A Case in Point.

• Author: Johnson, Sharon
• Position: Unfair labor practices

The greatest challenge Martha faced as a custodian at a suburban school outside Chicago was getting her employer to pay the wages she was due.

"I was supposed to receive $9 an hour," says Martha, a forty-two-year-old Latinx single mother who asked that her last name not be used. "But the outside contractor, which had been hired by the school, used a variety of ways to ensure I received far less."

The school's custodians, most of them people of color, were required to work through lunch hours and work overtime, and even on weekends without pay, Martha relates. Frequent changes in schedules and methods of calculating wages resulted in late paychecks that didn't reflect the hours worked.

"Despite the obstacles, I always did my best because I had two teenage children to support and owned a home," Martha says in a phone interview. "Because of my limited knowledge of English, I was terrified that I would never find another job and my family would suffer."

Martha eventually summoned the courage to raise her concerns about the unpaid wages with the cleaning service. "Not only was I rebuffed but the managers retaliated by giving me fewer cleaning supplies and more work," she says.

Seeking strength in numbers, Martha and other custodians who had experienced similar intimidation met with the managers who threatened to fire them and withhold their paychecks.

"Retaliation escalated and after six years, I was fired along with seven other custodians," Martha recalls. "I was sad and hurt because I had done more and more work and had close relationships with people at the school. Our firing made no sense because there had never been a single complaint by the...