Immigrants Provide Employee Answer for Long Island Mailing Company

                                                                                      (BY CHARLIE LeDUFF)

EDGEWOOD, N.Y.—There is a one- story building in the back of an industrial park here with a roof the size of eight football fields.  There, companies’ financial statement are prepared and shipped to investors across the country by Investor Communication Services, the nation’s largest provider of such services, which expects to send a billion pieces of mail this year.

            The company has one problem: employees “ we can’t find enough of them,” said Judy M. Winter-Giella, director of human resources.

            The solution is immigrants. “ We know what the job market is and we’ve found a work force that is eager to work and eager to learn,” M. Winter-Giella said.

            The work force at the I.C.S. center here on central Long Island is about 90 percent foreign born, company official estimate: about 85 percent Hispanic and 5 percent Haitian. Though they work with mail written in English, most of them cannot speak or read language.

            Like much of the country, Suffolk County is experiencing an unprecedented labor shortage.  With unemployment hovering around 2 percent here, there are not enough people to fill all the low-level, low-paying jobs available.

            It is not unusual for large companies to turn to recent immigrants to close the gap.  But I.C.S. has come up with a way to keep the workers it has, while helping them toward jobs with better pay and a future: it pays workers to attend courses on English as a second language.  Classes are held twice a week in the company break rooms.  Each two-hour class averages about 20 people.

            The company says employees with English skills work more efficiently and provides a pool of candidates for higher-level jobs.

            “If you want to sort mail written in English, if you want to get ahead, then you have to learn to read and speak English,” Maggie Rajotte, the language teacher, told a dozen Hispanic men in the break room after work.

            During the busy season from March through May, the company, a division of New Jersey-based Automatic Data Processing, will take on 1,300 temporary workers to augment its full-time staff of 700.  These people will work as much as 84 hours a week in 12-hour shifts, Ms Winter-Giealla said

            Wages start at $6.75 an hour, and few skills are needed to load envelopes and reading material into a machine.

            “ The truth is, the new people are hungry,” Ms Winter-Giella said.  “We’ve found they will work 54 days in a row.  We depend on them to tell their friends and relatives that there is good work here.”

Nadesha Sosa found work here.  She walked in the door four years ago as a temporary sorter and is now a line supervisor earning about $15 an hour.

Ms Sosa, who fields the civil war in El Salvador, now owns a home nearby in Brentwood with her husband, a day laborer, and two children.  She speaks excellent English.

“I came from a war, and now I have a home,” Ms Sosa, 26, said as she wandered between the sorting and stamping machines.   “ The language classes, they’re a good thing.  The company is teaching people to be part of society, not hidden laborers.”

The Census Bureau estimates that more than 850,000 immigrants came to the United States between July 1998 and July 1999.  But some economists believe that the number of illegal aliens is woefully underestimated and that the actual number could be as much as three times that.

There is a strong demand for people to fill laborious and dirty jobs that pay $8 an hour or less- about 25 percent of all jobs in the country.  And Suffolk County has a large population of new immigrants- 3,040 in the year that ended in July 1999, according to the Census Bureau.  Most of them are from Mexico or Latin America, and many are here illegally.

At I.C.S. workers are required to offer proof that they can work legally in the United States: a Social Security card and a picture ID.  But counterfeits are easily obtained and workers readily that they work under false names.  Workers also must pass a drug test and a criminal background check.

Employers can be fined for knowingly hiring illegal workers, but they also risk being sued for discrimination if they challenge documents that on the surface seem authentic, Ms. Winter-Giella said.

“ If the documents appear real, we accept them as such,” she said. “we can’t afford to mistreat people.’

The Social Security Administration makes only random checks once a year for numbers that fail to match legitimate accounts or repeat themselves in different locations.

The workplace is clean and well kept at I.C.S. The overtime is plentiful, the paychecks steady.  And the technology is state of the art.

“ The hardest part of the job is the ink and the paper cuts,” said Luis Morales, 32, a Mexican who works under another name.

“It doesn’t pay much, but it warm work for the wintertime.  Ehen May comes, I’ll go back to landscaping.  That pays $15 an hour without taxes.”

While they have found work on the farms and in the factories, new immigrants have not found a welcome mat in Long Island.  Groups of Americans routinely protest the presence of day laborers that loiter on their streets while waiting for work.  Recently two Mexican men were abducted by two white men and stabbed and beaten with gardening tools in Suffolk County.  The motive was hate, the police said.

There is a housing shortage that the county is unable to solve.  Immigrants routinely live in tool sheds and auto garages. “ Speaks English!” is the battle cry in the suburban parking lots.