DATELINE–Los Angeles

On the night of Wednesday, Jan. 6, 1999, Leticia Alvarez de Toledo spent the night at work. It was a new job for de Toledo, and she often arrived home in a state of near exhaustion. Yet, she had never arrived later than 11 p.m. Her husband, Jorge Luis, feared something had gone terribly wrong.

E-ProMOTION is a start-up Internet marketing firm located just outside Los Angeles with a staff of 25 full-time employees specializing in niche-marketing on the Web. The two-year-old company already boasts such high-powered clients as Time Warner and Prudential Insurance.

Less than a month before the close of 1998, E-ProMOTION moved into larger headquarters in Malibu Shores. The company expects its staff to double within the first quarter of 1999, and its new offices, with over 2,000 square feet of space, are handsomely equipped to facilitate this expansion. Shortly after the company’s relocation, it signed a yearlong contract with California Corporate Custodial.

De Toledo began working nights at E-ProMOTION as an employee of CCC two days after Christmas. Her nightly chores consist of cleaning the bathrooms, emptying out the trash bins, vacuuming and tidying up in the staff kitchen. By the time she reaches E-ProMOTION at 8 p.m., she has already worked 10 hours doing similar tasks at other offices. It’s her last assignment, and it usually takes Mrs. de Toledo less than two hours to finish her duties there.

Which is exactly how long her shift lasted on the night of Jan. 6. At only a few minutes past 10 p.m., Mrs. de Toledo had already packed up her cleaning gear and was ready to go out to the parking lot and await the CCC van that would drop her off near her apartment in La Puente. But when she attempted to walk out of E-ProMOTION, she found that the high-security gates had been locked from the outside. de Toledo was trapped inside.

Annoyed that she would have to wait for a CCC manager to arrive with the master keys, de Toledo attempted to telephone her family. After a few failed attempts (after 6pm, the phones at E-ProMOTION only dial preprogrammed numbers without a password), she finally called CCC to inform them of her predicament. The dispatcher at CCC was no longer picking up the phone. Instead, Mrs. de Toledo left a message explaining her situation.

Thirty minutes passed and there was still no sign of the CCC van. Delays of an hour or more are not unheard of in the custodial business. CCC employs more than 30 janitors and is responsible for both dropping them off and picking them up at work sites throughout the Los Angeles County. CCC provides the escort not as a service to the janitors, but as a quality control measure for the companies that contract its services.

At the pickup, a manager from CCC confirms that the custodians have done their job and makes sure they have not stolen anything from the work site. A full inspection of both worker and premises is performed daily as standard operating procedure. At 11 p.m., de Toledo began to worry there would be no such inspection that night. Sometime after 11:30 p.m., she made a series of frantic calls to CCC. None were answered.

At this point, another worker might have called 911 or at least telephoned a contact person at E-ProMOTION. But de Toledo was afraid to blow the whistle. Though both of her daughters were born in the United States, de Toledo was not. She is one of tens of thousands of illegal residents who work so-called “underground jobs” in the Los Angeles metropolitan area for substantially less than the minimum wage. There is no emergency relief for Mrs. de Toledo. She would just have to sit tight until the CCC van showed up.

And sit down she did, but not quietly. Two weeks earlier, de Toledo and her husband had purchased a used computer for their two young daughters. The Christmas gift came with a modem, and twelve year-old Isabel, de Toledo’s youngest daughter, had shown her mother how to use the Internet.

It was the first time de Toledo had used a computer, but having been an accomplished typist during her high school years in Lima, Peru, the 42-year-old took an instant liking to it. And to America Online.

At 12:14 a.m., de Toledo logged on to AOL using one of the many Web design workstations still up and running at E-ProMOTION. At 12:17 a.m. she posted an exasperated request for help to a Spanish-language chat room dedicated to telenovelas, the soap operas that play nationally on Hispanic television.

She asked if someone in the Los Angeles area could please call her family and inform them of her situation. Two L.A.-based AOL users who read her message reached her husband by telephone at approximately 12:30 a.m. de Toledo was then able to communicate directly with her husband via their daughters’ computer, although it would be another nine hours before she came home.

Lock-ins like the one that happened to de Toledo are not uncommon. In fact, California labor commissioner Jose Millan recently announced the results of a six-city probe by the Underground Economy Task Force that documented hundreds of similar cases. Assigned to clean retail stores and offices after closing, many workers were locked in overnight so that managers arriving the next morning can check them for stolen goods. The workers receive no additional pay for their overnight detention.

Mrs. de Toledo’s story would have remained just another anonymous incident of employee abuse had it not been for one incredible coincidence. One of the users logged on to the telenovelas chat room that night happened to be a clerk for Gil Garcetti, L.A.’s district attorney. Charges are currently being filed in Los Angeles Superior Court against CCC for several tax and labor law violations.