Please be advised that BIG SAM MOVING, located at 110 First Street in Jersey City, NJ, is an unscrupulous company that regularly cheats its workers of wages and customers of possessions.

The company is owned by Mr. Basam (last name unknown), who goes under the names of Sam or Mike. He uses aliases when he doesn't have enough workers for a job and goes himself to act as a helper, but does not want the client to know that he is the company's owner.

As a former employee, I witnessed first-hand as he stole items from customers that were meant to be kept safe in storage. He stole tool boxes and hand trucks from customers and used them in his business. He does not have insurance available for his clients and when they request it, he claims that he must call his broker, which would take too long. So, if anything gets broken, the customer is only reimbursed for 60 cents per pound so a $3000, 100 pound television would be reimbursed for just $60! In addition, Mr. Basam holds his workers financially responsible for any damage that occurs in the course of moving, even if the cause for the damage is unclear.

The storage, where customers' furniture is kept, is a dilapidated warehouse filled with rats and mice who regularly feast on the sofas and other stuffed items that are kept there. Once, when I delivered furniture from the storage to a customer's house, mice ran out from the sofa we were carrying. Naturally, the customer was horrified!

Many of his workers are ex-convicts, recent immigrants, or homeless people who have few resources and are therefore easily taken advantage of. These are often desperate people who sometimes steal from the customers, since Mr. Basam is reluctant to pay them their wages on time. If the customer complains about theft, then Mr. Basam opens his own wallet and pays to reimburse the client, so that no complaints will be filed against him or his company.

His wife, who answers the phone, always quotes the cheapest price possible to the customer, pretending that a $1,000 job can be done $300 to $500. She does not speak English well, which further confuses the customers. It is then up to his foremen to inform the client about the realistic cost of the move, which immediately causes conflicts between the clients and the movers. The hostility is so extreme that on occasion the movers have had to call the police in order to settle the contract for an amount that the client did not expect.

Sometimes Mr. Basam's wife negotiates a “flat-rate" contract – again for a ridiculously low amount. Then, when the workers are confronted with a much larger job than they expected, they have to work for less than minimum wage, as they will only be paid a flat rate, no matter how many hours the job actually takes. Often they work for 9 hours but are only paid for 5 the hours of work enumerated in the contract.

On occasion, Mr. Barsam gets two workers to agree to “split" hours. In other words, instead of one person working for $7 to $9 an hour, two people have to split that and therefore only make $3.50 to $4.50 per hour apiece. These are grown men, often with families to support. And the work is extremely difficult: The men sometimes have to lift heavy furniture up 3 or 4 flights of stairs with no elevator. He picks out these unfortunates by calling more people than he needs, early in the morning, and then latest them wait for hours and hours until a job may become available. If they wait long enough, he knows they're desperate enough to work for almost nothing.

Many of his employees are drug addicts and dealers, because no one else will remain in his employ for long. Mr. Basam sends these troubled, desperate people into the homes of unsuspecting customers. Most people working in his company are illegally employed and have no skills as movers. They tend to work for just a couple of days to make some money, and then disappear.

When I was working for Mr. Basam, I was considered a full-time employee, with taxes withheld from my wages, However, I was never given a W4 form to fill out. Mr. Basam told me that he was withholding Social Security tax and regularly deducted a percentage from my paycheck. However, the checks did not itemize the amount withheld and there were no records of how much he deducted from my salary. At the end of the year, he never sent me a 1099 form. In other words, he pocketed the money he was supposedly withholding for the government.

Alex
jersey city, New Jersey
U.S.A.



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