At Trump golf course, undocumented employees say they get systematically cheated when told to work extra hours without pay
His bosses at the Trump country club called it “side work.”
On some nights, after the club’s Grille Room closed, head waiter Jose Gabriel Juarez — an undocumented immigrant from Mexico — was told to clock out. He pressed his index finger onto a scanner and typed his personal code, 436.
But he didn’t go home.
Instead — on orders from his bosses, Juarez said — he would stay on, sometimes past midnight. He vacuumed carpets, polished silverware and helped get the restaurant at Trump National Golf Club Westchester in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., ready for breakfast the next day.
All off the clock. Without being paid.
“It was that way with all the managers: Many of them told us, ‘Just clock out and then stay and do the side work,’ ” said Juarez, who spent a decade at the golf club, before leaving in May 2018. “There was a lot of side work.”
Allegations that workers were routinely shortchanged on their pay at President Trump’s suburban country club are now the subject of an inquiry by the New York attorney general, whose investigators have interviewed more than two dozen former employees. [Continue reading…]