Taking advantage

The first clue came when police investigating an apartment burglary in the eastern Pennsylvania town of Honesdale picked up a young Russian immigrant who worked nights cleaning floors at the local Wal-Mart Supercenter.

Vladimir Blinov was 18, had exhausted his tourist visa and could provide just a few details to explain how he had ended up in the small Pocono Mountains town – two names and three telephone numbers. But that was enough for a federal agent to start a probe five years ago that set the stage for last week’s arrest of 245 allegedly illegal workers employed on contract cleaning crews at 58 Wal-Mart stores across the country.

Federal authorities have offered only limited details on last week’s sting. They’re saying even less about the Honesdale case – which implicated two dozen interconnected businesses with contracts to clean more than 80 Wal-Mart stores – except to confirm a link between it and the recent arrests.

Taken together, the Honesdale case and three others in Florida, Illinois and Virginia all involving illegal workers employed to clean Wal-Marts and other businesses point to the largely overlooked but widespread recruiting of Eastern Europeans and other foreigners to scrub the floors and toilets of America’s retail emporiums while most shoppers sleep.

“Employers don’t care about what documents you have,” promises a Web site operated by Tady, a recruiting firm in the Czech Republic that offers to match workers with jobs in the United States.

Last week’s crackdown was unusual because it appears to be the first to implicate executives at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. itself.

No Wal-Mart executives have been arrested. But a law enforcement source said investigators recorded undercover meetings between a contractor and Wal-Mart executives, as well as phone conversations between a contractor and store managers establishing “that various immigration violations have continued to occur for several years with direct knowledge and reckless disregard of these violations by the Wal-Mart Corp.”

The use of outside contractors has proved popular as part of a boom in outsourcing by U.S. companies, say lawyers, labor experts and others familiar with the cleaning industry.

The Wal-Mart situation “isn’t a highly unusual case,” said Stacy Whitacre, editor of Contracting Profits, a cleaning industry trade publication. “The standard is basically that if you do your due diligence in picking a contractor, then it (employee’s legal status) is the responsibility of the contractor.”

A spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, Mona Williams, said the retailer’s arrangements with cleaning companies and other outside contractors leaves hiring and other operating decisions to those businesses.

The pressure to keep costs down gives retailers a good reason not to ask too many questions.

“The retailers, they don’t have any choice, because they cannot find the labor force to do this kind of work,” said Stanislaw Kostek, a Polish immigrant from Queensbury, N.Y., whose contract cleaning firm pleaded guilty to employing illegal workers in the Honesdale case.

Kostek said he paid his workers between $6 and $8 an hour to work nights cleaning floors and toilets. He didn’t set out just to hire ineligible foreigners, but few Americans applied, he said.

Though the recruiting of Eastern Europeans is said to be prevalent, the largest group among those arrested last week were Mexicans. There were also Mongolians, Brazilians, Uzbeks and others.

Kostek said he found his workers by word-of-mouth; most were Eastern Europeans in the United States on tourist visas.

But many such workers are enticed from abroad with job offers and often pay a fee – from less than $1,000 to as much as $2,500 – for the privilege, according to documents from several court cases and interviews.

Experts on immigration law say the use of contract firms – both those doing cleaning and other types of work – has increased substantially in recent years.

“Employers started looking for ways to insulate themselves,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates tighter immigration policies. “Everybody knew they were hiring illegals, but they just paid these guys to say we’re not asking, you’re not telling. If the INS comes, it’s your problem.”