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ORDERLY DAY LABOR

Jupiter center's lottery safer way to match workers, employers


By Maria Herrera
South Florida Sun-Sentinel

September 16, 2006

Jupiter· Juan Cotiy-Guarchaj placed all his hopes on a pale blue raffle ticket.

He held it tight between his leathered fingers, worrying about money.

"I've sent them very little lately," the undocumented worker said of cash he regularly sends to family in Guatemala. "I've worked once in the last two weeks."

At El Sol Neighborhood Resource Center, at least 65 day laborers such as Cotiy-Guarchaj spread throughout the hall waiting for the big prize: a job for the day; if they were lucky, maybe even longer.

Not all are undocumented, but the neighborhood center is a response to the safety issues on Center Street in Jupiter, where for years mostly undocumented workers gathered by the dozens, rushing to passing trucks picking up cheap labor.

The center, which opened last month, offers a safe haven where employers can solicit workers in an orderly fashion.

"It's truly become community serving," Catholic Charities Executive Director Tom Bila said. "The town of Jupiter has gotten this far in finding a solution to a decades-long problem."

Five hundred workers and at least 60 employers are registered. Workers receive ID cards and are classified according to their skills and English proficiency.

A lottery takes place several times a day, and five workers at a time are placed in a standby pool. It's from that pool that workers are assigned to employers.

Cotiy-Guarchaj heard his number called and rushed from his seat among 30 other workers in an English class.

Some workers, though, complain about the lottery system and are impatient about the slow trickle of employers.

Bila said program coordinators chose the lottery over a first-come, first-serve system to avoid long lines.

Nearly 45 workers -- a quarter of the pool -- found jobs Tuesday.

Soon there will be a doctor and nurse onsite, as well as legal and immigration services and Mayan and Spanish translation services.

The center also serves as a meeting point for laborers and employers who already have agreements. That's the case for Jesus Perez Aguilar of Chiapas, Mexico.

His employer, Glenn Mesteller, picks him up at the center every day.

"It is better to come here because it's organized," said Mesteller, who has been using Aguilar at his landscaping business for several months. "I was picking him up at the corner or at his house, but police said that probably wasn't a good idea."

The need for a day-labor center stems from a thriving underground economy fueled by an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants living and working in the United States.

In Lake Worth, officials are looking to El Sol as they plan their own center.Dozens gather daily on Lake and Lucerne avenues waiting for contractors to hire them. The city tried to move that pick-up location to a nearby shuffleboard park, but "employers didn't listen," Lake Worth Mayor Marc Drautz said.

City officials are waiting for a city-owned building at Lucerne Avenue and F Street to become available, and for a nonprofit agency to run its center, Drautz said. Enacting a street-soliciting ban is key, he said.

At El Sol, volunteers started registering workers and employers before the center was officially opened, but when the town banned soliciting workers on the streets and added a $500 fine, the center filled up.

Now laborers sip hot coffee and sit through English lessons in the main hall of the 10,000-square-foot former church building, which the town rents to Catholic Charities for two years for $1 a year.

"It's comfortable here," said Mario Gonzalez, an undocumented worker from Veracruz, Mexico, waiting for work at the center. "You don't have that fear that a car is going to run you over at any moment."

Catholic Charities stepped in to manage and staff the center with a $189,000 foundation grant. The volunteer group Friends of El Sol and the Hispanic-advocacy group Corn Maya conceived the idea of the center and commissioned the charity to run it.

"We lobbied town authorities and described what had happened in other cities where there were labor centers," said Tim Steigenga, a political science professor at Florida Atlantic University and board member of Corn Maya.

But part of the success of El Sol still depends on employers.showing up.

Cotiy-Guarchaj's blue ticket landed him a landscaping job with Sam Williams, a small-business owner.

But contractors still are gun-shy about the new program.

"[Contractors] need to overcome the fear that they might be seen getting people off the labor center," Steigenga said, "which is ridiculous, because everybody sees them picking people off the streets."