How Utah concrete companies, using underpaid workers and teens, send money to a polygamous church
Source: Salt Lake Tribune
RAWLINS, Wyo. -- On a hot day in June, most of the construction workers building a new high school here went home at 5 p.m. The crew from Phaze Concrete remained. Four Phaze employees labored another 90 minutes building a wooden frame in a trench.
Phaze's headquarters are 580 miles away in an unmarked office building in Hildale, Utah, home to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Phaze, a Salt Lake Tribune investigation has found, is a major financier of the FLDS Church, which believes in polygamy as a spiritual tenet and whose president, Warren Jeffs, is serving a prison sentence of life plus 20 years related to taking underage girls as brides in Texas.
The Tribune probe, based on records and interviews with former employees who also have left the FLDS Church, has found:
• Phaze and the company it merged with at the end of 2013, Jack Daniel's Construction, have paid their employees amounts below minimum wage, former workers say and records show, so they can divert money to the FLDS Church.
• A former worker says he was just a teenager when he drove machinery — despite federal prohibitions against doing so — and two ex-foreman said they had teenagers working on their jobs.
Read more: http://www.sltrib.com/news/2691902-155/how-utah-concrete-companies-using-underpaid?fullpage=1
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