Thread: SACRAMENTO GROUP TO HELP DAY LABORERS

Day labor centers try to take workers off street corners
As a push begins for a site in south area, study notes 25 communities in the state offer the service.
By Susan Ferriss - Bee Staff Writer
Published 12:00 am PDT Thursday, July 26, 2007
Story appeared in MAIN NEWS section, Page A4

As they wait to be offered work, day laborers are reflected in a window Wednesday at the Arco gas station at 47th Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Sacramento Bee/Renée C. Byer
Latin American day laborers who gather on public streets have become the oft-maligned public face of illegal immigration, even though they represent only 3 percent of all the estimated male undocumented workers in California, according to a study released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California.
On any given day in the Golden State, about 40,000 people are employed or looking for work as day laborers, a number so small that it doesn't represent even half of 1 percent of California's entire working population, the study by the San Francisco-based think tank found.
Despite their small numbers, day laborers' visibility often makes them the focus of media coverage, and the object of community activists' attempts to try to crack down on illegal immigration, said economist Arturo Gonzalez, whose report, "Day Labor in the Golden State," is based on data gathered in a 2004 national survey of day workers.
Whether they stem from claims that laborers harass passers-by, urinate in streets, degrade property values -- or are probably illegal immigrants -- nearly 60 California communities have enacted ordinances to try to prevent workers from gathering on streets or in parking lots to wait for employers to cruise by with informal job offers.
On the other hand, the study notes, about 25 California communities, more than the total elsewhere nationwide, are trying to take day laborers off the streets by designating sites for employers to seek workers' services. Those sites can range from an outside area with benches, to an inside hiring center run by a nonprofit group.
A nonprofit group in Sacramento interested in bringing more health and job training to low-income neighborhoods is preparing to develop a community center in south Sacramento that will include a day laborer program.
The Community Resources Project, which has obtained funding from the Kaiser Foundation and other private sources, is thinking of modeling its day labor program after one in Concord. That program enters workers' names and skills in a database and matches them with employers in an organized, rotating fashion.
Linda Kimura, former chief of staff to Sacramento County Supervisor Jimmy Yee -- who endorses creating a day laborer program in his area -- collaborated with the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department and others to research the idea of a center.
Kimura said Yee's office and the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department asked immigration officials how they could help get day laborers off the street. She said immigration agents said their priority was detaining illegal immigrants with criminal records, not random undocumented suspects they had no room to house in detention.
Immigration enforcement is not a local duty, Kimura said.
But "health and safety" is, she said, so the supervisor and the Sheriff's Department concluded that most day laborers just wanted to work, and that law enforcement time and money would be better spent on serious crime prevention rather than on attending to calls about loitering.
Gonzalez said he's heard this reasoning from other local communities.
"I would say that the workers' centers are more for the community's benefit than for the workers' benefit," Gonzalez said. "There has to be some community support for this, otherwise politicians backing these centers would end up out of office. By the way, the people who do the hiring come from within the community, too."
Gonzalez found that 80 percent of California's day laborers are illegal immigrants, a number he said probably wouldn't surprise many in the public but surprised him because he thought it would be higher.
He said the phenomenon of day labor, however, is the result of U.S. market forces, not the result of illegal immigration.
Americans' desire to find someone to perform part-time labor, sometimes requiring skill and stamina, doesn't always fit into the world of full-time employment contracts or union hiring halls.
"This reflects the pace of the modern economy. Employers want people quickly, and with a minimal amount of paperwork," Gonzalez said.
Whether they're private homeowners who want a fence fixed or shrubs planted, or a subcontractor who needs a day's worth of concrete poured, employers are driving the demand for easy-to-find affordable workers, Gonzalez said, and immigrants are filling the niche.
Day laborers are vulnerable to abuse, cheating and usually don't find as many hours of work as they would like, he said. But California day laborers' average wages are about $11 an hour, more than California's $7.50 minimum wage.
As cities struggle with the day labor dilemma, many municipalities have concluded that they cannot be held liable for the abuses committed by employers who use a community-run hiring center.
The reason, Gonzalez said, is that day labor centers are providing "a community service," not acting as hiring halls.
The staff at centers can warn workers of abusive employers -- many do just that. A center's roster system can create a "paper trail," even if it is just a number without a name that a center might give an employer or an address of a work site.
Gonzalez said the "greatest challenge" cities probably face if they establish day labor centers is persuading employers to use them.
Day labor centers' records, he said, however basic, might help hold employers responsible for violating wage, tax or workplace injury laws.
"On the corner, there is no paper trail," Gonzalez said.

Uhhh... not this again... Day labor centers are unlawful!!! Again can we make a center for all law breakers??? Oh wait there is its called jail!!! Can we send them there???

Well looks like we need to step it up in Sac. I know that site well.