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September 2nd, 2020 
Awake Goy ”It makes you think that only the rich have rights in the courts,” he said.
By Selwyn Raab
- June 14, 1998
See the article in its original context from June 14, 1998, Section 1, Page 36Buy ReprintsNew York Times subscribers* enjoy full access to TimesMachine—view over 150 years of New York Times journalism, as it originally appeared.SUBSCRIBE*Does not include Crossword-only or Cooking-only subscribers.
Eighteen years ago, Wojciech Kozak helped build Trump Tower, the skyscraper jewel in Donald J. Trump’s real-estate empire. Today, Mr. Kozak recalls that time with nightmare memories of backbreaking 12-hour shifts and of being cheated with 200 other undocumented Polish immigrants out of meager wages and fringe benefits.
”We worked in horrid, terrible conditions,” Mr. Kozak said of the six months he spent in 1980 wielding a sledgehammer and a blowtorch in demolishing the Bonwit Teller Building on Fifth Avenue to make way for Trump Tower. ”We were frightened illegal immigrants and did not know enough about our rights.”
Mr. Kozak, like other laborers on that job, has no hope of collecting about $4,000 in back wages from a contracting company that began the demolition and later became insolvent. But after almost two decades, the demolition workers are still struggling to compel Mr. Trump and his business associates to compensate a union’s welfare funds and thus increase pension and medical benefits for some of the Polish workers.
Mr. Kozak is now a party and witness in a class-action lawsuit that has meandered through the Federal courts for 15 years and charges that Mr. Trump owes $4 million to the union welfare funds for the work the Poles performed. Filed in 1983, the suit has been bogged down by a torrent of motions and appeals of judicial decisions and by the deaths of a judge, a lawyer, the original lead plaintiffs, an important witness and two of Mr. Trump’s co-defendants.
In an effort to resolve the tangled case — one of the oldest on the civil dockets of the Federal District Court in Manhattan — Judge Kevin T. Duffy last month warned lawyers for both sides to be prepared to begin a jury trial on 48 hours’ notice.
But on Thursday, in a development that could delay the trial yet again, Judge Duffy ordered the case assigned to another judge. Lawyers for both sides said the 48-hour notice was still in effect, but that it was unclear when the trial would start.
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Mr. Trump denies that he was aware of the working conditions at the site in 1980 or that any of the demolition workers were undocumented immigrants. He is also chal lenging claims that he is liable for payments to the union that were evaded by the demolition contractor.
”All we did was to try to keep a job going that was started by someone else,” Mr. Trump, in an interview, said of his company’s efforts to guarantee that the demolition contractor paid wages to employees. ”In fact, we helped people and it has cost a lot of money in legal fees.”
Mr. Kozak and other Polish immigrants who were hired for the demolition said in interviews that they often worked in choking clouds of asbestos dust without protective equipment. They accepted the conditions because they thought the job would pay 10 times as much as they could earn in Poland, said Mr. Kozak, 56, a slightly built man who became an American citizen and joined a laborers’ union.
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Julian Nalepa, 63, who suffered a head injury in the demolition, said he and fellow workers were baffled by the unending suit. ”It makes you think that only the rich have rights in the courts,” he said.
The demolition project on Fifth Avenue and 56th Street lasted from January to June 1980. It cleared the way for an ornate 68-story glass-sheathed structure containing shops and an atrium on the lower floors and 263 condominium apartments above that originally sold for $500,000 to $10 million each.
The tower was financed and built by Mr. Trump’s development company, the Trump Organization, and the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States.
According to court records and testimony, the Trump-Equitable joint venture hired Kaszycki and Sons Contractors Inc. at a fee of $775,000 to raze Bonwit Teller’s 10-story flagship department store although the contractor had little demolition experience. Demolition Workers Local 95 of the Laborers’ International Union of North America had a collective bargaining agreement with the Kaszycki company, of Herkimer, N.Y., requiring it to pay specified wages to union and nonunion workers at the Trump Tower site and to make additional payments for each worker into the local’s pension and medical insurance funds.
Wendy E. Sloan and Lewis M. Steel, lawyers for current and retired Local 95 members in the suit, assert that William Kaszycki, owner of the contracting company, hired about 200 Polish immigrants who were not Local 95 members and agreed to pay them $4 to $5 an hour on 12-hour shifts seven days a week.
The Kaszycki company, the plaintiffs said, violated the union’s $11-an-hour minimum wage scale and made payments to the local’s welfare funds for only 12 to 15 employees. The contractor also failed to pay the 200 Poles their full wages, causing work stoppages and delays.
The plaintiffs contend that Mr. Trump was desperate to meet demolition and construction deadlines and that his company in May 1980 began supervising the demolition, assuming full responsibility for adhering to the union contract and for the payments to the union welfare funds.
https://time.com/5039109/donald-trump-undocumented-polish-trump-tower-bonwit-teller/
Doing Business With a Sociopath/Psychopath:
PR Puff Piece For Trump, A Cabal Member of the “Jewish” ZIONIST Mafia Who Gets Away With All His Crimes:
His reported rape of his wife & alleged rape of a 13 Year old who received death threats until she dropped her lawsuit.
Ripping off contractors and not paying for decades, etc.
| patty — President Trump and Abraham Lincoln—A Worthy EmulationIn the Republican Convention and elsewhere, the President has made repeated references to his admiration for Abraham Lincoln. He wanted to hold his acceptance speech at Gettysburg, symbolizing the crisis now upon us. Many of his supporters have told us they are hungry for an understanding of Lincoln. They want to understand the reference. We will gladly comply.The article which follows is by Graham Lowry, one of the most talented historians of the American System who ever lived. Graham died in 2003. But his works on Lincoln bring the profound ideas of this hero, the nature of his mind, vividly to light. Lincoln saved the union by directly organizing and elevating the intellectual life of the working men and women who fought with him in the Civil War. He did so by resort to the great ideas of the American Revolution, grounded in the European Renaissance, which his own generation had all but forgotten.READ MORE |
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