Providers to sue network for missing wages

After several months of working without pay, a group of UFT family child care providers in the Bronx are preparing to sue their former network, Hunts Point Multiservice.

The 10 providers, who were not paid for four months of work completed during the summer and fall, are filing a class action lawsuit against the South Bronx network on behalf of themselves and 35 of their former colleagues who have also not been paid.

Tammie Miller, the chair of the UFT Family Child Care Providers Chapter, blasted the network and its director, Manuel A. Rosa, for their treatment of the providers.

“Mr. Rosa and Hunts Point Multiservice have cheated 45 hardworking providers out of wages that are rightfully theirs,” Miller said. “They earned that money with their labor, and neither I nor the UFT, with all of its 200,000 members, will rest until they have it.”

The union was informed of the situation in late September by one of the 45 providers working at the network who said she had not been paid since June 30.

It is unclear what happened to the money meant to pay the providers. Under ordinary circumstances, that money would have passed from the city to the network, which would have dispersed it to providers according to a formula set by the state. But that process broke down, and neither the city nor the network have said publicly what happened to the funds.

“The silence emanating from Hunts Point Multiservice and the Administration for Children’s Services speaks volumes,” Miller said. “Clearly, the city is failing to provide sufficient oversight of child care networks to which it entrusts huge sums of money — and it is working New Yorkers who are hurt as a result.”

The loss of four months’ income has taken a heavy toll on the providers.

“I had to use my savings, and now I’m financially dependent on my daughter,” said Hilda Monción, one of the providers participating in the lawsuit.

Monción, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, had worked with Hunts Point Multiservice for 17 years. The job had allowed her to raise her children and put them through college.

“It’s a slap in the face,” she said. “All the hard work I’ve put in over the years went unseen. It leaves a feeling that providers aren’t important, that we’re not important.”

The Administration for Children’s Services had said it would try to find funds to pay the providers the money owed them, but it has so far been unable to do so.

Most of the providers have since transferred to a different network at the city agency’s behest.