Newly arrived from Guyana and with a pregnant wife at home, Jermaine Cranmore, 34, was looking for a job.
Sipping on a drink at a local cafe in Richmond Hill, Queens, Cranmore struck up a conversation with a fellow countryman. As it turned out, his new acquaintance happened to be a recruiter for a temp agency called Workforce that supplied workers for Parts Authority, one of the nation’s largest auto parts retailers, and had a job for him he could start immediately
The catch? The job paid $13 per hour, below the state minimum wage of $15 an hour. New to New York and hungry for work, Cranmore took the job anyway.
“Being a recent immigrant, I needed a job,” he said. “I got a wife. I got bills. I got to put a hot plate of food on the table.”
Within a few weeks, in May 2022, Cranmore was riding in a Workforce van from his home near Rockaway Boulevard in Queens to Parts Authority’s Bronxdale Avenue warehouse in the Bronx. All workers hired by Workforce were required to take the van to and from the warehouse and had to fork over $10 a day for the privilege.
“That’s like $70 a week they took out of our paycheck,” said Cranmore. He claims that “if you didn’t take the van you had to leave the job.”
Although initially grateful to have a job, for the next two years, Cranmore would come to find himself trapped in a cycle of what he believed was exploitation that was difficult to escape. While Parts Authority partly employed union workers at their warehouse, it also employed immigrant contract workers like him who were paid at a lower hourly rate and worked longer hours.
“We were doing the same job but they would work eight hours a day and we would work 12 hours a day,” he said.
In addition to the low wages and long hours, Cranmore claims immigrant workers like himself were not provided with adequate workplace safety equipment.
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“They never provided safety gear like back straps or heavy-duty shoes,” he said. “It’s a warehouse so it’s dirty and they don’t give us masks or gloves.”
Now, Cranmore is fighting back. According to a class action lawsuit he filed on Aug. 1, Cranmore alleges that the Parts Authority engaged in a practice that discriminated against recent immigrants from Guyana based on their actual or perceived immigration statuses by paying them subminimum wages at hourly rates lower than those of other Parts Authority workers performing the same job at the same location.
The lawsuit is focused on the Parts Authority Bronx location and could impact about 300 workers employed at the warehouse over the past six years.
Cranmore, who was employed as a car parts stocker and scanner, claims he regularly worked 54 hours a week. Frequently, he says he was required to extend his shifts until four in the morning, forcing him to work up to 66 hours per workweek. During the busy summer period in July and August 2022, it was not uncommon for Cranmore to regularly work an exhaustive seven days per week, totaling approximately 84 hours per workweek.
Working so many hours, he found it difficult to maintain any semblance of a normal life.
“A lot of times I would miss my kid’s [doctor visits],” he said. “ I would miss my wife’s appointment with her ultrasound, her doctor because I couldn’t take a day off. It felt like a part of me was pulled away.”
Although time with his family grew scarce, Cranmore’s fear of being replaced kept him working.
“It was not fun,” he said. “I remember vividly when I wanted to take the days off and they told me if I took off they would have to replace me. Sick or not we had to go to work. It was hectic, but I pulled through to do what I had to do with my family.”
Yet as he continued to work, he grew conscious of the disparity in pay between the immigrant contracted workers and the union Parts Authority workers. When he complained to a supervisor about the low pay he recalled the supervisor telling him he was “lucky” to receive $13 per hour.
“You’re basically held in captivity there,” he said. “You work Monday to Saturday. Sunday is the only day off. How could you start looking for another job? So they got you. You’re concrete. Locked in.”
Cranmore’s experience is not a unique one. Parts Authority has had a long history of exploiting subcontractors. Last year, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) ordered Parts Authority to pay workers $5.6 million in back wages and liquidated damages. The DOL found that the company misclassified 1,398 truck drivers in Arizona as independent contractors.
Much like what Cranmore experienced, the DOL found that Parts Authority violated the Fair Labor Standards Act by disregarding minimum wage requirements, paying straight-time rates for all hours worked, failing to pay at time and a half for hours over 40 in a workweek, and failing to keep required timekeeping records.
There have also been at least three other lawsuits against Parts Authority for wage theft and misclassification of workers.
In addition to engaging in wage theft, Parts Authority has an extensive track record of violating federal safety standards. Between 2017 and 2024, Parts Authority accumulated 56 Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) violations at locations across the country.
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During one incident in Maine on July 6, 2023, a Parts Authority employee had multiple fingers amputated while attempting to cut a section of unclamped and unsecured wire rope. The company was ordered to pay a penalty of $10,938.
Another dangerous incident occurred at a Parts Authority warehouse in Georgia on June 5, 2018, where employees performing warehouse work were exposed to eye and skin burns while working with corrosive chemicals from batteries containing sulfuric acid. Parts Authority was ordered to pay a penalty of $13,260.
Parts Authority did not respond to Documented’s request for comment. Workforce recruiting agency could not be reached for comment.
Cranmore’s attorney Galen Baynes, a partner at Pechman Law Group PLLC, noted that attempts by major companies to conceal minimum and overtime wage violations by using subcontractors are commonly seen in wage theft cases. Baynes also emphasized that “all workers are protected against wage theft under the law and have the right to bring claims for unpaid minimum and overtime wages regardless of immigration status.” He reaffirmed that, “it is also an illegal discriminatory practice under New York law to pay workers doing the same jobs at different rates because of their actual or perceived immigration statuses.”
Cranmore no longer works for Parts Authority. He was fired in April, and claims it was for taking time off to repair his car. He says it wasn’t the first time he was penalized for taking time off, receiving a week’s suspension from a Parts Authority supervisor earlier this year because he had taken personal leave to take his son to the hospital. He claims the same supervisor also suspended him for a week after he left work early at another time to take his wife to the hospital.
Cranmore hopes that the case will benefit not only him but all the other immigrant workers too.
“A lot of this happened to people in the past and they never got anything from Parts Authority, but my wife told me it’s better to try and fail than to fail to try.”
