GRAND ISLE, La. -- Some workers who were hired to help clean up the oil spill in Grand Isle have said they're getting the runaround about getting paid.
Some workers for Ashland Marine, one of BP’s clean-up contractors, have gotten promises from the company that their checks are coming “tomorrow,” but tomorrow never comes.
Hundreds of workers descended on the beaches of Grand Isle the day President Barack Obama visited, including Magary Brown's husband.
“He have to leave here at least at like 2:30 in the morning so he can make it there for 4:30 'cause it's a couple of hours away,” Brown said.
Her husband took pictures of the crews the first day that he went to work on Grand Isle.
“He's been calling for five days for his check. Other guys that were working out there got their checks, but he didn't get his,” Brown said.
And she said he's not the only one.
His wife and mother are speaking for him, because he said he was forced to sign a confidentiality agreement when he took the job.
He said he should've been paid last Friday in Houma, but when he went to get his check, he was sent to three different locations.
“He had to go to three different places and mind you me, he had to find a ride to get there,” Brown said.
Police greeted the hundreds of workers who were looking to get paid at one of the locations. The head of Ashland Marine told us they got kicked out of two Houma locations because of the volume of people who came to the locations looking to get paid.
Many ended up at the Thibodaux Civic Center where 200 got their checks.
The company's president, Roland Orgeron, admits they're getting an onslaught of calls from people looking to get paid. However, this is what he said about the people who say they still haven’t received their checks:
“Everybody's been paid. The only ones that in question now is we're trying to make sure these guys signed in. Because if they don't sign the sheets there's no way for us to know they were out there working.”
But Brown said her husband did sign in for all 14 days that he worked, because he knew he couldn’t get paid without signing in. Her husband hasn't been back to work because he hasn’t been paid and she said many of his co-workers are in the same boat.
Reporter Katie Moore asked Orgeron, “You promise that these people are gonna get paid?” He replied, “They get paid every week.”
But according to Brown, not all of them are getting paid. Ashland Marine said they're planning on paying those workers who haven't yet received their checks on Friday at H.L. Bourgeois High School in Houma between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.
