Hard Landing
By Frank Clancy
Photo by Jonathan Barkat
(page 4 of 6)
Hicks’s experience contradicts some familiar arguments in the immigration debate. His employees aren’t doing backbreaking labor, like digging ditches or picking crops in 100-degree heat. Lole showed me a weekly pay stub dated September 19, 2005, documenting his $10-an-hour pay—$666.50—significantly higher than minimum wage, and good money by Mexican standards.The work, Hicks says, “is not very physical, and it’s not very complicated. It’s a matter of working eight or 10 hours a day, continuously. It’s a matter of discipline—of being at work and working.”
Crews often work six or more days a week. Immigrants prefer that, Hicks says; they’d rather he pay them for 65 hours a week than hire more men to work only 40 or 50 hours each. Technically, they’re self-employed, responsible for paying their own taxes; Carolina doesn’t withhold money.
On bigger jobs, Carolina Installers rents apartments with kitchens, rather than motel rooms. “The guys like it better,” Hicks says. “It’s more like being at home.” He takes pride in treating workers well. That’s not empty rhetoric; three former employees, including Nestor Rangel, said Carolina was a good employer.
“I have a lot of respect for [immigrants], and what they do, what they do for their families,” Hicks says. “I feel for these people. They’re not asking for anything. They’re just asking for an opportunity to work. They’re not coming here and taking something. They’re improving.”
For the Carolina Installers crew, life in Hopkins was consumed by work: up at 6:30, at work by 7, home at 6:30, a simple dinner, television, bed. Most lived at Hopkins Park Plaza, a five-building apartment complex downtown, a quarter of a mile from the warehouse. The company paid the rent—$225 a week for each apartment, which two men shared.
With the rent paid, no car, and no free time, a man could send a significant amount of money home—$500 a week was not unreasonable. Juan Antonio sent less, but he was also saving money in Minnesota, Mariana told me. The plan was for him to stay less than two years; he was going to return by January 2007 for Marianita’s third birthday, a special one in Guanajuato.
Before leaving San José de la Luz, Juan Antonio had paid for a private phone line so he could call Mariana whenever he wanted. They spoke almost every night, for two or even three hours at a time. Sometimes he spoke to Marianita, although at a year old she didn’t fully grasp the concept of a telephone. “He liked [the United States], but sometimes he felt very sad,” Mariana recalled the first time we spoke, in a park across from the boutique hotel where she worked as maid. “He even cried sometimes.”
“In truth, it was lonely,” Nestor confided.
Juan Antonio’s coworkers called him Toño, short for Antonio. And on November 3, 2005, they had a planned a small celebration. It was Toño’s 20th birthday.
At Supervalu, the men put the steel shelf system together in sections, assembling each vertical element on the ground, then lifting it intact. As each new piece was lifted by a machine, workers attached it to the existing structure with horizontal crosspieces. They added diagonal bracing at regular intervals, to provide structural integrity. According to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) rules, structural stability was supposed to be “maintained at all times throughout the erection process.” For safety, the first vertical piece was attached to a ceiling joist with two straps, which were to remain in place until the entire shelf was finished.
On the afternoon of November 3, 2005, Lole, Juan Antonio, and two other men were assembling a section of shelf that was designed to be 37 feet high and 150 feet long. According to the OSHA accident report, 64 of 102 vertical sections were in place. Lole and Toño were at the south end of the system, where the safety straps were attached to the ceiling, standing in a fully extended scissors lift, the floor of which was 32 feet off the ground—high enough for the men to touch the ceiling. Two other employees were in another lift about 50 feet away. Together, the four men were trying to install a piece of diagonal bracing.
What happened next is unclear. According to both a police report and the OSHA investigation, the shelves were leaning slightly. Hoping either to push or pull the system into place, Lole and Juan Antonio loosened or disconnected the safety straps.
The 15,000-pound unit collapsed with a deafening clatter, like a long line of dominoes. The last domino was the scissors lift.
Juan Antonio landed beneath the lift, with his feet elevated and his head on a pallet of sheet steel. When the police arrived minutes later, blood was flowing copiously from his ears and mouth. He had no pulse. He was not breathing.
According to an eyewitness, Lole was thrown from the platform and hit the concrete floor face first. He was bleeding heavily and screaming, the police report said.
Juan Antonio died at the scene. An ambulance rushed Jose to Hennepin County Medical Center, where he spent a month recovering from broken bones and other injuries to his head, ribs, clavicle, and forearms.
Nestor Rangel was at the warehouse that day, but did not see his son fall.
After he was released from HCMC, Lole stayed for another month or so in Hopkins with the Carolina Installers crew, who were still working at Supervalu. It was awkward, since he couldn’t work and the company was paying the rent. But he didn’t want to return to Mexico and lose access to doctors and any benefits due him because of the accident.
One evening, Lole says, Larry Hicks’s brother Jerry came to his apartment and offered him a check for $4,000. According to Lole, Hicks said, “I want you out of here tomorrow or I’m calling the police.” Jerry Hicks emphatically denies that this took place. “I did not do that,” he says. “I can’t speak Spanish. He can’t speak English. That did not happen.”
Lole took a Greyhound to Texas the next morning. In late August, a doctor there cleared him to return to work. It’s an assessment that his attorney questions. She is particularly concerned about neurological damage; brain injuries heal slowly, and he left Minnesota without being officially released from care by his doctors.
Lole’s parents worry about his emotional health. “Right now, he’s very bored, and very tired,” Marcelo Zúñiga told me. “He is suffering after the accident.”
