New Jersey Monthly
By Miriam Ascarelli
Jersey City’s Underground Economy

At 6 p.m., as the lights twinkle in the skyscrapers across the Hudson River, an exhausted Maria Barengan gets off the #101-L bus from Bayonne and arrives at the doorstep of New Jersey’s most celebrated urban reincarnation: the Jersey City waterfront. Carrying her dinner neatly packed in a clear plastic tote bag, Maria walks against the steady stream of well-dressed traders, attorneys and secretaries leaving the office towers that have risen from the ruins of a moribund waterfront and enters 15 Exchange Place, a stately stone building with a view of Manhattan and an A-list of clients that symbolize the swagger and clout of the new prosperity: Merrill Lynch, Deloitte & Touche, Tucker Anthony. Maria heads straight for the security desk and signs in, then takes the freight elevator to the ninth floor where she meets Jose S., the night supervisor, and gets the keys. Thus Maria, a 23-year-old Honduran immigrant who has already spent the day working in a sweater factory in Bayonne, begins her second job: cleaning offices.

Welcome to the underbelly of the new economy. Maria is part of an invisible workforce, the unnoticed legion of laborers whose work begins after the high tech moguls and financial wizards who have turned the Jersey City waterfront into the poster child of post-industrial prosperity have gone home for the day. Doing the tasks of vacuuming floors, disinfecting toilets and emptying trash cans, the cleaners work in deserted offices that only a few hours before were bustling with the drama of high-stakes litigation and million-dollar deals. They are cheap labor: recent arrivals from Latin America, most of them women, who speak little or no English. As many as 40 percent, according to the organizers of Local 32 BJ of the Service Employees International Union, are undocumented, working under the table or with false papers. The jobs are mostly part-time. The going rate is $6 to $6.50. Benefits are rare.…