Appeals on other matters, however, threw the case back into the courts. The extraordinary dragging out of the legal action by the immigrant workers against Donald Trump has had its effect. Several of the lead plaintiffs have already died, as has one of their lawyers and the original judge. Yet 15 years after the lawsuit was initiated, and 18 years after the workers were cheated out of their compensation while working under intensely exploitative and hazardous conditions, the case still stands as powerful expression of the chasm between wealth and poverty that characterizes social relations in New York City. While New York's comeback is constantly celebrated by politicians and the media, the fact remains that creation of new wealth, concentrated almost entirely in the speculative activities on Wall Street, has benefited a thin layer at the top, while leaving masses of people trapped in poverty and low-wage jobs.
Unemployment remains at twice the national average.
One recent study showed that roughly two-thirds of the growth in wages has taken place in the financial services industry, with the vast majority going to those at the top. Bonuses, which go almost exclusively to the highly paid deal makers on Wall Street, accounted for 23 percent of all wage growth in the city between 1990 and 1995. Immigrants account for nearly one-third of the city's population and provide a seemingly inexhaustible supply of the kind of cheap labor Mr. Trump used to erect his tacky palace on Fifth Avenue. The role of the union in the Trump Tower case is also representative. Sitting on top of this social structure, Mayor Giuliani has recently come under ridicule from the media for plans to build an emergency operations center, universally described as a bunker, to direct governmental operations during a period of extreme crisis.