Workers unite!

As it happens, when I was in NYC recently, my friends and I talked with some of the striking workers as we walked uptown from Greenwich Village.

The Associated Press

NEW YORK -- Danger and exhaustion came with the job in the decade Chen Tianyun spent as a restaurant delivery man in Manhattan.

Traffic threatened to squash his scooter like a dumpling. He survived an armed robbery. Most weeks, he toiled 70 hours so he could send money to his family in China.

And for his effort, he said he was paid a salary of $550 per month -- about $1.81 per hour.

Live on your tips, his bosses told him.

Stories like Chen's are a dime a dozen in New York City, where immigrants make up nearly half the work force and employers who ignore labor laws have long been able to count on a complicit silence from laborers thankful for a job.[...]

Chen and fellow delivery workers at the Saigon Grill, a small chain of Vietnamese cafes, filed a lawsuit seeking back pay in March. More than a dozen New York restaurants have seen similar claims in the past few months.