Thread: Portland, OR: Day Labor Center Opens

Day labor center opens in central, eastside Portland

The city-sponsored center is a place for workers to congregate while waiting for a day job from a local contractors

Tuesday, June 17, 2008
ANNA GRIFFIN

The Oregonian

Within a few weeks, if the success of similar projects elsewhere is any indication, the new city-sponsored day labor center in Portland's central eastside business district will become a bustling example of capitalism at its most basic.

First, however, the TV cameras will have to leave.

The city's controversial makeshift shelter for day laborers -- people paid by the day for jobs in landscaping and construction -- opened Monday with little fuss and few job opportunities.

The workers were there: Three men waited at 6 a.m., when organizers opened the front gate to foot traffic. By 7 a.m., 25 milled around in the parking lot under a billboard advertising organic tomatoes at Fred Meyer.

When the first person looking for workers showed up at 8:30 a.m., a crowd of more than 50 potential employees greeted him with cheers.

He only needed two people.

Organizers said they weren't surprised that things were slow on the first day and suggested that contractors were likely scared off by the three TV crews doing live shots outside.

Although crackdowns are rare, it's against federal law to hire undocumented workers. Up to 75 percent of day laborers across the country are here illegally, according to a joint 2006 study by professors at UCLA, the University of Illinois at Chicago and the New School.

Still, judging from the crowds, police and activists say a rising number of Portland-area builders and landscapers are turning to day laborers as a cheap, easy source of help. For more than a decade, a community of mostly Latino workers -- also known as jornaleros -- have gathered on corners near East Burnside Street and along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard seeking jobs.

As the numbers have grown, so have complaints. Police say drug dealers use the steady morning traffic of trucks and sport utility vehicles as cover for their trade. Business owners say men and women urinate in the open, leave behind garbage and scare off potential customers.

Laborers and the activists, who work on their behalf, say that day laborers are frequently taken advantage of: Employers get a day's work out of them, then refuse to pay. Or they refuse to pay doctor's bills when an employee gets hurt on the job. Workers say they're also used to hearing racial epithets shouted at them from passing cars.

More than 65 other U.S. cities have day labor centers, including Seattle and San Francisco. Some are merely bus shelterlike spots for workers to congregate. A few cities have buildings complete with showers, computer rooms and space for English classes.

For now, Portland's center consists of a parking lot and a mobile trailer that stayed locked Monday morning because the person with the key wasn't around.

The center has a site manager and will be open from 6 a.m. to noon, Monday through Saturday. Each day, workers must sign up when they arrive. Their names are entered into a raffle to determine the order for available jobs.

Contractors must agree to pay at least $10 an hour.

"One of the things we can do here is make sure that no one is taken advantage of," said Ignacio Paramo, an organizer with the Portland-based VOZ Workers' Rights Education Project, a nonprofit running the new center.

Some people might not like going through a lottery to get work -- and on Monday morning, there were still a few holdouts on Burnside hoping to find work -- but eventually Paramo and other organizers think a critical mass of jornaleros will opt for what they consider a safer, fairer system.

And where the workers go, center organizers say, employers are sure to follow. Eventually.

"We've been doing it this way for over 10 years, so it's going to be hard for some people to adjust," Paramo said. "It will take awhile for people to see that this is a better system for everyone."

Mayor Tom Potter first talked of a day labor center during his 2004 campaign. At his urging, the City Council is spending $200,000 on the center over the next two years. The Portland Development Commission is renting out the parking lot at the corner of MLK and Northeast Everett Street to VOZ for $1 a year. City Council members expect the center to support itself after the first two years.

Critics, including a few talk show hosts and the conservative group Judicial Watch, say the city shouldn't spend money helping illegal immigrants find work that presumably will help them stay in the United States. But Potter and other city leaders say people who want to work in Portland deserve a safe, dry place to seek it.

"This is one of our core values in Portland," Potter said during a party to celebrate the center's opening last week. "If you want to work, you should be allowed to."

A police car did lazy laps near the center Monday morning, in case protesters showed up and trouble started.

Just one -- a man with a sign that read "No" -- plopped down in the center driveway. The biggest problem center organizers had, besides the lack of jobs, came from a cameraman angry that some at the center didn't want their faces on TV.

Anna Griffin: 503-412-7053; annagriffin@news.oregonian.com

FYI, my teen son has a full-time job in the industrial area of Portland (at the same warehouse where his father works too) and was alone coming home today by public transit. He overheard two men speaking in English (they were Hispanic, but of course we do not know for sure of legal status) and he overheard one say he could not get a job since the opening of the day labor center, employers do not want to pay the wage the city required (he said because the city demanded $10.00, the employers will probably not hire then anymore) the other said that one employer offered him a job but then asked about documentation, and when he could not provide it, the employer turned him down.

Apparently with the job center site, it is having the opposite effect the liberals in this city were hoping, and employers are hearing about raids more and more, and decided they will start checking themselves.

We can only hope it will have this effect, and that local contractors will stop and think that they may be next to be in trouble ........

I saw this on my northwest news over here. They almost sounded proud that they are encouraging more illegal aliens to come take the jobs from Americans.

Portland, OR is virtually a clone of San Francisco. It only takes about two years for their ideas to arrive there. But according to a news channel poll, 66 percent still oppose the Center. So far 95 precent of the guys just hang around there with no job. Maybe they should go out and work in the fields.

Captainron, last week I saw a posting on Craiglist, in the "FREE" section for free food and drinks on the city at the new day labor center. Was that you? It was funny, I should have copied and posted it here, it is now gone from Craigslist (surprise, surprise that the libertards did not leave it up).

Actually, I was wondering who put the lock on their gate The Quislings were locked out for an hour until they could saw through it.