Paul didn't mind working hard.
For three years, he installed drywall on major construction projects across New York City, often staying late when asked and doing whatever it took to support his wife and three children.
What he minded was never knowing when—or even how—he would be paid.
Sometimes his paychecks arrived weeks late. He often worked overtime without receiving time-and-a-half for those hours. His pay came partly by check and partly in cash. When money was delayed, paying rent and buying groceries became a weekly source of anxiety.
"I worked hard," Paul said. "I just wanted to be paid fairly."
To labor advocates, stories like Paul's raise a broader question: What responsibility do construction users have to understand how the people building their projects are actually being employed?
Paul spent those three years working on projects that utilized Gotham Drywall before leaving this spring to join a union contractor. He says the difference was immediate—and went beyond the increased pay.
"It's everything," he said. "The paycheck. The schedule. Everything."
Cristian Batres, a council representative with the New York City District Council of Carpenters, has spent years monitoring Gotham Drywall and other non-union contractors as part of the union's Area Standards program, interviewing workers, documenting payroll practices and tracing networks of subcontractors that critics say can obscure accountability.
According to Batres, workers often report to jobsites utilizing Gotham Drywall, wear the company’s safety gear and take direction from its supervisors. Yet their paychecks frequently come from other subcontractors or labor brokers—companies workers sometimes know only by the first name of the person who hired them.
"It's very hard to follow," Batres said. "Sometimes these people don't even know who they're working for."
Paul considered himself to be working for Gotham Drywall. Like the other workers on site, he was told to wear a shirt with Gotham Drywall’s name, but his paychecks came from another company. According to Paul, he agreed to work for roughly $21 an hour. But on paper, he was paid just $17 an hour, with the rest of his wages made up through cash payments.
Batres says arrangements like this make it difficult for workers—and sometimes even investigators—to know exactly who is responsible for paying wages and complying with labor laws.
As the months went on, paychecks that had once arrived every week became increasingly unpredictable.
"They would tell us, 'No check today,'" Paul recalled. Sometimes workers waited two or three weeks before another payment arrived.
The uncertainty extended beyond payday.
He and his family shared a modest apartment with another family because he couldn't afford a place of his own. Taking a vacation wasn't really an option.
"If you took vacation," he recalled, "you didn't know if you'd have a job when you came back."
Gotham Drywall has worked on a number of prominent and high-profile New York projects, including film and television production studios; commercial offices; and affordable housing. Batres argues that the company's prominence makes it one of the clearest examples of a labor model that has spread across parts of the city's non-union construction industry.
A recent investigation by The New Republic examined Gotham Drywall as a case study of what it described as a broader labor-broker system operating within parts of New York City's non-union construction industry. The article alleged that workers frequently performed work under Gotham Drywall’s supervisors while technically being employed by layers of subcontractors—a structure critics argue can make it more difficult to determine responsibility for wages, benefits and workplace protections.
Gotham Drywall has been named in multiple wage-and-hour lawsuits brought by former workers in recent years. The complaints allege unpaid overtime and other wage violations. One of the most recent cases, Castro v. Gotham Drywall, remains pending in federal court.
Gotham Drywall did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
To Batres, Gotham Drywall matters not simply because of the allegations against one contractor, but because he believes the company illustrates a broader challenge facing the industry. Contractors that pay taxes, provide benefits and comply with labor laws, he argues, struggle to compete against companies operating with substantially lower labor costs.
"How do you compete with a company that doesn't pay benefits, doesn't pay taxes and doesn't do everything by the book?" he said. "It's like having a big pink elephant in the room, and nobody's seeing it."
For users of construction services, those decisions shape not only project budgets, Batres argues, but also the working conditions experienced by the people building them.
"When companies talk about their values, about treating people fairly, about doing the right thing, they should expect the same from the contractors building their projects."
Today, just seven weeks after joining the union, Paul says he's earning a predictable paycheck, receiving overtime at the proper rate, and no longer worries about whether he'll be paid each week. His union health insurance is about to begin, and for the first time, he and his wife have started talking seriously about buying a home.
"Before, we were just trying to survive," he said. "Now we're thinking about the future."