Thread: San Antonio considering Day Labor center

This is so stupid - they state outright that the illegals don't have enough work, so why build them a center? So stupid!

San Antonio exploring creation of a day labor center

Web Posted: 10/14/2007 11:49 PM CDT

Hernán Rozemberg
Express-News

Once he lined up a place to live after moving from Los Angeles to San Antonio two years ago, José's next priority was to find the local day labor center to make some quick rent money.
To his surprise, there was no such center. He learned he had to hang out on downtown street corners, jostling with others trying to get a day's work.


"I couldn't believe it," José, originally from Mexico, said as he leaned against a building one recent morning at Houston and Frio streets, the most popular gathering spot for day laborers. "Back in L.A., they had centers for people to get picked up for work. They even had computers and English classes while we waited."

(Sense of Entitlement??? Just a little!)

He and other day workers here say they'd prefer not to loiter on sidewalks without bathrooms and get harassed by police, but they don't have a choice.

That could change soon.

After decades of letting an informal labor marketplace operate on streets and sidewalks, San Antonio is looking to go the way of other cities across the country, including several in Texas, by opening a day labor center with an organized pickup system.

According to a University of California at Los Angeles study released last year, around 118,000 day laborers in the country are looking for work on any given day at 63 day labor centers in 17 states.

Most, like José, are undocumented migrants from Mexico and Central America.

Under current federal law, employers are asked to show in good faith that they are hiring people who are legally allowed to work in the country. They could face fines if it's proven they knowingly hired workers who are in the U.S. illegally.

The centers have proven themselves safer and more humane environments than the streets, particularly when cities design them using worker input, said Pablo Alvarado, an immigrant from El Salvador and former day laborer who directs the National Day Labor Organizing Network in Los Angeles.

Riding on the coattails of the decision to construct the $75 million Haven for Hope campus for homeless people, City Councilwoman Lourdes Galván pushed city officials to use the opportunity to fix the day labor dilemma.

Zoning rules will prohibit loitering within 1,000 feet of the homeless campus, which would push day laborers out of an area where many now congregate.

Rather than let the workers drift into another neighborhood on their own, Galván instructed city staff to come up with a relocation plan in two months.

She said she's confident the council will follow through.

"Nobody has wanted to deal with this issue, but it's now going from the back burner to the front burner," Galván said. "It shouldn't take a rocket scientist or an act of Congress to get this thing done."

Long overdue


It will take the work of Dennis Campa, director of the city's community initiatives department, who expects to hand a proposal to the city manager in six weeks.

Campa said it's too early to talk about possible sites for a day labor center, but he said the ideal solution would be to limit costs by using city-owned property and contracting with a local social service nonprofit agency to manage it.

He agreed that action is long overdue and that the problem is out of control.

Work-seekers are part of a toxic mix of characters that share a downtown area known as Cattleman Square. Besides a jail, there are two homeless shelters housing people with mental health problems and others with drug and alcohol addictions.

Shelter residents linger on sidewalks with everybody else, and the laborers complain that substance abusers who get into fights or pass out in plain view of motorists are so unsavory that potential employers just keep driving.

The workers themselves might start drinking if they don't pick up work. And many are cited by police for solicitation — the same charge meted out to panhandlers — if they leave the sidewalk to crowd around an employer's vehicle. It carries a fine of up to $2,000.

The whole scene is "not the kind of neighborhood we want as the gateway to the West Side," Campa said.

Business owners and residents in the area have long clamored for changes. Now that the city is apparently going to do a major cleanup, they would like Campa to check with them if his idea is to open a new center there, said Jason Mata, president of the Prospect Hill Neighborhood Association.

Finding a solution


All Romeo GarcÃ*a wants is for the day laborers to move from his front door. He has owned the Cattleman Square Tavern for 15 years, and employers used to pull into his parking lot to pick up workers until he chased them off.

And though the bar remains open at night, he recently had to shut down his morning grill service because the workers scared off customers, GarcÃ*a said.

"I have nothing personal against these guys, because they just want to work, but they're killing my business," he said. "If this was happening on the River Walk, the city would have taken care of this a long time ago."

It's not like the city hasn't tried to find a solution. The idea of creating a one-stop-shop has been floated for at least two decades but never came to fruition.

Drivers can still see a sign at Commerce and the Interstate 35 access road pointing to a day laborer assembly site — that's as far as the effort reached in the 1980s, said Rolando Morales, who worked in Campa's department for more than 20 years.

And three years ago, then-Mayor Ed Garza convened a Day Labor Task Force that examined the issue in depth, studying and visiting other cities' day labor centers.

Some potential sites were even identified but, with a new mayor in the picture and other projects such as the Main Plaza redevelopment taking center stage, the day labor issue was sidelined.

Much remains up in the air. But the support and attention the idea attracts has brought relief to those affected, starting with day laborers themselves.

"I'd be the first to sign up," said a man on Houston Street who only identified himself as a 61-year-old Mexican national who has been a day laborer in San Antonio for 25 years.

"Out here on the street it's too dangerous, there's too much competition for little work and even then we get constantly ripped off by abusive employers," said the man, as a circle of eight other workers formed around him, nodding in unison.

Hey San Antonio why don't you folks take down the American Flags and the Texas Flag...and raise the Mexican Rag....so in the future we will know who and what you are really about...but remember you mess with the Alamo.....and may god Help you guys when we return to the Great State and Nation before the invasion.....

Sorry for venting folks but....I have just about had enough!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!![/quote]