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Center gives day laborers a safe place to find work
Duluth facility finds way to connect workers, contractors

By Merritt Melancon | juliana.melancon@onlineathens.com | Story updated at 10:49 PM on Sunday, December 18, 2005
DULUTH - It's 9 a.m. and a crowd of about 40 Hispanic men and women mill around the Hispanic Community Support Center - actually a service bay of an old mechanics shop - waiting for work.

As they wait, they listen to announcements about the latest news from around the world, the latest on immigration reform legislation and a daily pep talk.

Today, the center's director, Maria Garcia, offers a devotional about holding onto their hopes and dreams, which seems apt for a day when the weathermen have predicted a day full of icy rain, a day when very few contractors will stop to hire day laborers.

"It's unfortunate, but not everyone gets work every day," Garcia said. "It will pick up in the spring."

While they wait to see if any contractors come through the door, the men and women discuss the upcoming Christmas dinner they've planned. Purple and silver tinsel already is strung from rafter to rafter, and a few of the workers brought in a Christmas tree to get everyone in a festive mood.

Five years ago, many of these workers would have gathered in the parking lot of a local business, vying for the attention of the next contractor to pull into the lot, occasionally rousted by police and hoping that if they did get work, they also would get paid, said Garcia.

After Oconee County sheriff's deputies arrested 31 men who were waiting for work Dec. 1 in the parking lot of Home Depot on Epps Bridge Parkway, the Hispanic Concerns Committee of Athens, a Hispanic advocacy group, renewed interest in a permanent day labor center here - one like the Duluth center.

Although the committee still is looking for grants and sponsors to help start the program, its members agree that the day-labor center should be in a permanent spot, offer classes to the community and provide an organized way for contractors to find day laborers, according to Jim McGown, the group's treasurer.

Hispanic Community Support in Duluth offers day laborers a warm and dry place to meet up with the contractors and homeowners who hire them, but since Garcia founded the center in 2000, it has expanded its services to include classes in literacy, English, personal finance and citizenship. The center also offers a bilingual summer camp and an annual health, wellness and job fair.

The center pays its bills with donations from day laborers, contractors, local businesses, churches and the United Way. The workers themselves decide how individual day laborers get assigned to jobs, the lowest wage they will accept, the amount of pay they should donate to the center and the center's code of conduct.

"When you get people involved in something like this, they have sense of belonging and ownership," Garcia said. "If we had tried to solve this problem without involving the workers or without involving the contractors, this wouldn't have worked."

Easing tensions

When Garcia founded Hispanic Community Support in the basement of Calvary Christian Fellowship, the church where her husband had a Spanish-language ministry, tension was brewing among shop owners, day laborers and local police.

Garcia, who was a preschool teacher at the time, had heard too many stories of day laborers who worked at a construction site all week and then weren't paid, she said. Other times, men were hurt on the job and felt they had no recourse because they couldn't speak English. There had to be some way to provide a more orderly system, where both the worker and the contractor were held accountable, she thought.

"After I heard several stories about people working and then being left someplace or not being paid the wage they had agreed to, I was shocked," said Garcia, who came to the United States about 20 years ago. "I never thought that this kind of thing could happen in America."

Workers who found day-labor jobs in parking lots and street corners before the centers opened prefer the security the center offers, said Herminio Lazano, a man in his 50s who came to the United States about two years ago.

When he first got to Duluth, he found his day-labor work on the street. He never was arrested for loitering, but had been rousted from his waiting place by police several times.

However, the biggest problem with finding work in the parking lot was not getting paid - a disappointment that happened fairly often, maybe 20 percent of the time, he said.

The center has changed the relationship between the workers and the police in Duluth, said Col. Brian Carney of the Duluth Police Department. Officers now spend a lot more time advocating for the workers than they do shooing them out of parking lots, he said.

In the late 1990s, the police department would get daily calls from the owners of shops in strip malls lining Buford Highway asking that authorities remove loitering day laborers, Carney said.

But there have been almost no loitering complaints since the center opened, he said.

Complaints of workers not getting paid for their work have jumped, though, because the center's staff is helping workers file them with the police department.

"If someone works and is not paid, they'll file a report with us," Carney said. "Then we'll take out a warrant and arrest the contractor. Theft of services is a crime."

Added accountability

Before Hispanic Community Support's day-labor service, known as Ready 2 Work, will allow a contractor or homeowner to hire a worker, he must fill out a registration form and show a photo ID. He also agrees to pay no less than $10 an hour, which is an average day-labor wage, even in Athens and Oconee County.

Workers also must register with the center before they can work, providing a photo ID, an address and a telephone number.

The accountability makes contractors and homeowners more comfortable hiring workers, said Jerry Luftice, who frequently hires workers from the center to work for his remodeling and landscaping business.

"I get workers from this center quite often," Luftice said. "I come here because the workers are very dependable. They're people I consider my amigos."

The same day Luftice dropped by to hire helpers, a 60-year-old woman came by to hire two men to help her move furniture.

Whether workers get a full day's work on a construction site or just a couple hours' of pay for moving furniture is up to chance. About a year ago, the workers at the center voted to abandon the first-come, first-served policy and instituted a lottery system. Everyone who gets to the center between 7 and 9 a.m. gets an equal chance at work, while separate lotteries are held for workers who speak English or have cars because those workers are in higher demand, Garcia said.

For some of the workers at the center, a day job can provide the connections they need to find a permanent job.

Day labor turned into a year-and-a-half stint with a single contractor for 22-year-old Armando Reyes, and when he was laid off earlier this month because the company didn't have enough work to go around, Reyes came back to the shelter to pick up jobs until the contractor's business picks up again.

"I came back here because it's easier to get work and the wages are better," Reyes said.

No questions asked

The majority of the workers who find permanent work through the center are legal immigrants, Garcia said.

No one at the center asks for documentation as workers come in; it's the responsibility of the employer to ask - and they usually do if they plan to hire the worker permanently. Out of the 25 or so workers Luftice has hired from the center, only one was undocumented, he said.

Since the center doesn't ask, there is no way to know how many people who use Hispanic Community Support are documented immigrants, Garcia said.

But Chris Taylor, an attorney in Roswell who works exclusively with north Georgia's Hispanic immigrant population, said the majority of day laborers who use the three or four well-established day labor centers in Georgia are illegal immigrants.

For Garcia, the question of whether the workers immigrated legally doesn't matter in relation to the service the shelter provides.

"Immigration has been here for years," she said. "We saw that there was a problem and we decided to do something about it, to be proactive and to change the way things were done. People want the service these men provide, but they don't want to see them. We have to keep an open mind and have a greater vision of what our communities can be, because these workers aren't going anywhere."