Like all states, New York has a Department of Labor (DoL) who’s job is to protect workers, run the unemployment system, enforce labor laws, and help people find jobs. Yeah right.
This is my experience with the NYS DoL and how I was consistently screwed over by them.
Autobody Shop
My earliest experience with the DoL was when I was looking for work and was contemplating of going into the autobody field. At the time there was a DoL office in Great Neck on Great Neck Road and at that time everything was in paper. No computers at all except for the staff. All of the job listings were on index cards. Even your information was on an index card.
I met with a counselor there and he sent me to this body shop on Cutter Mill Road in Great Neck. I spent a week there outdoors in January wet sanding with cold water the fenders on a Camaro that was getting repainted. No matter what I did, the job was not good enough. The owner had a very heavy German accent which didn’t help. He just told me to wet sand. At days end, my hands were frozen and bleeding.
In talking with the guy, he said that the place was for sale and a friend of his (the counselor that I saw) was helping him to sell the place through the DoL and he got a finders fee for helping. Being naïve I went back to the DoL office and asked the counselor about it. After all, isn’t using the DoL as a brokerage illegal?
The counselor said something to the affect ‘so what’. He said everyone is doing it and asked if I wanted to buy the place.
I went back there a few other times and looked through the index cards. There were a few possibilities that were of interest. Now the way the index card works, the client (me) would find a job on the card. There was the job title, the job description, the salary the town where the job was located and finally, a code to reference the job by. You would take the index card to the counselor, they would look up the employer using the code. Only then you get the employer details and the contact person. Sometimes the counselor will set up the appointment for an interview. Even if you find say 4 potential jobs, the counselor would give you the details on one employer. And yes I’ve found a few potentials there but the counselors would give me the info on only one employer. It was a gross waste of my time.
Security Guard
I landed a job as a security guard and was bounced all over the place. Eventually I was assigned to the graveyard shift, midnight to 8AM at a fancy country club. I was unable to sleep when I got home. After a week I was getting sick and was not adjusting to the hours. My doctor, Dr. Jones even said that the hours were detrimental to my health. I told that to my supervisor, and he fired me.
I applied for Unemployment (“UI”)and it was denied.
I filed for an appeal and showed up to a hearing with an administrative law judge. I had my wife with me and Dr. Jones as my witnesses. The judge refused to allow my witnesses to testify, especially Dr. Jones.
The judge denied my claim, put sanctions on me that lasted a year and closed the case.
Marina
I worked at a marina in Freeport and they had a large layoff. I was one of the people they let go. So I filed for UI and it was granted. At the time we were being harassed by a psychotic individual, his wife and daughter. It got so bad we had to get the police involved for all the good that did.
This nut job would call us all day long and some times as much as 80 calls in one hour. We were able to get the calls stopped by having his daughter arrested. It turns out that she was calling us from her job for him. But this guy even sent us death threats in the mail, tried to place an obituary for my wife in a local paper, steal our garbage cans or dump them in our drive. Even one day he chased us through Oyster Bay at high speed waving a gun out his cars window. You know the old saying, there is never a cop around when you need one. This was a perfect example and at the time, cell phones were not that popular were very large for they were in a carry bag and were very expensive so we didn’t have one.
This moron went so low as to make a complaint with the child protection agencies and claimed that I was “shooting spies out of our front room window”. Right off the bat you can see that we were dealing with someone who was mentally unstable. But since there was a complaint made, we had to be put under a microscope. Of course the police who were investigating the moron did absolutely nothing for us.
Then one day I got a letter from the DoL saying that someone made an allegation that I was working while collecting UI and the DoL stopped all my benefits. I was not working so the allegations were false. I applied for a fair hearing before an administrative law judge. Before appearing I went to office of the judge to see the allegation. They gave me the folder and there was no allegations in there, nothing. The judge kept yelling at me that I was guilty and shouldn’t waste their time while waving a red rule book in the air like the Chinese did when Mao Tse-Tung was in power. He kept repeating over and over that I was guilty as he walked around the office. I thought they were supposed to be impartial. Nope not in New York.
The day of the hearing I was able to get a lawyer to appear with me. She was with one of those pro-bono law firms and I didn’t have to pay anything. It wasn’t until later that lawyers are not allowed to charge for employment cases. One of the reasons that lawyers will not take employment cases, no money in it for them. So justice goes unserved. At the hearing she did absolutely nothing to defend me. She didn’t even ask about the missing allegation. When I asked to see it I was told I had no right to see it. The judge said I was guilty and I was sanctioned again for 2 years.
During the whole ordeal I learned something that is very frightening. Let’s say that you have a 90 year old woman as a neighbor. Normally her son (or daughter) will take out the garbage to the curb. You are collecting unemployment, a whopping $150 a week. With a family of 4 in your household that amount is $25,200 below the poverty level. But this is New York State and the state does not care.
One day the woman calls you and asks if you don’t mind taking out her garbage for her children could not show up for some reason. So you being a nice person put on your shoes and brought the can from where they kept it and put it on the curb. It took you maybe a minute and a half, a whole 90 seconds. According to the NYS DoL that constitutes a whole days employment and you have to report that and lose that day’s unemployment. That means you lose $30 from your unemployment. Already you are below the poverty level and losing that $30 certainly does not help. Oh, by the way, you still have to pay federal and state income tax on those few pennies. Yep, welcome to New York
Real Estate
I was the CTO for a public REIT and we had a new CEO come on board. In the first week that he was with us, we had a company wide conference call and the CEO said he was going to replace all the older workers with younger and fresher blood. I saw where this was headed. And how many laws did he break?
In March of 2012 I was replaced by an inexperienced 26yo snot. Where I saved the company $4.8 million, the replacement spent $1 million in under a year and things were not working.
I applied for UI and it was granted. So far so good. I did my weekly certifying with the DoL that I was looking, in essence jumped through their hoops and had to do a ‘little tap dance’ until my benefits ran out. Which wasn’t much mind you. Again I was getting below poverty level amount of unemployment.
Crazy thing, they take out for unemployment in your paycheck which makes the money yours yet the DoL dictates how little you get and if you get it.
In my job search quest I face numerous accounts of age discrimination from prospective employers. Yes I was told that I was too old for employment by several. They had the gall to tell me that I was too old. I met with one of the counselors at the Hicksville office of the DoL on Old Country Road and he told me straight out that I will never work again and if I do, I’d make only minimum wage. Really encouraging.
I thought they were suppose to help you find a job. Welcome to New York.
I was free to look through their database to see what jobs were available. And their database? It was Career Builder, Zip Recruiter, Monster, etc. All job websites that anyone can access on the internet. From my experience, not one single job listed with them existed. It was nothing more than recruiting firms collecting resumes to what end? After sending out thousands, yes thousands of resumes not one produced an interview. So I seriously doubt that any of the jobs on those so called job sites exist in the first place.
I even had my resume reviewed by these so called resume experts and they all said it was spot on. Yet not one of them was able to figure out why I was not getting interviews. Experts, my ass.
Funeral Home
I was able to land a menial part time job at a funeral home as a greeter. My job description consisted of menial chores like making sure the chapels were presentable all the time, clean the building after a service, direct people to the correct chapel and or the bathrooms. Nothing more. As part timers we were not allowed to do anything mission critical or constructive. We were told that we were too stupid by the managing partner. The pay sucked, there were no pay raises, no benefits, the directors looked down their noses at the part timers. Both managing partners and the manager also stole the gratuities from the part timers. The place was a toxic working environment through and through. I was there for 11 years putting up with that crap. The only reason I stayed there is because no one was hiring a person my age. Yeah more age discrimination. I’ll touch more on that later.
I must have sent out over 20,000 resumes between getting let go at the real estate company until I started at the funeral home, and maybe the resumes generated 10 interviews. Not great odds. Eventually I gave up and stayed being a door mat for the directors.
We had a new managing partner join us and had one of the managers as his right hand. She followed him just about all over. As a side note, when the original managing partner was there when I was hired, retired that particular manager became the managing partner until the main office found a permanent replacement. Now she had a habit of throwing everyone under the bus.
When I started, I’d do between 30 and 35 hours each week. Then it went to 28 hours, 25 hours, 20 hours then to 15 hours a week. It’s not that they didn’t have the business for they did. They wanted a large pool of part timers to kick around. Regrettably a lot of the part timers were not the sharpest knives in the drawer.
One day the new managing partner came in with the manager and told me that my hours have been cut to on-call. I asked about being transferred to another building that was busier. He said no. But they did give hours to a younger person from the one building where I was to the building that was busy. An argument ensued. The managing partner demanded the keys from me. I gave them to him and asked does this mean I’m fired and he said yes. I was fired.
I applied for UI and initially it was approved then it was denied stating that I made false statements. It appeared that the managing partner and manager lied about my being fired. They said I quit. And like when I was a guard, the New York State DoL sided on the side of the employer and not the employee who is the victim. The DoL demanded that I re-pay the few dollars that I got from UI and sanctioned me again for two years.
Age Discrimination
Now let’s get into age discrimination and the law. On the books it is legal to discriminate based on age yet there are no legal remedies to enforce the law. The best you can do is sue that employer if you can find a lawyer that will take the case.
I was quoted from $30,000 to as low as $5,000 for retainers. With the lawyers that had the so-called low figures as retainers wanted more money in a month, and more in a few more months and yet even more without producing any results. They nickel and dimed you to death. Some big nickels and dimes for sure. So with that kind of service and crazy rates I have to wonder if any cases do get settled. And even then, what is the settlement in the first place? Financially it is not worth their effort to proceed with litigation.
And there is another drawback, once you file a lawsuit it becomes a matter of public record. With a lot of companies using employment screening firms, they will find out about the law suit and label you as a trouble maker. So kiss any opportunities good-bye. Again, thank you New York.
With this, age discrimination is perfectly legal in the state of New York.
I even went as far as going to the Nassau County Bar Association when they had an open house in June. The lawyer I spoke to was not interested in seeing that justice was done. He told me that I can handle the litigation by myself. I went as far as contacting the Bar Association directly and they never responded. So I remain screwed. Thank you New York.
