Thread: New Orleans: Dreams of Steady Work Fade for Hispanics

July 13, 2007

Dreams of Steady Work Fade for Hispanics in New Orleans
Kathy Chu -- USA Today

NEW ORLEANS -- Wilfredo Montes came from Texas to this city about a year and a half ago for good work and good pay: gutting homes and clearing debris from neighborhoods left waterlogged by Hurricane Katrina. He worked six or seven days a week, for up to $15 an hour.

These days, Montes often finds work only two or three days a week, and the pay rate has shrunk by nearly half. Yet he's staying, at least for now. The hourly wage still far exceeds the federal minimum of $5.15. In fact, the $8 for an hour's work is nearly as much as he'd earn in a full day back in Chinandega, Nicaragua, where he used to sell steaming plates of rice and beans.

"I like it here for the money," Montes, 54, says, speaking in Spanish. "But the lifestyle, I don't like it."

Since Katrina, tens of thousands of Hispanic workers, most of them undocumented, have poured into battered sections of the Gulf Coast. They've supplied the labor to rebuild, to keep businesses running and to boost tax revenue. To support their families back home, they often will work longer hours and for less pay than other laborers.

Yet the economic dream that drew them here has weakened. For some, pay is falling. And jobs are scarcer, because the most urgent work -- gutting homes and removing debris -- is mostly finished. Though years of rebuilding remain, not enough state and insurance money has arrived to pay for it.

Still, many Hispanic workers remain in the region -- and others are still arriving -- because even now, they can typically earn more on the Gulf Coast than in other parts of the USA. Some workers have decided to settle here, bringing their families over to open restaurants and businesses, says Phuong Pham, who teaches at Tulane University in New Orleans.

As of March 2006, the most recent point for which figures are available, Hispanics made up nearly half the reconstruction workforce in New Orleans. About two thirds of them moved to the area -- mostly from elsewhere in the USA -- after the hurricane, according to a study of 212 workers by researchers at Tulane University and the University of California, Berkeley.

For all the economic muscle these workers have supplied, their presence has also fueled tensions: over language barriers and over education and health care needs in a public-services system strained by Katrina. There's been "a big increase (in the Hispanic population) at a time when the local infrastructure (has been) stretched," says Katharine Donato, a sociology professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

As longtime residents return to the region, concern is rising that migrant laborers have diminished job prospects for others. Greg Stewart, a business owner and member of the Mississippi Federation for Immigration Reform and Enforcement, complains that illegal workers are "driving wages down for people who live in Mississippi."

The Hispanic population on the Gulf Coast ballooned after Katrina struck in August 2005. In New Orleans, their numbers surged 29 percent by October 2006, even as the overall population shrank to less than half its pre-Katrina levels. Meantime, the number of African-American households in New Orleans fell sharply from pre-Katrina levels. Mayor Ray Nagin expressed concern shortly after Katrina about the city being "overrun" by Mexicans. He later soothed critics by saying he welcomed all workers and that Hispanics were particularly hardworking.

Cameron Taylor, 35, has worked alongside Hispanic laborers, rebuilding homes wrecked by Katrina: "At first, I was upset because I was losing work to them." Taylor's resentment eased, he says, after he saw how hard they worked. New Orleans has a long way to go in its recovery, but the city wouldn't have progressed even this far, he says, "if it wasn't for the (Hispanic day laborers). They should be allowed to stay."

Montes says he doesn't mean to take anyone's job. But he has to earn a living, he says, and finding a good job in Nicaragua is all but impossible.

He left his country 10 years ago to try to provide for his family -- a wife, Natalia, and seven children. He worked in Costa Rica before coming to the USA, spent a few years in Dallas, then moved to New Orleans more than a year and a half ago. Over the years, his children, who range in age from 21 to 31, have grown up and most have married, so he no longer needs to support them. But Montes wants to earn enough money to complete his wife's dream house in Nicaragua; he's two windows and a front door away from his goal. He also wants to build a cash cushion so he and his wife can afford to retire.

For five months, Montes has been sleeping in a partitioned corner of a Lutheran church, Monte de los Olivos, set inconspicuously in a neighborhood of modest homes outside New Orleans. He and more than a dozen other migrant workers live there free. In return, they're required to attend weekly Bible classes, English classes and Sunday services if they're not working. Montes, a Catholic, says his belief in God lifts his spirits on days when he can't find work.

On this Tuesday, like many other days, Montes wakes before dawn. He showers and dresses before rousing the others, who are sprawled on cots and pews around the wood-paneled room.

Montes "runs the camp," says the church pastor, Jesus Gonzales, which means that Montes looks after the Hispanic workers living in the church and keeps it tidy. Today, his task includes figuring out how to dispel the faint odor of shoes, unwashed clothes and dirt tracked in from construction sites. Montes sprays air freshener. He wends his way around fold-up cots, a fake palm tree and a white dry-erase board that recalls last night's English lesson given by a teacher from the neighborhood.

This week, the workers learned such phrases as, "My head hurts" and "I'm not doing very well," so they can tell their employers when they're ill. The vast majority of them have no health insurance. When they get sick, they typically go to one of the free health clinics that have sprung up after Katrina to serve the Hispanic population, or to a hospital if it's an emergency.

A strained health care system

The result is that Hispanic day laborers who lack health insurance are further straining the region's health care system, already in poor shape after Katrina. Six hospitals in the New Orleans area remain largely closed because of damage. Those that are still running are losing an average of $750,000 a month treating the uninsured, though losses vary widely among hospitals, says Jack Finn of the Metropolitan Hospital Council. The average wait time in emergency rooms has ballooned to about three hours.

By 6:20 a.m., Montes steps out into the already muggy New Orleans air and begins his mile-and-a-half walk. By the time he reaches his destination, an intersection in front of Home Depot, nearly two dozen other men are waiting. Hispanic day laborers congregate outside construction supply stores like this one, hoping for contractors to swing by to find workers.

It's been three days since Montes has found work. When a van pulls up, he jumps at the job prospect. Montes sticks his face halfway into the window. "Tiene trabajo?" he asks hopefully. The man shakes his head. No work.

The pattern repeats itself all morning. A handful of contractors stop and pick up men. Those who are the fastest, most "prepared, strongest and who speak a little English" are noticed first, says Raoul Martinez, a laborer from Mexico. Workers pile into a van with offers of work but no guarantees. Other contractors drive by to look over the men and tell them they might need help tomorrow. Or maybe the next day.

On days like this, when he can't find work, "I feel depressed," Montes concedes, adjusting his baseball cap lower to shield the sun, which blazes as fiercely as it does in Chinandega. "But I'm a very strong man, and I keep it inside. We knew when we came to the United States, we were going to suffer like this. This is life."

Day laborers, when idle, share stories about how they were paid less than promised, or not at all. They note that they're trying to rebuild a city that welcomed them when the most dangerous work needed to be done, only to rebuff them as the pace of rebuilding stops and starts. "A very legitimate perception," says Anita Sinha, a staff attorney at the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization in Washington, D.C. "What's actually gotten worse, perhaps, is the attitude toward these immigrant workers."

A rising number of Hispanic workers have contacted the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice in recent months to report abuses by contractors, or harassment by immigration agents or police, says Saket Soni of the center.

Hispanic workers in New Orleans who responded to last year's Tulane-UC Berkeley study said they also had trouble recovering wages and coping with dangerous working conditions.

The Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance says it's helped recover more than $1 million in back pay for workers, mostly Hispanic, since Katrina. Illegal workers were more likely to say they have been mistreated on the job, the UC Berkeley-Tulane study found.

Even Hispanics who came here legally, on guest worker visas, say their situation has been far from ideal. One hotel chain, Decatur Hotels, faces a lawsuit from Hispanic workers who say they faced unacceptable working conditions after being brought from Latin America by a recruiter working on behalf of Decatur Hotels.

Daniel Castellanos, of Lima, Peru, says he answered a recruiter's ad in November 2005 promising $10 an hour with "good housing" -- "in a luxury hotel in New Orleans."

Castellanos says he used most of his savings and mortgaged his house to pay $4,500 in recruitment fees and travel expenses to work for Decatur. But he says he wasn't reimbursed for his expenses and faced poor living and working conditions in New Orleans. Castellanos and others have sued the hotel chain.

Patrick Quinn, head of Decatur, disputes the claims, saying, "The working conditions were American hotel working conditions." Quinn says he thinks the workers' objections coincided with a business slowdown in 2006, when the hotel couldn't give many of them a full 40-hour week. "Our motive was good: to find people who wanted to come here and work," he says.

Fading prospects

Montes says he's seen friends hauled off to jail for minor infractions, such as standing on private property, or deported for major ones, such as lacking permission to work in the USA.

Today, police cars cruise by the site outside Home Depot nearly every hour. Most of the men shrink away, walking in the opposite direction. One police car stops. "Go home," an officer says.

The men chat. Does the officer mean go home for the day or to their own country? Montes mutters, "No more here," and walks away. He'll try his luck outside Lowe's, a few miles away.

It's 11 a.m., and Montes' prospects of working today are fading. By midafternoon, workers will call it a day if they haven't found work.

Hispanic laborers who stay in the region see blocks of wrecked homes that seem to promise a livelihood in rebuilding for years to come.

But state Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., says illegal workers should go home. The city, he says, "is happy to have anyone who comes here legally to rebuild. But it becomes a problem when someone is illegal. If someone is breaking the law to come here, then there's a higher chance they're breaking other laws while they're here."

When he doesn't find work, Montes tells himself he'll return to Nicaragua in the fall. On other days, when he has a job, he's certain he'll stay a few more years. Today, he didn't find work. He hopes his luck will change. He knows it could be worse. "I don't have money," he says. "But, thanks to God, I have good health."

Source: (c) Copyright 2007 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

http://www.hispanicbusiness.com/news/ne ... p?id=70617

Interesting, he's building his wife's dream home back in Nicaragua while complaining there's less work here in a country where he is ILLEGAL. How ridiculous. tear, sniff sniff....so sad.

"I like it here for the money," Montes, 54, says, speaking in Spanish. "But the lifestyle, I don't like it."

Well I'll be damned an honest one out of zillions. At least he's not waiving the rag of his homeland, demanding everything but the kitchen sink and pretending to love America.

Cameron Taylor, 35, has worked alongside Hispanic laborers, rebuilding homes wrecked by Katrina: "At first, I was upset because I was losing work to them." Taylor's resentment eased, he says, after he saw how hard they worked. New Orleans has a long way to go in its recovery, but the city wouldn't have progressed even this far, he says, "if it wasn't for the (Hispanic day laborers). They should be allowed to stay."

LIES LIES LIES LIES

It has been in the news and discussed here before. Some employment agencies had AMERICANS lined up to do these jobs and just about the time the Americans were going down, the Employment agencies were called and told not to bother because "The Mexicans are coming". I heard this on an interview on Fox and nearly lost it. That is exactly how she said it- I am not signaling out one specific group. I wish I could find the transcripts.

So do not tell me that New Orleans will not be rebuilt without illegal day laborers. That is a crock.

All these celebrities that run around Katrina this and Katrina that, where are they on this issue? How many Americans have been driven out of N.O. because of these illegals taking jobs and supressing wages.


It is like they are being victimized once again by this horrible tragedy.