Two Ecuadorian migrants working in a Queens factory packaging loose “grabba” tobacco sold by a popular New York-based street brand have filed wage theft complaints to the state labor department, alleging thousands of dollars of unpaid labor and overtime.
The complaint against HotHead Grabba LLC comes weeks after women in a Brooklyn factory filed papers against the company with the New York State Department of Labor and the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration alleging wage theft and dangerous working conditions, as previously reported by THE CITY.
In the new complaints to the state DOL, submitted April 11, the two male workers assert they typically worked between 10 and 13 hours a day, seven days a week at an Ozone Park assembly line packing tobacco into five-gram plastic tubes for sale in retail outlets for several weeks in November and December.
A man they knew only as El Niño told them they would be paid $10 an hour, the men said in their complaints and in a joint interview with THE CITY. The New York minimum wage at the time was $15 an hour, now up to $16.
They were never paid even the $10 an hour, according to the complaint — either getting shortchanged or not paid at all.
The older brother, who’s 34, got paid $1,600 for 410 hours of work according to their calculations filed with the state — equivalent to $3.90 per hour. His 25-year-old sibling received $1,540 for 400 hours of work.
With overtime, they are owed $6,545 and $6,365 respectively, asserts the complaint, filed with the state by the immigrant advocacy organization Make the Road New York.
“We just want them to compensate us for our work,” the older brother said of HotHead Grabba. THE CITY is withholding the complainants’ names at their request. “We don’t want this to happen to anyone else ever again.”
In their complaint, the men said that even getting paid what they were able to get was a protracted process. “I asked El Niño repeatedly for my unpaid wages, eventually he told me to stop calling and he would let me know when my payment was ready but I never heard from him,” both of them assert on their complaint forms.
The brothers also described sweatshop-like conditions at the factory, where they listened to salsa, Colombian vallenato and English-language music on a speaker while sorting and packing the tobacco.
HotHead provided workers with surgical face masks, barely a buffer against the acrid tobacco smell, so strong that they stuffed their masks with napkins as an additional filter. At the end of his shifts, the younger brother said, his hands were sometimes swollen and cramped.
The ground tobacco, they said, was “everywhere” – inside their masks, stuck to their clothes and hanging in the air, making them nauseous and dizzy, they told THE CITY.
The factory, which the brothers said is windowless and unventilated, doesn’t have a bathroom, forcing workers to use the bathroom at a garage next door. On days where the garage was closed, workers had no choice but to wait until they got home to wash their faces and hands. They have not submitted complaints to OSHA.
The state labor department declined to discuss the new complaint, citing its ongoing investigation of HotHead Grabba.
OSHA is probing the Brooklyn women’s claims of enduring dizziness, fainting and nausea on the job, THE CITY previously reported.
A message sent to HotHead Grabba’s Instagram account Monday did not receive a response. Last month, a message from the account called “false” the initial wage theft allegations from women who had worked at the Brooklyn factory.
“How can we ever owe someone thousands of dollars we don’t offer that kind of help here, it’s impossible so,” the message read.
HotHead Grabba registered as a limited liability company with the state of New York on March 7, three days after OSHA inspected the Brooklyn factory and a week after THE CITY first exposed the allegations of sweatshop conditions at that facility.
Weekly Pay Promised
The brothers started working at the Ozone Park factory just three days after arriving in New York from their native Ecuador in November. A mutual friend told them about the job, saying they could earn between $2,100 and $2,200 a week packing ground tobacco.
Once at the factory, the younger brother said, the two went straight to work after “El Niño” explained how and when they would be compensated: $8 hourly for the first week, and then $10 hourly every week after, from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day, in cash payments at the end of each week.
The men worked seven days a week to meet their production quota: a daily minimum of 500 plastic bags filled with 30 five-gram branded tubes of packed “grabba” tobacco each, the equivalent of 15,000 individual tubes daily, they told THE CITY.
The men told THE CITY they were in charge of packing the tobacco while two other men were responsible for grinding the stripped tobacco leaves that arrived in piles of black garbage bags throughout the day.
At the time, the two brothers were unaware of New York’s minimum wage laws but they were happy with the pay they were promised, said the older sibling, compared to the $20 a day he earned harvesting bananas back home.
The brothers didn’t receive their first payment until their third week at the job, $520 and $480, according to the complaint, after reporting 190 hours of work.
“El Niño told us that business was bad and that’s why they couldn’t pay us the full amount then, but they would in the future,” the younger sibling said.
But if business is so bad, he recalled asking El Niño, why hadn’t their hours and daily quota decreased? “He said that they would give the tobacco to the stores on credit, and that’s why they didn’t have any money,” the former worker said.
They each received two more payments before quitting on Dec. 18, 2023, according to their complaints to the DOL.
“It got to the point where we couldn’t afford the bus to work,” said the older brother. “That’s why we told them we were quitting.”
Another relative loaned the brothers money to cover their rent, a debt they are still repaying. Both said they continued texting and calling El Niño to ask for their money — and claim El Niño eventually told them to stop calling him, an assertion they included in their DOL complaints.
Now both work as construction day laborers, finding odd jobs in residential renovation projects and construction cleanup. The pay is better – $16 an hour, they said – but between recent bad weather and a market saturated with other migrants like them, work is hard to find.
They only realized the extent of how much money they were owed when in February they attended a know-your-rights workshop at the Jackson Heights office of Make The Road and learned about New York’s minimum wage laws for the first time.
The younger brother said he hopes that HotHead will stop denying other workers their due wages.
“We’re angry, and we feel like we were cheated,” he said. “We want [HotHead] to really think about what they’ve done with our pay, and to stop cheating workers out of their pay and taking advantage of illegals.”