Dirty deal: Unionized office cleaner axed
A spokesman for the Labor Department declined to comment.
“Under the Privacy Act, the department cannot, absent a release from the claimant, discuss the details of a claim including confirming or denying the existence of a claim,” the spokesman said.
According to Henderson’s documentation, after the agency first denied him a workers’ compensation benefit, he was invited to appeal the ruling.
He did, and the agency then denied it again, saying he had not submitted the requested medical forms from a doctor.
Although Henderson and his lawyer disputed that — and could point to the medical form in their submission — they decided to appeal again, which they’re currently doing.
Henderson is not the first federal employee to find himself caught between warring opinions in federal agencies.
Former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Special Agent Terence Opiola, diagnosed with a 9/11 blood cancer, has also been denied workers’ compensation by the Labor Department — even though other federal agencies have conceded his sickness is linked to work he did at Ground Zero.
Henderson’s attorney Jeffrey Mullins said his client wasn’t trying to double-dip.
“Whatever he is getting from Social Security now would be offset if he got workers’ compensation,” said Mullins. “He’s only trying to get what he’s owed. This is why the federal government has workers’ comp.” NEW MOM Kilvia Rodriguez de Rivas was five months pregnant when she lost her job as a cleaner at fashion giant H&M over the summer.
Rodriguez was one of two union cleaners employed by H&M to work at its Fifth Ave. headquarters — a position she lost when the company decided to make a change.
Now a mother of a month-old son, Kyrie Ethan Rivas, she’s worried that she won’t be able to find another job at the same union wage.
Rodriguez and her colleague Maximo Acosta are both members of 32BJ SEIU. As such, they were earning $25 an hour plus benefits when they were let go.
Rodriguez was paid by Mayco Building Services Inc., the cleaning company that had a contract to care for H&M’s corporate offices in Midtown and drew on 32BJ SEIU workers to do the job.
After dropping Rodriguez and Acosta, H&M first hired a nonunion-contract company to do its cleaning, according to 32BJ.
The union said it reached out to the company after the firings over the summer to try persuade it to use a good contractor who would pay a living wage.
But the company chose another route, the union said.
H&M, in a statement from a spokesman, said it had changed its cleaners as part of an internal review — not to hire cheaper workers, as 32BJ suspects. “This year, H&M performed a complete review of our cleaning contracts. Based on those findings, we chose to move forward with a new cleaning vendor nationwide and to bring the cleaning of our corporate office in-house,” the statement said. “H&M believes in people and aims to be a good partner to all our vendors. We continue to enjoy a positive relationship with labor unions, and every one of our city stores are unionized with all the cleaning performed by union workers.”
For Rodriguez, 31, the change has meant a very bleak holiday season — despite the joy of having her first baby. “I was about five months pregnant when I lost my job, and I was trying to hide it in case something like this happened,” Rodriguez told the Daily News.
She said she had no warning her dismissal was coming. “They just told us, a day before, that on Friday we had to get all our things, that the job was over,” she said.
Rodriguez, who came to New York from the Dominican Republic six years ago, said her husband’s earnings aren’t going to cover the family’s expenses for long — but she’s hopeful she can return to work soon, with a union company.
“I just need the chance and then it will work out, I’m sure,” she said.