Thread: New York City to Consider Job Centers for Day Labor

http://www.nytimes.com

June 16, 2006
City to Consider Job Centers for Day Labor
By SEWELL CHAN
A New York City panel is examining whether the city should subsidize job centers for day laborers to link this overwhelmingly immigrant work force to prospective employers and curb wage and workplace abuses.

The job centers would bring a measure of regulation to an informal economy that involves throngs of immigrants gathering on curbsides and in parking lots each morning waiting to be hired for work doing light construction, landscaping or domestic chores.

A handful of other major cities, including Los Angeles, Denver and Phoenix, have given public funds to day labor centers, but efforts in other locales have drawn fierce opposition from groups that favor tighter immigration controls.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, appointed the commission, which held its first public hearing on Wednesday evening. Its goal is to evaluate the legal issues surrounding the job centers and determine whether public financing and oversight would be feasible.

"As the demand for day laborers continues in New York City, we must address the issues that arise, including day laborers' need for safe and healthy work conditions," Guillermo Linares, the mayor's commissioner of immigrant affairs and the chairman of the panel, said at the hearing. "To address these issues, other jurisdictions have created day-labor job centers with public and private support. For the past 10 years, cities throughout our nation have found these centers to be viable long-term solutions."

Nationally, the centers have provoked debate. Advocates for tougher enforcement of immigration laws have argued that the job centers encourage illegal immigration, legitimize the informal economy and depress wages or working conditions of native-born workers. Last year, Arizona lawmakers voted to ban public financing of day-labor centers. In New York, Nassau County has two taxpayer-supported centers, in Glen Cove and Freeport, and Suffolk County has one, in Huntington Station, though the county executive has fiercely resisted the idea.

The centers typically coordinate job assignments, inform employees about their rights under minimum-wage laws and help workers to file complaints and lawsuits. The National Day Laborer Organizing Network says the centers prevent a "race to the bottom" in wages and working conditions.

The mayor has called for a federal database to allow employers to verify the immigration status of job applicants and tougher penalties for businesses that fail to perform the checks or ignore the results. But he has also called for gradually giving roughly 11 million illegal immigrants permanent status and ridiculed the idea of deporting them as "pure fantasy."

The panel, the Temporary Commission on Day Laborer Job Centers, comprises representatives of nonprofit and advocacy groups, city officials, including the police, , and leaders of two privately run day labor centers.

"It's going to be hard for us not to come up with a recommendation that supports the centers," said one commission member, Edwin Meléndez, a professor at Milano the New School for Management and Urban Policy. "Personally, I think it's not only a solution that's in the character of New York as an immigrant-receiving region, but also a part of our history. We've had day laborers going back 200 years."

Dr. Meléndez, an economist, was a co-author of the first national study of day laborers. The study, completed in January, estimated that there were 117,600 such workers in the United States, and concluded that they were routinely denied payment for their work and subjected to workplace hazards, as well as insults and abuses from employers.

The study found that 21 percent of the laborers found jobs through centers, and the rest informally. The impetus for the city commission came from three council members — Vincent J. Gentile and Bill de Blasio of Brooklyn and Helen Sears of Queens — whose constituents had complained that the proliferation of day laborers was hurting the quality of life. In response to such complaints, Mr. Gentile helped the Latin American Workers Project, a nonprofit group in Bushwick, secure space for a small jobs center in Bensonhurst, which opened in March 2002 and is privately financed.

Stu Loeser, the mayor's chief spokesman, said the panel needed to finish its work before the mayor could make a decision. "It's simply too early to predict what those recommendations may be," he said.

At the Wednesday night hearing, the commission heard from seven day laborers — six men and one woman — and a former day laborer who is a home-renovation contractor.

Santiago Torres, 29, said he once had a job cutting grass from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. for $70 or $75 a day. One time, he said, an employer berated him for not cutting the grass at the proper angle and then refused to pay him. Mr. Torres said that when he tried to write down the employer's license plate, "he threw me to the ground and hit me three times." He added, "I went to the police and they said that since my face wasn't bloody they couldn't help me."

Javier Gallardo, an official from the Latin American Workers Project, said the job center in Bensonhurst — a $300-a-month trailer with no toilet — was often cramped. "We need a dignified space, like a classroom, a meeting room, a computer lab, a bathroom," he said. "Heat in the winter. Running water."

The job centers would bring a measure of regulation to an informal economy that involves throngs of immigrants gathering on curbsides and in parking lots each morning waiting to be hired for work doing light construction, landscaping or domestic chores.

Where is ICE?

This kind of stuff is getting real old....they are here illegally and want the taxpayer to pay for facilities with all the amenities so they can earn a living without paying taxes. I certainly wouldn't hire anyone of them thus eliminating the possibility of being accused of non-payment or abusive treatment. Hiring an illegal alien is merely aiding and abetting.