‘The Violation of Their Rights Was Astounding’

To fully understand why, in 2010, Marcos Díaz and Giovanni Paulino showed up at Steve Arenson’s office with a wage-theft case against J.V. Car Wash, you’d have to go back to 1998. It might even make sense to go back to a man hailing a cab outside his Manhattan apartment building in 1987.

That man, Joseph T. Arenson, Steve’s father, and a well-known wills and estates lawyer, 

struck up a conversation with Juan Carlos Castro, the Dominican driver whose cab he happened to hail. By the end of the day, Castro was Arenson’s personal driver. By the end of the week, he was family. 

“Famous judges and famous lawyers spoke at my father’s funeral, but what I remember most is what Castro said,” says Arenson, from the offices of Arenson, Dittmar & Karban. “He spoke about how he was an orphan living in New York City; and then my dad became a father to him. He showed him what a real gentleman looked like.”

Arenson, an employment and labor lawyer, has a background in theater, and his talent for dramatization is on display as he weaves the tale of how he became the lawyer New York’s immigrant communities call on. It began in 1998 with a phone call from Castro: “‘Esteban! I have a case for you! It’s 150 people. They feel their lawyer is a real bandito.’” 

Days later, Arenson found himself in the basement of a church on 186th Street, with more than 100 Dominican workers sizing him up. They were seeking to sue a Fortune 100 financial institution for an act of discrimination, and they’d already been through one attorney. Arenson soon learned the case was about much more than that single incident: Rampant racial discrimination and sexual harassment was creating a hostile work environment.

The lawyers for the company tried to overwhelm Arenson, he says, like the time they demanded answers to extensive written questions for each of his 150 clients, many of whom didn’t speak English. Some interviews took three hours, some three days, some three weeks. “I had an interpreter, but I couldn’t get a linear, coherent narrative,” he says. “When I would ask these women, ‘Were you sexually harassed?’ they would say, ‘No.’ Three hours later I would say, ‘Did anyone ever touch your breasts or butt?’ And the answer is, ‘Oh yeah! Of course!’ It took me about 18 months to do this.”

The hard work paid off when the defense settled on the eve of trial in 2003. “It was a remarkable amount,” Arenson says. “It was life-changing for these people.” 

And word went out in the Dominican community.

At issue in the J.V. Car Wash case was a large group of workers, “carwasheros,” as they referred to themselves, who claimed wage theft: working 12-hour days for $50 a day in cash for many, many years. “They’re outside in January. In July. It’s brutal work,” Arenson says. “And to be paid like that, it was just crazy.”

Against the advice of his peers, Arenson took it on. “I had to,” he says. “The violation of their rights was astounding.”

Two workers turned into 16. “To our surprise, the owner of the car wash, Jose Vazquez, goes to the judge and his first defense was, ‘These people never worked for me. I don’t know who they are,’” Arenson says. “So I went back to my clients. Luckily, they had selfies of themselves working at the car wash over the years. So we produced the selfies. The judge says to [the owner], ‘Well, what were they doing there?’ And he said, ‘Well, my car washes are in very dangerous neighborhoods, and there are gangs, and the gangs are backed by drug lords. And the drug lords have threatened me at knifepoint to let these people come on my property and operate their own business.’ 

“And the judge looks at him in disbelief and says, ‘And for how long has this been going on? ‘Oh, since the beginning.’ ‘For 25 years?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘At all four locations?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You ever think of calling the police? ‘No, I was too scared.’”

The defense, says Arenson, banked on a run-down-the-clock strategy. Vazquez postponed depositions, fired his original lawyers, and, in an 11th-hour attempt to halt the case, filed Chapter 11, yet failed to disclose the $1.2 million in cash he had sitting in his basement, which was discovered by trustees appointed to the case.

Eventually, Vazquez settled for an amount much higher than Arenson originally sought. 

“One of the workers, Ramon Alvarez, got close to $200,000, which was life-changing money for him,” Arenson says. “A number got over $100,000. Most got between $70,000 and $100,000.”

Along the way, Arenson kept getting calls from other J.V. employees who wanted to join the case, but that window had closed. Until it reopened.

“A letter comes onto my desk,” Arenson remembers, “and it’s a notice from the bankruptcy court. And it says: ‘Notice to all unsecured creditors, if you have any claim, the time to submit a claim has been revived and extended.’ … I called up a top bankruptcy lawyer, and I said, ‘Does this mean what I think it means?’ He says, ‘It does.’ I said, ‘Should I be telling people? He says, ‘It’s perfectly fine for you to notify workers who may have claims.’ So I called up the guy who’d been calling me for months, word spread like wildfire, and part two of the case opened the door to 88 more workers.”

All told, 106 workers were compensated. 

“After eight years, the total recovery against this car wash was approximately $9 million,” Arenson says.

Unsurprisingly, immigrant workers from other companies keep calling Arenson and firm partner Avi Mermelstein. In a wage-theft case against New Jersey’s Caribbean Car Wash, Arenson won $1 million for 23 former employees. In 2021, he won a case on behalf of hundreds of car wash workers in New York and New Jersey, settling for more than $5 million. 

Arenson was in the midst of a case in federal court, he says, “in which immigrant construction workers, who worked on scaffolds 10 to 20 floors above the streets of Manhattan, were made to wait to the end of the month to be paid in cash—in violation of the New York State Labor Law—only to find that their pay was incomplete. They also were subjected to racist comments disparaging Spanish workers from one of the bosses, which went on for years despite their complaints. Sadly, this is not uncommon.”

When he thinks about these cases, he also thinks about his own family. The grandparents on his father’s side, Jewish immigrants from Romania, arrived in the U.S. not knowing English. His grandfather wound up selling sewing machines door-to-door.

“That immigrant experience and the promise of the American dream intersected with being raised in the tradition of helping those who are less fortunate,” Arenson says. “The work is very much animated by my Jewish values, the idea of having compassion for the stranger, for someone who is new to a land.

“No matter what’s happening right now,” he adds, “this country, and chiefly, this city, still provides opportunities and hope.”

Arenson’s Inspiration

Along with his own family history, Arenson draws inspiration and motivation from two sources. One is the essay “Loving the Stranger” by Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of England. The other is Biblical, Deuteronomy 24:14-15, which he says feels like it’s pulled from one of his wage-theft cases:

“Do not withhold the wages due to your poor or destitute hired hand, whether he is one of your brethren or a proselyte living in a settlement in your land. You must give him his wage on the day it is due, and not let the sun set with him waiting for it. Since he is a poor man, and his life depends on it, do not let him call out to God, causing you to have a sin.”