KINGSTON (New York) FREEMAN

December 30, 2007

A voice for the voiceless

By Blaise Schweitzer, Freeman staff

The very name of Geovanny Triviño's new employer, the Bureau of Immigrant Workers' Rights, triggers a common question.

"Immigrants have rights?"

Triviño, a New Paltz resident, joined the newly formed arm of the New York State Department of Labor in July, but even before then he spent much of his life convincing workers and employers that everyone has rights. The right to be paid fairly for work, to be treated with respect and to have safe working conditions is inherent, he said.

"If you've provided a service, if you've performed labor, you should be paid for that labor," he said.

Even the word "immigrant" has taken on a negative connotation that Triviño shakes his head at, especially when paired with "illegal" as it often is in news accounts.

Triviño prefers to call such men and women "undocumented workers." He said no human life is "illegal," and when it is used, the word leaves an aftertaste of criminality behind. "How could you say a six-month-old kid is a criminal when he's carried through a border?"

Triviño's current position, that of immigrant community liaison within the state Department of Labor, has him working all over New York. Sometimes he joins unannounced inspections of factories and other businesses; sometimes he speaks to state workers about how to better serve immigrants. Often his ever-present cell phone and hand-held computer light up with calls and forwarded messages from activists.

Networking is a big part of his job now, so Triviño recently met with former colleague Dan Werner of the Workers' Rights Law Center of Kingston to talk about a new anti-human-trafficking law as well as farm worker issues in the Hudson Valley.

Before coming to the Department of Labor, Triviño was outreach coordinator with the center for three years. There he demonstrated an ability to put people at ease and to stand up for their rights, according to Patricia Kakalec, the executive director of the agency.

"He's so not off-putting to people. People really trust him," Kakalec said. "We used to get calls: 'Is this the law office of Geovanny Triviño?"

Although prior to joining the center he did work as a paralegal for the Farmworker Law Project of the Legal Aid Society, Triviño is not a lawyer. Kakalec and Werner are the agency's attorneys who have fought in court to get large overtime wage settlements - and others - for workers throughout the region.

Kakalec joked that she was a "cog" in Triviño's wheel when they worked together, and said his ability to communicate with wronged workers helped make many of those settlements possible. She specifically mentioned his connection to workers who won a $250,000 overtime case with Peppy's Foods Inc. of Montgomery. In the 1995 case against the pizza maker, individuals received between $40 and $15,000 upon settlement.

"He was really the face of the Workers Rights Law Center when he was here," she said.

When Triviño left the center to join the state Department of Labor, he was joined by a new staff of 10 bilingual investigators tasked specifically to serve immigrants who work jobs in New York State. Eight of the new investigators speak English and Spanish, one speaks Korean and English and one Chinese and English.

Since they were hired, the state Department of Labor has been successful in increasing payments to wronged workers in overtime and minimum wage claims by more than $1 million over the same 9-month period of 2006, according to Leo Rosales, director of communications for the labor department. That was an increase from approximately $4.6 million to $5.6 million due to the outreach as well as better investigation and enforcement work.

The state Department of Labor's new policy of entering workplaces without prior appointments has angered some employers and frightened some workers, especially those who haven't obtained green cards. The state agency doesn't enforce immigration laws, however, and Triviño has worked hard to ease the fears of such workers when he comes across them.

Just as men and women may fail to report crimes to the police if they fear being reported to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, they wouldn't trust the state Department of Labor if they got an inkling the department was working with INS, he said.

It does not, Triviño said, but he has seen employees who have nothing to fear blanch at the sight of state Department of Labor workers entering their plants. To their eyes, "the government is the government" and men in suits can be scary, he said.

"We're not INS," he tells workers, "This is a worker-protection division."

Some of Triviño's contacts in the field - such as organizer Sandy Cuellar Oxford of the United Food and Commercial Workers union - have seen him in both his role in the private sector and his new position.

She said he is operating in a climate where workers are fearful and said the reaction to Gov. Eliot Spitzer's attempt to give driver licenses to immigrants highlights the general hostility toward such workers.

He has a brief window in which to convince workers on the job that he is on their side, Oxford said.

"With this population that he's working with, he has to be able - in the first 10 seconds - to disarm them and to get on a level where they will trust him."

Triviño's ability to speak Spanish fluently is an obvious asset, but he has also picked up the lingo and manner required within the more corporate atmosphere of his government job, she said, calling him almost a shapeshifter.

One moment he will be easing a fearful worker, the next interacting with officials or employers with more of an assertive air.

"He can shift when we need him to be stronger and more authoritative and more bureaucratic," Oxford said. "He can speak that language as well. Not only is he bilingual in the languages of English and Spanish."

Triviño was born in Ecuador and raised part-time there and part-time in Brooklyn. He would go from a somewhat guarded life on one square block in Brooklyn to the incredibly free experience of running around his neighborhood in Ecuador. He smiled as he recalled using a nearby river as a means to swim from place to place.

Now a citizen of the United States, Triviño has a wife, Angelica Bailon, who is a teacher, and two sons. His own mother is a seamstress and his father a cab driver. From the age of 12 he joined his mom's world of sweatshop sewing, making fancy ties with designer labels. He later drove a cab like his father, but the long hours sewing did more to inform how he goes about his current post helping workers.

"We didn't know it was illegal to work in sweatshops, let alone be a minor and work," he said.

When the family went back to Ecuador for seasons at a time he would live more like a pint-sized entrepreneur. Sometimes he would sell empanadas or pickled mangos, other times he would rent out a videocassette player and movies to his neighbors.

Even in Ecuador, however, he witnessed how disparities in wealth can be damaging. There, the lucrative shrimp farming business wreaked havoc on mangrove swamps and harmed the poor men and women who lived nearby.

He has studied photography, and for a time helped an uncle document the shrimp-farming crisis with pictures. That was satisfying, he said, but has felt himself to be more drawn to supporting poor workers more directly.

While he has seen the power of photography inform and uplift, he feels when he is helping workers stand up for themselves he has a broader positive impact, he said.

Time is not only linked to money. When he has seen workers abused and pushed beyond sane hours without pay gain back their lives, he feels good, he said.

"Sometimes when people really have no time for themselves and family, when they're practically working 20 hours a day or are on call 20 hours a day and they really have no time," he said.

He doesn't have to push when it comes to asking workers to file claims. They already live with the motivation to strike back, he said: "When people feel that they're not respected or valued ... Usually people are upset enough that they really don't need any convincing as to why."