Labor Photo: Colossal Cat

(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)The Washington Building and Construction Trades Council (WBCTC) put their brand-new Fat Cat to work last Friday targeting Prince George's County Public Schools where they say contractors have been cheating their employees of wages. In a recent incident two workers (Mario Sapata and Eduardo Aguirre, center) from Colossal Contractors were fired when they asked for the back wages they were owed for not being paid the prevailing wage or overtime on work at Greenbelt Middle School, a prevailing wage project in Prince George’s County. “The building trades are standing behind these workers,” says Lino Cressotti, Business Manager of Insulators Local 24. The trades have found numerous instances of workers not getting paid properly by contractors at Greenbelt Middle School, but have yet to get any response from the county school system. “Our complaints have fallen on deaf ears, but we’ll keep fighting,” said Vance Ayres, head of the WBCTC. Aguirre, who’s worked for Colossal for six years, says he was never paid prevailing rate even though most of the time he worked on schools in Prince Georges or Montgomery County. With two kids and a wife to support, Aguirre says he’s “tired of being underpaid and mistreated by the contractor and just wants the money I’m owed for the work that I put in at the company.”  - report/photo by Steve Courtien