A wage battle is brewing between a contract cleaning company and about 17 workers who were hired to work the overnight cleaning shifts at the Omni Hotel in November and December, but were never paid.
"It's very frustrating to see this type of thing continues to happen, especially when workers, we get punished after completing our work without getting paid," Neptari Perez, with Workers Dignity said.
Last week, through Workers Dignity, the former cleaning employees delivered a letter to the hotel demanding they get paid the wages they're owed. That total, after liquidated double damages under the Fair Labor Standards Act comes to $18,516.
"We were under the assumption that all of the associates that had been working for the third party cleaning company had been compensated for their work performed here on site," said Area Managing Director at the Omni Hotel, Dan Piotrowski.
According to Piotrowski this all started when the hotel contracted with a company called Alliance in October of 2017. "Without our knowledge Alliance subcontracted out a portion of that work to a local company here called Impact Cleaning Services," Piotrowski said.
News Channel 5 tried to contact Impact Commercial Cleaning Services. Our calls were never returned and when we visited the address listed on its site we never found the actual address.
Meanwhile, more than a dozen workers who the company hired are struggling to get by. "They were unable to pay their rent, how they had to scrounge up money, ask for money, burrow money and ended up having to pay fees and penalties because of late rent," said Perez.
"We want them to get paid but we paid for the services rendered through Alliance and are now working with Alliance to hopefully get either them or Impact, get these folks paid as quickly as possible," Piotrowski said.
