Using The Homeless To Create The Homeless
MayorBob.
Posted to Business on Thu Sep 14, 2006 at 05:51:08 PM EST. RSS.
If you're a landlord in the District of Columbia and you have a tenant who's hopelessly behind on the rent, you have to make a decision at some point on whether to evict or not. If you decide to evict, you're probably not going to want to do the job yourself; you're likely to call in the professionals. Said professionals are companies who hire day laborers to remove belonging from evictee's homes and trucks to transport the evictors from one property to the next. But, while the companies contracting to do the evicting might style themselves as professional, they don't pay their hired help too handsomely. As a matter of fact, you might say they hardly pay them at all. At least that's what's being charged in a class action suit brought against six DC area eviction companies.
Eviction companies have a tough job. But, most of them in DC have found a nearly inexhaustible supply of evictors - the city's homeless residents. There is a positive feature to this workforce from the perspective of eviction companies -- they work cheap. As reported earlier this year by Street Sense a Washington-area newspaper devoted to reporting on homeless issues, most of the time evictors don't make anywhere near federal minimum wage. A lot of the time they are removing belongings from apartments and homes for as little as (US)$5 a day. The fact that they are being paid so meagerly to essentially create more homeless people wasn't lost on Jake Ashford, one of the Street Sense reporters, because, well, he's homeless also:
"Here it is I am living on the street and don't have anything, and I can't bear the thought of women and children ending up in my situation. It sickens to me to know I am helping the problem that is making them homeless. And only for $5 a day."The complaint (pdf doc), filed in federal court charges that not only do the six companies recruit from among the ranks of the homeless and pay them less than they should, they also are engaged in anti-trust actions by conspiring to keep their wages so low. The federal minimum wage is $5.15 an hour and DC bumps that up to $7.00 an hour for work done in the District. Ashford, who is the lead plaintiff in the suit, says around 10,000 evictions are performed in DC annually. He, and a couple of the other plaintiffs said they were paid from $5 to $15 for an entire day's work.
The companies named in the complaint deny they are hiring the homeless with company, All American Eviction, saying the workers are part of its staff or are hired for at least the minimum wage. The economics of the business would seem to indicate otherwise. Eviction companies charge landlords from $165 to $200 to empty an apartment and $450 for a townhouse. Hiring ten people at $7 an hour for four hours to empty an apartment would cost the company $280, thus a money losing proposition. But, by paying ten people $5 for an entire day's work, they can make $400 off of two apartments with total labor costs of $50. Because DC is different from every other jurisdiction in the US, the US Marshals Service is involved in the eviction process, by serving the legal documents on those about to be evicted and being on site for every eviction. Robert Brandt, a supervisory deputy for the Marshals Service, has no doubt that eviction companies are still recruiting the homeless:
"I would imagine that 80 percent of the evictions in the city are conducted by independent eviction companies, rather than any in-house crew. Those eviction companies are almost without exception ones that pick up crews at the homeless shelters as their primary source of labor."
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