"We wanted to send a message" to the Labor Department, Romero says. "If you mishandle a case, it's gonna come out of your hide. The question I was asking was, how could you let it go this long? Why did you continue to pursue it to the absolute outcome?"
The AG's office, says First Assistant Attorney General David Kaye, continued the litigation for so long to prevent Renteria from collecting disability and back pay. And, in fact, the AG's office succeeded, because there was an out-of-court settlement and no legal precedent was set. "Conceding on those principles, particularly the issue of double recovery, likely would have cost the taxpayers far more in the long run through repetition in other cases," Kaye says. "The matter had to be resolved when first raised in this case."
In the end, Renteria's $350,000 settlement included back pay, interest and attorney's fees--but not disability pay. The state legislature agreed to pay $273,000; the rest was absorbed by the Labor Department.
While Renteria was busy breaking the bank, other Coloradans were coming to his division for aid and getting nowhere. Joe Kennedy lost his job as an engineering technician several years ago and filed a claim against his former employers, charging that they owed him back wages and had not paid. He waited three months before he was told by an LSU compliance officer to pursue the matter in court. Eventually, Kennedy found a lawyer, pursued his claim in court and won a settlement several months later.
"Trying to make the system work was defeatist," Kennedy says. "Trying to get into the system, follow it step by step, was fruitless. I wish they could tell me up front, 'We can't do anything. We're just doing this to get paid.' Maybe they're as frustrated as I am, but they don't make us aware of that."
Stronger labor departments in other states--such as Utah, Wyoming, California and Montana--can make legally binding decisions and often represent claimants in court; in Colorado, the LSU can do neither. Colorado's average wage collected per claim is lower than the amounts collected in Montana, Utah or California.
"We don't tell anybody that there's no more we can do," says Colleen Strasburg, acting supervisor of the Industrial Commission of Utah's labor division. "We don't just arbitrarily pull out because a suit is too gray."
Some Coloradans say that is exactly what happens here. Tom Snedden made $45,000 as a finance vice-president at the same company Moe Zenati worked for, Mainstreet Homes, until Snedden lost his job in March 1995. He says he was due vacation pay and thirty days of severance pay. He filed a claim with the LSU but says nothing came of it.
"They agreed my claim was valid," Snedden says, "but they said they didn't have the legal resources to get into that. My comment was, what are they there for if they're just going to write two letters?"
Snedden couldn't afford to pursue his claim in court, and it took him half a year to find a new job, as a sales manager for a construction company in Iowa. "I feel I'm an educated individual," he says, "and if I don't have a chance, then what about the poor?"
Even Colorado officials say Snedden has a point. "I think they're up a creek," Donlon says when asked the same question. "I think they're at kind of a loss." The LSU doesn't keep statistics on the number of claimants who actually pursue their complaints in court, but Donlon says he "doubts seriously" that there are very many of them.
Zenati is one. Hired as a computer programmer on contract by Mainstreet Homes in January 1994, Zenati claims he became an employee of the company by October of the same year and wants $100,000 in wages and overtime for hours worked between that time and April 1995, when he was fired. The company paid him $5,000 upon his termination but contends he was always an independent contractor, never an employee.
Mainstreet argued that Zenati had never filled out an employee agreement or a W-4 form and that he had submitted invoices to them, an action typical for a contractor but not an employee. On June 23 of last year, the LSU rendered its determination: "It appears there will be no resolution of your claim through this office."
Zenati compiled affidavits of colleagues who believed he was an employee, and when that didn't accomplish anything, he sought Renteria's help. (In the meantime, Zenati learned of Renteria's own labor dispute.)
He and Renteria give different accounts of what transpired during their few conversations. "I thought we were having a good dialogue," Renteria says, "and all of a sudden he got an opinion that I wasn't being fair. So he asked me to pull out, so I did. He did the right thing: He filed a lawsuit."
"If he's saying we had a good dialogue from the very beginning, that's a fabrication," Zenati says. "I pointed out to him that I felt he should have been more sensitive to due process, having gone through the same thing.
