The evening of May 23 was supposed to be a restful one for Wilfredo Zuniga, a busboy at Zen restaurant in Northampton who came from Honduras to seek a better life. It was his night off and the fatigue of a 70-plus-hour work week had lulled him to sleep in his room inside the employer-provided house on State Street.
Then he got a call from his cousin, Marcial Zuniga — who, like Wilfredo Zuniga, is an undocumented immigrant.
Wilfredo no longer had a job, his cousin said. None of them did. At the restaurant that night, the owners had called a meeting to announce the business was closing immediately. At 9:40 p.m., the workers had just about finished their shift as well as completing setup for the following workday — a workday that would no longer be.
“Everybody’s done,” Zuniga recalled his cousin telling him. He sprang from bed to go to Zen and retrieve his final pay, $1,900 — the biggest payday he could remember during his 10 months at Zen — to compensate him for the roughly 300 hours he had worked that month.
Even without factoring in any overtime pay, that adds up to just over $6 an hour — far less than the $10-an-hour minimum wage required by Massachusetts law before overtime pay is added in.
Not only were Zuniga and his three cousins out of a job, they were also out of a home. In interviews with the Gazette, they said the owner, who former employees knew only as “Mr. Sun,” told tenants they had three days to vacate and then handed them one-way bus tickets to New York City.
Zen owners Michelle Sun and Erik Hong did not return messages from the Gazette.
Two days later, outside of a cluster of employment agencies in Chinatown, Zuniga and four of his co-workers — all of whom are undocumented immigrants — said the low pay they had received at Zen was just one of their worries. They say the restaurant-provided duplex they crammed into in downtown Northampton featured bed bugs, parades of cockroaches and a non-working stove.
But at least, they said, it was a living — and a better one than they could have gotten in a home country torn by poverty and violence.
“There are people ready to work but the government is useless,” Wilfredo Zuniga said in Spanish, adding that the cities are so violent that he and his family avoid them. “It’s not like here.”
Honduras, a country struggling with poverty and political instability, has one of the highest homicide rates in the world. The Honduran government reported a murder rate of 66.4 per 100,000 people in 2014. The American rate that year: 4.5 per 100,000.
When American citizens or immigrants with green cards get laid off, they generally remain in their homes, check the help-wanted ads and seek a new job nearby. But Zuniga, his relatives and other undocumented workers say that in the underground economy in which they make a living, they often have little choice but to hit the New York Chinatown employment agencies to land a job that features company housing, long hours and low pay.
On a late May day when the temperature reached 95 degrees and the smells of sweat, garbage and perfume filled the crowded sidewalks at Division and Forsyth streets in lower Manhattan, the workers joined others milling around windows with listings of jobs for cooks, busboys, dishwashers and waiters at locations all around the Northeast — including Northampton, Amherst and other Pioneer Valley communities.
Zuniga and the others said it’s understood that employers offer a flat sum — generally between $1,600 and $2,400 a month — for jobs that require them to work six days a week for 10, 12 or more hours a day. Most also offer “free” worker housing, in quarters that range from dirty and cramped to clean and reasonably spacious.
But even after the value of housing is factored in, according to figures provided by the workers, they’re not making minimum wage. In many cases, they’re not even close.
Two days after Zen closed, the four cousins — Marcial, Josiel, Wilfredo and Edil — hopped on a Peter Pan bus to New York City. They packed into a cheap motel room for the night, and arranged to meet Lin Geng and Bess Hepner, two fellow Zen workers, in Chinatown.
After riding the train over the Manhattan Bridge, with its scenic views of Chinatown, Lin was awash with a sense of home.
“It’s like being in China,” he said.
In Chinatown, sidewalk vendors sold everything from watches to mangos, cherries and a rainbow of other fruits. Old women with walking canes gathered in front of the fruit stands. A stout, white Isuzu truck made its presence known with rhythmic grunts.
An old man sat at the foot of a crosswalk post on Bowery Street playing a T-shaped string instrument that Lin identified as an erhu, or Chinese violin.
“That’s where I’m from,” Lin said with excitement, pointing to a business with Fuzhou, a large city in southeastern China, in its name. The sign read: “Wing Ikei Noodle Co., Inc,” and underneath “USA Fuzhou Entertainment Center 102 Canal St.”
Lin hasn’t been to Chinatown in five years, he said as a cacophony of horns and the rattle of a train passing overhead made conversation difficult. Lin and Hepner made the trip to the city not to find work for themselves, but to help their former co-workers.
Overhead signs at the agencies contained mostly Chinese characters, although there were a few signs in English. One read: “Ann’s Employment Agency,” another read “Successful Employment Agency,” another, “Professional Employment Agency.”
Lin and Hepner came upon two of their Honduran friends, Josiel and Marcial Zuniga, who were leaning on a wall between one job agency and a neighboring hair salon.
“How was the hotel?” Hepner asked Josiel in Spanish, leaning in for a hug.
“El hotel?” Josiel Zuniga replied. “Cinco estrellas.”
Five stars. His smile said otherwise.
With a large suitcase in hand and a duffle bag beside him, Marcial Zuniga, 34, stood ready to depart for Honduras. He’s been working in U.S. restaurants for about six years, he said — since one of the job agencies connected him with the Zen job — but the restaurant’s sudden closing persuaded him to return to his wife and children and their family farm in Honduras.
Josiel Zuniga, Marcial’s brother, said it took him mere minutes upstairs in Ann’s Employment Agency to find a dishwashing position in New Jersey. Asked about his brother’s departure for Honduras, he said in Spanish: “That’s the idea — to return to Honduras when things get better.”
Wilfredo and Edil Zuniga emerged from the one-room job agency clutching small pieces of paper that bore the barest details of the jobs each had lined up, both in Massachusetts. Wilfredo’s piece of paper had the area code 413, the word “dishwasher,” two phone numbers and a salary: $1,900 — which workers say is the monthly wage.
Wilfredo speaks little English. He said the employment agency representative had put him on the phone with a Chinese boss who also spoke little English. They had nonetheless come to terms on a dishwashing job at a Northampton-area eatery.
Edil, his mouth pinched and his eyes anxious, said he did not know where in Massachusetts he was headed.
Of the Zunigas, Marcial had worked at Zen the longest. Thus, he said, he made the most — $2,400 per month for about 72 hours per week of work. That adds up to about $8 an hour — below the $10 minimum wage and including none of the standard time-and-a-half pay for overtime.
“I don’t have papers,’ Marcial Zuniga explained. “It’s the only option.”
Marcial said it would be hard leaving his brother and cousins behind, and he worried about the journey back to Honduras. “But, I’m happy I’ll get to see my family and my country.”
A van arrived, and Marcial lugged his suitcase forward as the family huddled around him. An overhead train turned the scene into a non-verbal one as the brothers and cousins exchanged hugs, handshakes and took teary-eyed photos.
“I’ll see you in Honduras, brother,” Josiel Zuniga said.
Wilfredo Zuniga, 34, said the family is worried because he’s crossing country borders with so little money. The restaurant’s sudden closure, he said, left Marcial Zuniga little time to save for the trip.
“My cousin is leaving for Honduras and he doesn’t have money,” he said with a frown. “He’s not prepared.”
Edil Zuniga, 20, said he made $1,800 per month for 72-hour weeks as a dishwasher and busboy at Zen, which is at least $1,000 less than the minimum wage. The youngest of the family — his only experience with the U.S. was the year and a half he spent at Zen — he’s the most visibly shaken by the day.
“I’m a little sad, but I’ll move forward,” he said in Spanish. “There’s nothing we can do.”
As the group gathered outside one of the employment agencies, a woman who appeared to be in charge stormed out of one and spoke heatedly with Lin in Fujianese, a dialect of the province in southeastern China. She then waited, with stern face and crossed arms, by the now-silent group.
After several moments the woman returned to her post inside, and Lin informed the group that she’d seen the camera and notepad of the Gazette photographer and reporter and demanded to know what they were doing.
Josiel Zuniga said it’s hard to communicate with the agencies’ employees, most of whom speak Chinese and not Spanish, but this is the only choice they have.
“We don’t have papers,” he said. “And we have to work.”
It wasn’t easy to say goodbye to his brother, he said, and he misses his family at home.
“It hurts but we continue on,” he said. “We have to continue on.”
Confused about his itinerary, Wilfredo asked Lin for help. He pointed to the paper.
“You paid for a bus to Springfield,” Lin responded. Wilfredo’s new boss would meet him at the station and bring him to his new workplace and living quarters. Like the other Zunigas, he would be working as a dishwasher.
Back outside, Lin accompanied Wilfredo to the bus stop. As the two approached the street corner, a bus at the intersection let out an enormous cloud of smoke.
The bus groaned on. Chinese men with dollies full of crates inched by. A pair of gray-robed monks approached the corner, and the former Zen workers moved toward their future.
Amanda Drane can be contacted at adrane@gazettenet.com.