Immigrant Subway Cleaners in New York Win Millions

Five years later, Reyna and hundreds of his co-workers will get their big payday after a $3 million settlement secured by City Comptroller Brad Lander. But at the time, Reyna worked through a series of rationalizations to explain his situation. At least his pay of $21 an hour was above both the city’s minimum wage and the state’s minimum wage of $14.50 an hour. ​“For me, it was a lot,” he says. But even so, the job was hard — and painful. Skin would peel off workers’ bodies from the harsh chemicals used to clean. The company later diluted them to make the solutions less acrid. The gloves provided were flimsy.

Reyna couldn’t reconcile these contradictions and had a feeling he was on the losing side of an existential ledger. He wasn’t alone making that cold calculus: work or starve. He counted his blessings and continued to work.

“I felt blessed because I was working during an extremely difficult time, when many people were out of work,” says Reyna. ​“But at the same time, I was consciously aware of the danger I was taking every minute, every hour, every day that I went to work.”

As I reported at the time for The American Prospect, contractors received a windfall of $371 million, but they subjected their workers to poor treatment on the job, retaliation and open sexual harassment. Several workers, as well as other advocates for safe workplaces, shared in interviews that cleaners often received substandard cleaning equipment. Reyna says he wasn’t given respirators but regular masks. They weren’t provided with uniforms and sometimes were working in empty trains in which they could encounter a homeless person in crisis, also struggling to survive. 

Floors were stained with shit and vomit. The company provided them with powerful sprays, but ​“they hit your face, your arms, so that caused a lot of allergies, a lot of itching, a lot of burning.” But like countless immigrant workers, the tug of necessity kept him focused on toiling.

Reyna, like many of the cleaners he worked with, was the sole breadwinner for his family, who were in the Dominican Republic. He sent whatever earnings he could collect to provide for their livelihoods, making his sacrifices in New York, away from his family, worth it.

“My wife and two children were in Santo Domingo,” he says. ​“You live with the uncertainty of not knowing what’s going to happen to your wife or your children there, and you’re here and you can’t even travel because it wasn’t possible yet.”

He says he went to work cleaning after leaving a job at a minimart because he wasn’t feeling safe as owners and customers flaunted pandemic safety guidelines. With so many getting sick in New York, he feared it was only a matter of time before he would also catch the virus.

Sanitizing subways, meanwhile, came with the security of working in largely deserted subway stations.

Reyna stayed on at LN Pro Services until 2023, one of the private contractors New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA) hired after then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo shut down the 24-hour subway in May 2020 for overnight scrubdowns. Now, he’s one of a largely immigrant workforce of about 450 contracted subway cleaners who will share in a more than $3 million settlement recouped by City Comptroller Brad Lander.

​“Without these cleaners sanitizing and keeping our train system from piling up with debris, New York City would have had a much harder time getting moving again five years ago,” Lander said in a statement. They should have been paid NYC’s prevailing wage. But when NYCTA contracted with LN Pro Services and Fleetwash to clean the subways, it didn’t require them to do so over the objections of then-Comptroller Scott Stringer.

“This case has been a long time in the making,” said Claudia Henriquez, Director of Workers’ Rights in the Comptroller’s office. ​“Under comptroller Scott Stringer, the office issued a determination that the contracts to clean the subway cars were covered by the prevailing wage. And just a little bit of background on the prevailing wage, the prevailing wage is a special rate of pay that’s higher than the minimum wage that applies to certain public contracts.”

Under state law, the city’s Comptroller sets and enforces prevailing wage laws. It requires that prevailing wages and supplemental benefits be paid to building service employees on public contracts.

Henriquez, Director of Workers’ Rights in the Comptroller’s office, says the underpayment for the workers was in the range of $14 per hour based on how long they stayed working for the contractors. Workers are entitled to benefits after three months on the job. ​“Those benefits can be paid either through the provision of actual benefits, such as healthcare, a 401K, other direct benefits to the employee, or they can be paid in cash wages,” says Henriquez. ​“And for those workers who are employed in 2022-2023, it was a little over $14 per hour.”

​“Individual workers’ pay varied, but essentially, most of them, during that time, were making in the range of $16 to $18 per hour,” she continues. ​“So already they’re making a couple of dollars below what the prevailing wage required for workers who have been employed with the company for more than two years.” In 2020, New York City’s prevailing wage was $20.38 with a benefit range of $13.33 per hour.

In Reyna’s case, he was making $21.50 an hour in 2022 with no benefits. In an audit of his specific case shared by Lander’s office, Henriquez shared the following breakdown of underpayments over the years:

“From March through May 2022, he should have been paid $21.43 per hour in wages plus $14.01 per hour in benefits.

In June 2022, he was entitled to $24.29 per hour in wages plus $14.01 per hour in benefits.

By August 2022, he was entitled to the full benefit rate of $14.34 per hour.

So, for the first half of 2022, the difference between what he should have made ($21.43+$14.01), and what he did make ($21.50) was $13.94.

From August through December, he was entitled to $24.29 in wages + $13.34 in benefits. His rate of pay remained $21.50, so the difference then was $16.13.”

As part of the settlements, NYCTA will pay out $2,400,000 on behalf of LN Pro Services and $606,686.80 for Fleetwash.

Reyna is now a union member with 32BJ SEIU cleaning buildings in midtown Manhattan and writes in Spanish over text that ​“there are many benefits in the workplace that I have never had in any other job.” He has 10 sick days, paid vacations, and guaranteed paid bumps, which tops out at $31 an hour after 42 months of employment. ​“And earning a little more always gives you a breather!”

But not every worker has landed on their feet. Another train cleaner from Venezuela, Catalina Cruz, who asked to use a pseudonym because she feared being targeted for her asylum immigration status, had been working at John F. Kennedy Airport as a ramp worker for the past two years, but because she only has a legal working permit, she says she was fired on national security grounds because she wasn’t a U.S. citizen. The Trump administration has restrictedthe rights of asylum seekers, refugees andvalid U.S. visa holders, part of a crackdown on immigrants, in which both documented and undocumented people are disappeared by Immigration and Customers Enforcement (ICE) agents in broad daylight.

The economist Paul Krugman has dubbed the state’s ramp up in repression investments ​“ICEing the economy,” with $45 billion to expand the country’s network of detention centers, including $30 billion for arrest and deportation efforts, as well as hiring around 10,000 more ICE agents. Together, these efforts to expand the state’s capacity to detain, deport and jail ​“will eventually do even more economic harm than tariffs,” says Krugman.

While good paying jobs are growing for jailers with an expansion of public spending, service jobs for pushing a traveler on a wheelchair along an airport ramp are declining, by Trump replacing immigrant workers through racist policies. Before we hung up the phone, Cruz asked me, ​“if you know of any work, please keep me in mind.”