business

A group of longtime employees at D'Amico & Partners will lose their jobs Monday unless they produce paperwork proving their residency. The standoff is among the first of what could be thousands nationwide between employees and employers as a new federal rule takes hold.

The group of 15, all of whom are Hispanic, made a last-ditch effort Friday to save their jobs by filing charges of discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

"They're assuming that the workers are undocumented because they're Latino," said Veronica Mendez of the Workers Interfaith Network, a local nonprofit group that has worked with the employees.

The group includes workers who have been employed at the company for 10 to 17 years.

"The money that I make is what my family lives off of," said Victor Taday, who has worked at the company since 1996. The Minneapolis resident said he supports his wife and three children cleaning the Uptown D'Amico & Sons restaurant.

The confrontation is likely to play out in workplaces across the country that rely on immigrant workers. Recently, the Bush administration decided to press ahead with new rules for employers who receive notice from the Social Security Administration about employees who have suspicious Social Security numbers, or numbers that don't match government records.

The so-called "No Match" rule would force employers nationwide to fire employees who can't prove their identities within 90 days of receiving a notices.

A federal judge blocked the first version of the No-Match rule after a coalition of labor, business, farm and civil rights groups protested that it amounted to discrimination. The new rule, if it satisfies the court, could go into effect this summer.

"The employer is really between a rock and a hard place," said Laura Danielson, an immigration attorney at the Minneapolis law firm Fredrikson & Byron.

If the restaurant doesn't verify its employees, it risks a violation of federal employment eligibility laws; if the restaurant takes action against a group of employees, it risks discrimination claims.

"They're being required by the government to do very difficult and possibly contradictory things," she said.

The D'Amico employees were first flagged by the Social Security Administration in letters sent to D'Amico between 2004 and 2006, with some employees named more than once, according to the company.

"The company has been following up on these letters for the past several years when they have gotten them," said Dan Palmquist, a company attorney and immigration law professor. "Some of [the employees] were able to resolve them; some simply disappeared; some have been terminated in the past."

A dozen workers were fired Jan. 1, according to Mendez.

The company said this group of 15 was the last of the employees that had drawn concerns from the federal government.

Executive chef and co-owner Larry D'Amico met on Friday with one of the employees and a representative of WIN, but neither side could come to an agreement.

The company told the employees in September that they had to begin negotiations with the Social Security Administration by March 31 to clear up their identity or risk losing their jobs, said Amy Rotenberg, a company spokeswoman.

The employees were reminded in letters the company sent in January, February and again this week.

Some of the employees sent letters to the Baltimore offices of the Social Security Administration, according to the company. But that was the wrong office and wouldn't have cleared up the matter.

"We became very concerned that WIN was trying to game us, and trying to cover up something that shouldn't be covered up," said Rotenberg. "There are people who have a serious identity mismatch."

The restaurant says it's powerless to stop the federal government and could face fines or criminal charges if it ignored the no match letters.

Matt McKinney • 612-673-7329