Elena Delzer
An illustration of Juan Gonzalez in the hospital.
Juan can no longer walk. A fall through a Madison auto repair shop roof in 2023 paralyzed him from the neck down.
Juan, who asked that his last name not be used to protect his identity, spent two lonely years in Wisconsin health care facilities while his attorneys and state regulators worked out how to cover his medical bills and compensate him for the abrupt end of his working life.
Like many undocumented immigrants working in construction, Juan found the job repairing a sheet-metal roof in Madison through a blurry relationship between a labor recruiter and a general contractor. Neither had the worker’s compensation insurance state law requires.
The Department of Workforce Development (DWD) investigates thousands of employers each year for potentially violating those requirements. In 2024 alone, investigators issued more than 4,400 penalties totaling $8.7 million in 2024 against employers for operating without insurance. The penalties flow into Wisconsin’s Uninsured Employers Fund, which compensates injured workers while the state attempts to recoup costs from their employer.
But even identifying his employer after his injury proved difficult, Juan says.
While he eventually received compensation, Juan considers his lengthy hospitalization a cautionary tale both for regulators and for fellow immigrants afraid to ask who cuts their checks. “Sometimes people just work and work without asking questions,” he says, “and that’s what happened to me.”
Meanwhile, disconnects between worker’s compensation systems and federal workplace safety investigators can shield dangerous conditions from scrutiny, leaving more workers at risk of life-altering injuries.
A job with no clear employer
Juan, 40, was one of hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans who immigrated to the U.S. between 2020 and 2025.
Many fled after police responded violently to widespread protests against President Daniel Ortega’s totalitarian regime. Juan says he headed north to support his family back home.
He waded across the Rio Grande to Eagle Pass, Texas, on an early morning in December 2022.
After a brief encounter with U.S. Border Patrol officers, Juan joined a nephew in Florida. Eager to work and constrained by his lack of work authorization, Juan fit the target demographic for labor recruiters connecting employers in agriculture, construction and food processing with Florida’s then-booming population of newly arrived undocumented immigrants.
One job led to another, and he soon found himself crisscrossing the Midwest.
“One week we’d go to one place in Wisconsin; the next week we’d be in another,” he says.
“Sometimes we’d work up to 13 hours,” he recalled — usually at an unrelenting pace. Wary of asking questions that could cost him a job, Juan says he never fully knew who called the shots. “That’s the problem,” he says. “You start working and you don’t investigate who owns the company…. Sometimes they don’t think it’s good to investigate.”
Juan still didn’t know his employer’s identity when he climbed onto the auto repair shop’s roof on a cloudy Friday in August. The site supervisor hadn’t provided him with a safety harness, he added, so nothing broke his fall when he accidentally stepped through a sheet of insulation.
He fractured his spine upon impact with the concrete floor below.
Juan struggled to remain conscious as the site supervisor debated whether to call an ambulance. “It seemed like he was scared,” he recalls. “Afraid they would cause trouble for him because I had fallen. I kept telling him, ‘Call someone! Call someone! I’m dying!’”
Who pays when a worker is hurt?
Confined to a trauma unit bed at University Hospital in Madison, Juan was in a bind. Who would cover his medical bills?
Aaron Halstead, an attorney who represented Juan, says most Uninsured Employers Fund claims he pursued over his three-decade career involved undocumented workers, who are overrepresented in injury-prone trades and rarely have access to Spanish-speaking attorneys.
Opaque employment arrangements are especially common among undocumented immigrants, Halstead says.
“They get paid in cash by some guy they may or may not know.”
The state denies a claim if a worker or their attorneys cannot gather sufficient evidence to identify an employer, says Jim O’Malley, who directs the legal services for DWD’s worker’s compensation division.
Paystubs help prove a relationship with an employer, but workers paid in cash face difficulties, says Aaron Galarowicz, chief of DWD’s uninsured employers fund unit.
Tracking down the responsible employer requires a degree of “amateur detective” work, Galarowicz added. Text messages, worksite photos and cell phone location history can all help solve the mystery, Halstead says.
Leads in Juan's case pointed to two possible employers: Luis Villafuerte, the subcontractor who brought Juan to Madison, and RestoreMasters, a then-Florida-based contractor in charge of the roof repair.
Neither had worker’s compensation insurance in Wisconsin. Employers sometimes forgo insurance to cut costs, Halstead says, in hopes that when a worker gets injured, “no one’s going to do anything about it.”
Steven Potter / WPR
The Department of Workforce Development.
Wisconsin provides help for workers injured at companies without workers comp insurance.
RestoreMasters, which did respond to requests for comment, carried insurance elsewhere but failed to get a Wisconsin endorsement on its policy before taking the Madison job, Halstead says.
Not all states offer a fallback. Had he been injured while working for an uninsured contractor while living in Florida, for example, Juan’s only path to compensation would require filing a lawsuit against his employer.
In Wisconsin, however, DWD’s Uninsured Employers Fund could be tapped as investigators sorted out which contractor to hold accountable.
A million-dollar claim
Passing interactions with fellow Spanish-speaking patients provided Juan moments of comfort during his initial hospital stay. Those connections dried up once he transferred to a medical rehabilitation facility. He had no family or close friends in the area. “I felt alone,” he recalls. “I felt devastated.”
State investigators determined in February 2024 that RestoreMasters was his employer at the time of his injury.
By the time the state secured an agreement with RestoreMasters to cover his ballooning medical bills, Juan had another request: A flight back to Nicaragua. With nobody in the U.S. to care for him, returning was his only viable option.
The final payout, including all medical costs, compensation for Juan’s injuries and a chartered flight to Managua, reached nearly $1 million. Only one other uninsured employer — a now-dissolved trucking company in Oshkosh — paid a larger sum to the Uninsured Employers’ Fund in the past two decades.
Construction dominates uninsured-employer cases
Construction firms like RestoreMasters made up a disproportionate share of the uninsured employers that settled with DWD. Roughly one in four businesses that settled with the Uninsured Employers Fund between 2013 and 2023 offered construction or remodeling services. By comparison, the construction industry accounted for one in 14 worker’s compensation claims filed in Wisconsin during the same period, according to DWD data.
But RestoreMasters, a business with a portfolio spanning half the country, wasn’t a typical uninsured employer. “Employers with Uninsured Employers Fund claims tend to be less established than other businesses,” DWD spokesperson Haley McCoy wrote — and difficult to track.
A quarter of the roughly 150 employers that faced Uninsured Employer Fund claims between 2020 and 2025 have since dissolved, state records show. Some may have reincorporated under a different name. Records list another 20% as “delinquent,” having failed to file required reports or pay state taxes.
Less than half of employers still incorporated in Wisconsin with names matching Uninsured Employers Fund records have obtained worker’s compensation policies since encountering DWD.
When serious injury escapes OSHA scrutiny
Even as the state investigated and settled with RestoreMasters, the company faced no scrutiny from federal workplace safety regulators after Juan's fall.
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) serious injury records from 2023 contain no mention of the incident, and the agency’s enforcement data show no penalties against RestoreMasters for workplace safety rule violations.
Federal rules require employers to report workplace accidents resulting in deaths, overnight hospitalizations or the loss of a body part, and employers that fail to report injuries can face financial penalties.
“OSHA can barely enforce those penalties,” says Debbie Berkowitz, a fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor and a former Obama administration advisor for OSHA.
OSHA has six months to fine employers for failing to report serious workplace injuries, Berkowitz says. That deadline, coupled with overwhelming caseloads and a shrinking corps of investigators, allows many cases to fall through the cracks.
Others aware of Juan’s fall could have reported the incident to OSHA. But Wisconsin DWD has “no established reporting process” for sharing information about Uninsured Employers Fund payouts with the federal agency, McCoy wrote.
That disconnect goes both ways. “OSHA doesn’t double-check worker’s (compensation) records,” says Eric Frumin, health and safety director for the Strategic Organizing Center, a coalition of national labor unions. The agency’s investigations aren’t primarily driven by workplace injuries.
Even in states that enforce workplace safety laws through OSHA-approved programs, including Iowa, Michigan and Minnesota, regulators do not use workers’ compensation records, Frumin says.
Still, properly reporting injuries to OSHA doesn’t guarantee follow-up investigations, Berkowitz noted. In 2021, for instance, OSHA compliance officers investigated less than 40% of reports of severe workplace injuries.
A long road back
Juan boarded a chartered flight to Managua last fall. The final leg of his return — an eight-hour drive from the capital to his rural hometown — sapped what remained of his energy.
“I arrived home in terrible shape,” he says. “But I made it back.”
He’ll spend the rest of his life in a house he built with the payout from RestoreMasters. “Nothing fancy,” he says — but with a floorplan he can navigate in a wheelchair.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative newsroom.
