected officials think that the role belongs to the Business Integrity Commission. The BIC was created in 1996 in response to the criminal proceedings of the garbage haulers who broke the cartel. The BIC supervises private garbage companies, demanding that anyone with a license to transport garbage pass a rigorous investigation, denying licenses to those without "good character, honesty and integrity". A company may lose its license if it is discovered that it has commercial dealings with people that the BIC defines as convicted criminals, people who were expelled from the industry due to corruption concerns or gangsters' associations, or anyone who has previously been denied a license by the agency. . 

A LIFE union card 890. The union was born in a scandal in the 1990s and today many garbage workers ridicule it as a union in name only.


The BIC maintains that it has no authority to directly control the unions in the industry, but is looking for it. "We want to do more to protect workers in the industry and the public. "That's why we're looking for ways to expand our authority and oversee the unions that represent workers in the commercial waste industry," said Brownell, the BIC commissioner, in a statement.

Edward Ferguson, a former assistant US attorney who served as president and chief executive officer of the BIC from 1996 to 2000, argued that the relationships of garbage companies with a union such as LIFE 890 are the responsibility of the agency.

"If a transport company or an official of a transport company is involved or essentially doing business with an illegitimate union, I think that's something that BIC would like to investigate," he said. Without scrutiny of both garbage companies and unions, he said, there is a significant risk of a return to "the old days" in New York when the industry was run as a criminal enterprise. "It's not the kind of thing where you can clean the house and then the house will stay clean." It's a constant battle. "

"This is a perfect example of where BIC should exercise its authority, but they hide behind a weak interpretation of that," said City Council member Antonio Reynoso, president of the Sanitation Commission. "In the four and a half years that I've been supervising BIC, that's been the case, they can do a lot, and they can not."

The BIC seems not to have taken an active role in supervising the relations of its licensees with the unions. For example, the LIFE 890 connections with Todisco have not attracted the agency's attention over the years. Better known as "Danny Litod" for his old garbage business, Litod Paper Stock, Todisco was a leader in the private trash cartel in New York City. As vice president of the Kings County Commercial Waste Association, Todisco reported directly to Genoese boss Alphonse "Allie Shades" Malangone. In 1997, Todisco pleaded guilty to his role in the cartel and spent a year and a half in state prison and three years on probation.

However, Todisco today operates a company that has received $ 40,000 in business from the LIFE union and its "newsletter design" benefits fund and other services, according to the Department of Labor presentations. Since 2000, Todisco's wife, Marie, has earned $ 343,000 as president of another union founded by Mongello, Retail Wholesale Warehouse and Production Employees International. It turns out that their offices are located in the Brooklyn house in Mongello. The two sons-in-law of Mongello, Rocco Gagliardi and Andrew Gambino, run another union, the Local 308 of the National Security Officers and the Protection Employees. Its offices are listed in the commercial address of Todisco in Rockland County.

Call the telephone number of any of these other unions and you will receive the same answering machine message as LIFE 890.

(Daniel Todisco, Marie Todisco, Rocco Gagliardi and Andrew Gambino did not respond to requests for comments or specific questions that were sent to them by mail).

These connections have cost at least one company the opportunity to do business in the industry. In fact, the owner of a transportation company was denied a license in 2002 for having been "knowingly associated with Daniel Todisco, a convicted felon," according to BIC records.

Garbage collection in New York City is not glamorous work. Those who do the work say that the fact that their unions do not accept them adds insults to the experience.
(Michael Santiago for ProPublica)


Stephen Capone, vice president of LIFE, is also considered by the BIC to be a convicted felon, one with a long history in the city's garbage placard. In 1975, Capone's company, Capone & Denilo, was one of 55 private garbage haulers in New York who pleaded guilty to trade restriction in a case filed by the Brooklyn District Attorney's office. (The owners did not serve a prison sentence, but they paid a small fine). In 1995, Capone pleaded guilty to his role in the bribery scheme involving officials at the Staten Island landfill.

Years ago, Todisco and Capone tried to obtain licenses to transport garbage, and the BIC denied their applications. Not surprisingly, the BIC prohibits garbage companies from doing business with Todisco and Capone.

ProPublica asked the BIC about Todisco and Capone. The agency did not respond.

New York City Council President Corey Johnson responded to ProPublica's LIFE 890 findings, calling them "deeply disturbing." In August, following ProPublica and Voice of America investigation of Sanx Salvage of the Bronx carrier and the company's independent union, the City Council announced that it was opening a formal investigation into the performance of the BIC. Johnson added: "The issues raised ... underscore the importance of our ongoing investigation related to the Commercial Integrity Commission."



The LIFE 890 union offices are located in a residential house in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Repeated calls and a visit to speak with the union's top official, John Mongello, led to a regular response: "He may be in the field."
(Kiera Feldman for ProPubica)


Ernesto Waight drove a truck for Liberty Ashes for about six years. In 2013, the company told him they were making cuts, Waight said; He was the best paid driver there. After his dismissal, he said he showed up at the headquarters address of LIFE 890. Although he had hardly seen any LIFE 890 representatives in Liberty Ashes, Waight had paid dues for years and now he wanted to see if the union could be some help. He was surprised to find what appeared to be a private house in Brooklyn.

"I went in and smelled breakfast. They were cooking bacon and eggs, "Waight recalled. Waight said he turned around and left, thinking to himself: "This is a false union."

Orlando, the former worker who sought overtime pay, said the union at Liberty Ashes had only a ghost presence. When he first showed up for work, he was told that a union representative would soon see him and explain how to put his membership in order. After a month at work, the workers had to be in the union, they told him. But after three months of work, Orlando said he had not yet approached him.

"I never paid the fees, I never signed a union card, I never met a representative, I never went to a meeting," Orlando said.

Orlando's lawsuit has attracted other former workers, but it has lasted for years. Orlando said that the company's claim that all workers have to submit to arbitration seems a cynical ploy, in which LIFE 890 is a willing partner. The arbitration agreement requires workers to press their cases individually and prohibits workers from suing as a group. Orlando said that arbitration only works if there is a union willing to aggressively support its members.

"With a real union, arbitration works. You get your money. It's fair, "Orlando said." I do not know what an arbitration would be with 890. "

Lawyers for Liberty Ashes did not respond to requests for comment.

Orlando said he complained to Brownell, the BIC commissioner, about LIFE 890 last January, and said the union, in Orlando's words, was conspiring with Liberty Ashes. Orlando said he was told that the agency did not have the authority to act.







                                


                            





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ProPublica first reported in LIFE 890 this year, and subsequently union operations have attracted the scrutiny of the federal government. In August, the union's health care benefits fund, Life Benefit Plan, received a summons from the grand jury of the Labor and Justice departments. The subpoena requested searches and "made reference to an alleged violation" possibly involving fraud and conspiracy, according to a note from an independent auditor in the most recent financial presentations of the benefits fund, filed with the Department of Labor in October.

"The investigation is in the early stages and no charges have been made," the auditor wrote. "The administration trusts that there will be no criminal infractions, illegal acts or prohibited transactions to be discovered in this investigation."

LIFE 890 did not answer the questions related to the citation.

When ProPublica recently visited the LIFE 890 home in Bay Ridge, a woman who gave her name when Phyllis opened the door. Phyllis said he did not know Mongello's whereabouts, but maybe he was "in the field." Capone was not found anywhere either. (De acuerdo con los registros del IRS, Mongello trabaja 50 horas por semana y Capone trabaja 33 horas por semana). Al día siguiente, ProPublica llamó a Mongello y Capone, y tampoco estaban en la oficina. Phyllis dijo que no sabía cuándo volverían.

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