Thread: Day laborers take action on wages

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Posted on Mon, Jul. 31, 2006



Day laborers take action on wages

By Miriam Jordan
Wall Street Journal

AGOURA HILLS, Calif. – The driver of a black Honda thought he would quickly enlist some guys to load furniture and boxes onto a truck – until he heard the men wanted $15 an hour. “What? You don’t even have papers,” the driver told a clutch of Hispanic day laborers clustered around his car this month. But they stood firm.

“We do hard jobs other people won’t do,” Luis Cap, a Guatemalan, told the man behind the wheel. “If you want to save money, that’s OK. You will have to find other workers.”

The Honda drove off, the odd jobs unfilled.

Three months ago, about 120 immigrants who solicit work along a sun-drenched road in this town outside Los Angeles decided among themselves to only accept work for a minimum hourly wage of $15, about $2.50 higher than the previous, informal rate.

“What they have here is the essence of a union,” says Pablo Alvarado, national coordinator of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, who supervised the workers’ roadside vote.

Day laborers, who are often regarded as the face of illegal immigration and the informal economy, are organizing themselves. Steering this initiative is Alvarado, 38, a former undocumented immigrant determined to prepare this diffuse underground workforce for a role in the political debate over immigration.

“Organizing immigrants and other low-wage workers can improve conditions for all workers,” says Alvarado, who co-founded the Network in 2002.

About 117,600 day laborers in the U.S., most of them from Mexico and Central America, seek work on any given day, according to a study released in January by researchers from UCLA, the University of Illinois and New School University in New York. The national study also found that three-quarters of day laborers are illegal immigrants.

Congregating at hundreds of sites across the country, day laborers sometimes form the backbone of local residential construction and also work in landscaping, food service and at odd jobs. But they have recently become the target of anti-illegal immigrant groups, such as the volunteer border patrol Minutemen, and town ordinances seeking to eject them.

Partly to fight back, Alvarado and his team of organizers at 30 affiliated groups – which include day-laborer centers, immigrant-advocacy organizations and church-based groups – are striving to integrate the immigrant workers into the broader labor movement.

Last month, the Laborers’ International Union of North America, which represents construction workers, announced it would collaborate with Alvarado’s network to create hiring sites, lobby for immigration overhaul and protect day laborers’ rights. To be sure, day laborers could bolster the 700,000-member union’s presence in residential building.

“Employers abuse immigrant workers because of their status and bring down wages for everyone,” says Yanira Merino, the union’s immigration coordinator. “They can less easily manipulate organized workers.”

The powerful AFL-CIO is also courting day laborers. Recently, a delegation of senior federation officials flew to Los Angeles to meet with Alvarado and his team of organizers. They made the one-hour road trip from downtown to Agoura Hills for a close look at the effect of the network’s organizing efforts.

“Through Pablo, we have a whole new cadre of worker advocates,” says Ana Avendano, associate general counsel of the AFL-CIO.

Sources familiar with discussions between the federation and Alvarado’s network say they are on the verge of a historic agreement to put day-laborer representatives in several cities at the table alongside local AFL-CIO bosses as they shape strategies on a variety of worker-related issues. The day-laborer representatives would be there to participate in votes at the local level; some of the representatives would most likely be undocumented workers.

Of course, not everyone endorses the idea of allowing undocumented day laborers to hook up with the mainstream labor movement.

“They’re so desperate for new members that they’re selling out to the aliens,” says John Keeley, a spokesman for the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, a think tank that favors more restrictive immigration policies.

For their part, some day laborers are wary of linking up with unions because of negative perceptions about organized labor from their home countries.

Alvarado, a native of El Salvador, worked in factories, construction and gardening after sneaking across the border from Mexico into the U.S. 16 years ago.

He became a legal permanent resident of the U.S. after marrying a U.S. citizen in 1997. He and his wife have two children.

He honed his skills as an organizer in the 1990s, first as a volunteer filing wage claims for day laborers and then as a staffer of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, an advocacy group.

In towns trying to ban day laborers from soliciting jobs in the streets, Alvarado has helped the workers file lawsuits based on their First Amendment right to freedom of expression.






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© 2006 Journal Gazette and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
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The driver of a black Honda thought he would quickly enlist some guys to load furniture and boxes onto a truck – until he heard the men wanted $15 an hour. “What? You don’t even have papers,” the driver told a clutch of Hispanic day laborers clustered around his car this month. But they stood firm.

"We do hard jobs other people won’t do,”

LOL! I'd say these guys are about a buck shy of finding themselves quite dispensable.

“We do hard jobs other people won’t do,” Luis Cap, a Guatemalan, told the man behind the wheel. “If you want to save money, that’s OK. You will have to find other workers.”

They've heard it for so long from politicians and pro-illegal group activists that they are actually starting to believe it. Please, someone explain to them that most of the rhetoric and propaganda from pro-illegal immigrant supporters is not true, but used to support an empty argument!

It would be poetic for another illegal to come along and take the job from the other illegal because he will do it cheaper

they do it every day in maryland and delaware, its call perdue, mountain aire, tyson, etc chicken processing companies.

I DONT BUY FROM ANY OF THEM.

once they give back illegals jobs to locals in the community, the boycott will end.

-18B