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[August 15, 2005] Invisible to Most, Immigrant Women Line Up for Day Labor
By NINA BERNSTEIN
New York Times
The women are not noticed by the weekday morning crowds that rush past Eighth Avenue and 37th Street, in the heart of Manhattan's fashion
district. They arrive in twos and threes after 8 a.m., shrinking against the buildings on both sides of the avenue, until scores of them are waiting, small, dark-haired Mexicans, Ecuadoreans, Hondurans.
By noon they have vanished. In swift, discreet sidewalk negotiations, perhaps half have been hired for a day's work at the minimum wage or less in
some of the neighborhood's last struggling garment factories. The rest have given up until tomorrow.
A few miles away in Williamsburg, commuters on the busy Brooklyn-Queens Expressway are equally oblivious to the similar scene unfolding on
an overpass above them. There, the work at stake is $8-an-hour housecleaning, and those vying for a day's scrubbing, mainly for Hasidic
homemakers, stand in a crude ascending hierarchy of employer preference: Mexican and Central American women in their 30's at the back, Polish
immigrant women in their 50's and 60's in the middle, and young Polish students with a command of English at the head of the line.
At a time when male day laborers have become the most public and contentious face of economic immigration to the United States, these two rare
female shape-ups have doubled in size almost unobserved in recent years. Their growth reflects a larger overlooked reality: Women make up 44
percent of the nation's low-wage immigrant work force, and worldwide, studies show, more and more women are migrating for work.
Often invisible and undercounted, experts say, female economic migrants are an increasing presence, especially in big cities like New York, where
the demand is not for men to pick lettuce or process poultry, but for women to pick up the scraps of a collapsed manufacturing sector, or to serve in the vast underground economy of domestic service.
Although more women across the country are showing up in day-labor hiring halls, often run by grass-roots labor groups, experts say that these
two female shape-ups may well be the only significant ones of their kind in the nation - places where women are willing to put their personal safety in jeopardy for a few hours of work.
"What else is there to do if you have nothing to eat?" asked Rosario Jocha, 49, still standing on Eighth Avenue at 11 a.m. on a recent Wednesday.
She said she had recently grabbed a day's work cutting threads from jackets even when the employer, a Chinese immigrant subcontractor, insisted
he could not pay more than $5.75 an hour, 25 cents below the state minimum wage. "I've been here 11 years, and I still haven't found a stable, steady job."
At both locations, some of the women waiting for work had been in the country as little as a few months; others, like Ms. Jocha, a Queens resident
from Ecuador, were old-timers who spoke of better jobs lost when small-business employers could not pay rising rent. On Eighth Avenue,
merchants said that 100 to 150 women regularly sought work six mornings a week year round - double or triple the number when the intersection first emerged as an informal female hiring site about six years ago.
Yet May Chen, a vice president of Unite, the garment workers' union, whose headquarters is only a dozen blocks away, said she was unaware of
the shape-up's existence until she was asked about it for this article. And Aaron Adams, a veteran garment center landlord who passes by every
day, said he had assumed the women standing there "were just shooting the breeze."
Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, a sociologist who has written extensively about the feminization of migration, said she was not surprised. "The space that
these women occupy, the public spaces in the city, are just like fleeting moments," she said. "They don't really have a place in the city that's visible, so it's easy to ignore them."
Even the discussion of legal guest worker proposals in Congress centers on male migrants, she said. But though nationally men account for about
two-thirds of labor migration among illegal immigrants, primarily because of agricultural demand, she said, global patterns indicate that women are
easily half the immigrant workers flowing to large metropolitan areas like New York.
Ms. Parreñas and other researchers find that women who migrate for work are likely to be single mothers supporting children in their native
countries. Compared with their male counterparts, they earn less, despite higher levels of education, according to a 2002 study of the United
States' low-wage immigrant work force by the Urban Institute, a research group in Washington, which estimated that two million foreign-born
women made less than the minimum wage. Yet women are also more likely to remain in America, and they send home a higher proportion of their earnings.
Unvarnished lessons in global supply, demand and division play out at both New York hiring sites.
"We never talk to the Latinas - sometimes they agree to work for less," said Teresa, a 53-year-old Polish widow who, like many of the 60 women
waiting for cleaning work near Marcy and Division Avenues in Williamsburg on a recent Friday morning, would give only her first name.
At the other end of the curved concrete abutment, Maria, 35, from Ecuador, gave a shrug. "They pay them more," she complained, as a woman in
Hasidic dress passed by the Spanish-speaking group and selected a tall young Polish woman. "It's just that they're white."
Even among the Poles, immigration complicates the pecking order. Some older women won green cards after years as live-in maids for sponsors,
and boast in broken English of children in college. Other women lack papers, or shuttle on temporary work visas between their struggling families
in rural Poland and spartan, overpriced rooms in Brooklyn. And in summer, just when demand declines because of employer vacations, they now
face growing numbers of young Polish women working illegally on tourist visas while living rent-free with Brooklyn relatives.
"They don't want babushkas," complained Zofia, a 50-year-old mother of five, as a young Hasidic man led Justyne, a 24-year-old Polish student, to his S.U.V.
Not all employers had the same preferences, however, and most, like Rifky Kohn, 28, a pregnant mother of four, were on foot. At midday, with the Sabbath approaching, she gladly hired a Polish woman in her late 60's.
"She looks more experienced," explained Mrs. Kohn.
Rosa Yumbla, who supports four children in Ecuador, recently skipped a day on the overpass to address a national conference of day labor
organizers at New York University Law School. She spoke at the urging of the Latin American Workers Project, an advocacy group in Brooklyn.
"We suffer the changing weather throughout the year, the heat of the sun and cold in winter, because where we wait to be picked up is on the
corner," Ms. Yumbla said in Spanish to an audience that included the mayor's commissioner for immigrant affairs. "Help us secure a space where we can be safer."
For now, the women depend on one another and their own instincts for safety. On a recent Wednesday, when a man on Eighth Avenue
approached a young Mexican woman with a vague description of a part-time job in a store at the Port Authority, an older woman drew close and
signaled disapproval. The man, who gave his name as Victor Miranda and his age as 55, then turned to Josefa Limas, 32, who arrived from Puebla, Mexico, only six months ago.
She, too, shook her head. "Sometimes they'll just end up taking you somewhere else," she said, describing another woman's close call the previous
day. "An Indian man took her to an elevator and wouldn't let her out. He came over and tried to grab her. She pressed an emergency button and got away."
Still, the pressure to take chances can be strong. Nellie, 32, who shares a room in the Bronx, pulled out a picture of the three children she left four
years ago with her sister in rural Ecuador, in an effort to earn money for the heart operation needed by her son, the youngest.
"The little I make here I send to him," she said. "Many times I just want to go to be with him, but I don't have the money to do so. It gives me a desperate feeling."
On this day she counted herself lucky: she had been called back for a second day's work at $6 an hour, she said. And leaving the line, she melted into the crowd.
[August 10, 2005] Beyond the Stereotypes
Members of Herndon's day worker population want to be known for more than standing on a street corner.
By Brynn Grimley
Herndon Connection
Jose Hernandez wakes up every morning at 4:30 a.m. As the sun begins to rise, he begins his walk to the 7-Eleven at the corner of Alabama Drive and Elden Street, hoping to find work for the day.
If hired, Hernandez will work close to 10 hours of manual labor in a day, making $10 an hour. When his job at the construction site ends,
Hernandez returns home to take a quick shower, grab a bite to eat, and hop on a bus to his part-time job in Reston Town Center where he cleans offices for $6.50 an hour until 10 p.m.
On days he does not find a day job at the 7-Eleven, Hernandez begins to feel the pressure of financial burdens — so does his family.
A native of El Salvador, Hernandez has four sons, twin 7-year-olds, a 9-year-old and 11-year-old, along with a wife, sister and mother in his home
country. Each month he sends $600 or more home to them, $350 for his wife and children and $250 to his sister and mother who help watch the children.
"The big pressure's at the end of the month when you have to come up with rent," said the soft-spoken 30-year-old through translation by Jorge Rochac.
Hernandez, wearing workman boots, gray cargo pants, a black bandanna as a sweat band around his forehead and a navy t-shirt that lists
"California's Beaches" across it, stands a little under six feet tall. He looks away as he talks about the life he left more than a year ago to come to
the United States where he is trying to pay off his debts so he can return home.
"It's very hard to be away from one's family, especially your children and your wife," he said of the family he hasn't seen for 13 months and speaks to once a week via telephone.
"The United States are known as the 'Golden Jail.' If you're here you can't go back," he said. "You're gone three, six, nine months, sometimes your
loved ones die and you never see them. Since I have been here I have lost two close relatives."
A majority of the men circled around Hernandez could relate as he told his story of leaving school after the sixth grade to become a trash collector in El Salvador.
Many of them tell their slightly differing tales of family back home and why they chose to come to the United States — most of them because relatives live here.
The common denominator for all of them is opportunity — something their home countries did not offer.
"What really is happening, what in a sense made us come here, is the insecurity and delinquency of our own country," said El Salvadorian native
Jose-Luis Saravia, through a translator. "Here we don't have to deal with that."
Saravia has been in the United States for two years, but came to Herndon 10 months ago because his relatives live here. Initially living in Florida, his trip to Virginia took a detour.
Saravia said he was kidnapped for seven months by the person who offered to help him get to Herndon. He was held with seven other workers in
the "boondocks somewhere" forced to do agricultural work for $40 a day. Threatened with abuse on a regular basis, one night Saravia said he escaped and "just ran away."
At 22 years old, Saravia is not the youngest man on site. Francisco, who declined an interview due to legal concerns, is 15 years old.
Kandi Perdomo, an English as a second language teacher at the Neighborhood Resource Center, said Francisco came to the United States by
himself from El Salvador. Unable to attend school because he is supporting himself, Perdomo said Francisco stands at the 7-Eleven every day hoping for work.
Perdomo has met children younger than Francisco in the country alone. She also has heard repeated stories about men not paid for their labor.
"There's about $2,000 to $3,000 that I haven't been paid," said Saravia. "A lot of guys [employers] that don't pay say that if you don't have papers
you don't have protection — that's not true, that's a perception."
Sometimes employers will try to take advantage of Latino day workers because they do not speak English fluently, resulting in them working all day for no pay, he said.
If hired every day, he will make $500-plus a week, said Saravia. He added that as of Wednesday, Aug. 3, he had not worked in three days.
"HERE IT IS AN ADVENTURE," said Hernandez. "Some days there is work, some days there is not work. And some days, like today, you just
stand around and that's when people misperceive us and think we're just a bunch of bums standing on a corner doing nothing."
Hernandez said if he had the opportunity for a stable, full-time job, he would take it, even if it paid $7 an hour.
"When an American picks us up for work, we do our best," he said. "We want them to have a good concept of who we are and what we do."
Nery Vargas, 25, nicknamed "The Teacher" by the men on site, said there is a misconception in the community about the men that gather at the 7-Eleven.
"Those who are here, we're here because we really want to work, we want to contribute something," said the Honduran native. "We come here to
work, not to cause problems. Our contribution is our work in exchange for pay."
Before moving to the United States, Vargas was studying mathematics at a university in Honduras. He left after one year to come to the United
States as a "tourist" to see what the country had to offer. Since then he has worked as an electrician, placing his wages in a savings account, while
also teaching himself English and helping others adjust to the new culture.
Vargas has also spoken on behalf of the day workers at recent Planning Commission public hearings regarding a proposal for the creation of a formal, regulated day labor site in town.
"Who will speak for us if I don't?" said Vargas, adding it is important residents understand the workers are as unhappy with the current situation at 7-Eleven as anybody else.
"When someone comes and they need someone like a mechanic or a painter, there's no way for them to pick and choose," said Vargas.
"The big problem is that there is no order. There is no way people coming into the site have people they can speak to and people on the site have no way to speak to the [employers]."
Saravia added there is also a misperception among residents that stereotypes them as bad people.
"For us, it would be a beautiful thing to take a photo of the drunks who come here and print it in the newspaper so we can get rid of them," said
Saravia. "It would be good to get those people in the paper and prosecute them, so the general public opinion would change — it's not us."
Hernandez, Vargas and Saravia will continue to wait for work at the 7-Eleven because financially they have no other option.
Hernandez said he wants to take English classes, but cannot because of cost and scheduling conflicts. If the formal day-labor site is approved and
offers English classes as proposed in the application, Hernandez said he would definitely attend.
Until then, he will continue to pay his debts from coming to the United States — a $6,800 trip that is gaining interest at 12 percent each month until
he pays it off — and sending money home to his family. "I am living the American dream to get ahead and get rid of all my debts," he said.
"I am saving $30,000 and then I will go home to my country," Vargas added as a grin spread across his face under a black leather cowboy hat.
"I'll finish my studies and work as a math teacher," said Vargas about his plan to leave in a year-and-a-half. "But, for now, it's good to be here for work."
Even with a large debt hanging over his head, bills and rent to pay and a family to support each month, Hernandez smiles as he thinks about the future.
"My major goal someday — hopefully not too far away — is, I hope to go back home," he said. "I think that is the dream of most of us, to go back home."
[Jorge Rochac, a 16-year resident of Herndon, contributed to this story by helping translate for the men at the unofficial day-labor site.]
[ August 26, 2001 ]
Practical Labor
A San Francisco Chronicle column concerning day laborers along Monument Boulevard featured a profile of Lynn Svensson and the Day Labor
Research Institute. The Joan Ryan column concluded by stating, "We can wait for the federal government to do its job and arrive at a brilliant
solution. Or we can follow Lynn Svensson's lead and put our trust in practicality over politics."
Click here for the full text of the column. Chronicle column.
[ August 4, 2001 ]
All in a Day's Wage
Lynn Svensson isn't about to let a piece of cement thrown through the window of her new Toyota ruin her day. She shrugs off the recent
vandalism, saying it comes with the territory.
"Of all the things that have ever been done to me, that ranks pretty low," she said.
Svensson heads Concord's Monument Labor Works, a city-sanctioned hiring hall where undocumented workers, most of whom are from Mexico,
can meet potential employers. The work center marks its first anniversary today. City officials say it has substantially reduced street solicitation.
About 90 percent of day laborers who come to the center get work every day.
While city officials credit Svensson for making the center work, her job is far from glamorous. For one thing, she tolerates threats from drug
addicts angry about drawing more attention from police now that fewer day laborers mill on Concord's streets. She suspects it was one of them who broke her car window.
"I'm one in a field of one," she said. "Day laborers are like the homeless as far as popular subjects. Nobody wants anything to do with it, nobody
wants to be associated with it." Svensson helps between 70 and 110 people get jobs each day.
"It's better in here," said worker Henry Hernandez, 48, "Out in the street ... no good." Too much competition, he said. Before the center opened,
dozens of laborers would hang out on Monument Boulevard, waiting for work. When a potential employer pulled up, men would surround him
and fiercely outbid each other for the jobs. They would get in cars for as little as $3 an hour, Svensson said. Sometimes, employers would hire laborers and not pay them for their work.
On the street, there were no rules. Workers had no leverage in setting pay levels and no way of seeking justice from abusive employers. A
state-funded Casual Labor Office was set up in 1995, but as the city's migrant worker population grew, so did the numbers of people congregating on Monument Boulevard.
City officials were beset with complaints. They sought ways to curb the problem and found a model with a high success rate in Glendale that
Svensson spearheaded.
Her philosophy? Let the laborers take control.
"This is their center," she said. "They make the rules." A list of those rules is taped to the wall of the former dive shop: No handouts, no drugs or
alcohol, no thieves, vagabonds or lazy people. Everyone pays a dollar per day in dues to use and operate the hiring hall. Workers show up at 6
a.m. and put their names on a list. The cardinal sin is accepting less than $10 per hour for work.
Employers are tracked by license plate numbers, a system that offers some degree of security to the workers. If an employer doesn't pay, laborers
share the information with others and watch out for the offender -- if he makes the mistake of coming back, Svensson said.
Svensson is fiercely protective of the workers. On a recent day, a man came in shouting epithets about the "illegal aliens" who use the center. "I
chased him off," she said. "But that ... really makes me angry."
The legality of the center is challenged by labor union leaders who say the operation blatantly breaks the law. "It's not like we're against the
workers. All they're doing is trying to survive," said Greg Feere, chief executive officer for the Contra Costa Building and Construction Trades
Council. "But the contractors that use them are 100 percent non-union. They don't pay California income tax or workman's (compensation).
"It's kind of like illegal prostitution," he said. "That situation is not a whole lot different from the day laborers."
Concord's Assistant City Manager Peter Dragovich counters that the city merely provides a place for workers to congregate. "The city's goal is
not to provide jobs, but to address the significant number of day laborers on the street," Dragovich said. "The employers have the responsibility
to comply with applicable laws. Concord police can't stop someone for being an illegal immigrant."
Svensson also brushes off the criticism. "The men are here and they want to work," she said. "If we turn our heads, they're not going to go
away." That desire to work runs so deep with the migrant workers, she said, that sometimes it's nearly impossible for them to act casual when job
prospects arrive. Though they could earn more than $10 an hour, their competitiveness with one another can drive prices to the minimum.
Such a scene played out early one recent Wednesday morning. Before 7 a.m., an employer drove up in a dusty pickup truck. He needed painters.
Like bees to honey, dozens of men swarmed the car. The behavior frustrates Svensson. The workers have little chance of negotiating higher wages when employers see so many men eager for the job.
After the employer left with the workers, promising them the minimum $10 wage, Svensson called the laborers inside for an impromptu meeting.
"It hurts me to say this," she told them in Spanish, "but there are a lot of you who aren't negotiating well. When an employer comes up to you, don't say 'Yes, let's go.' Bid with them."
"You gotta be like the women at a dance," she said, as a ripple of laughter echoed through the room. "Stand around and look uninterested. Just
like a woman makes a man stand there, like she's thinking about it, like it's really going to pain her to dance."
Her words, even when they must be harsh, are laced with kindness. "They always hope there's a chance an employer is going to look behind the
crowd and say 'Hey, what about that guy right there?'" The laborers are like Svensson's extended family. She knows all of their names and their stories. She remembers their faces.
As a young woman, Svensson never envisioned such a career for herself or the rewards that would come with it. "One time in Glendale, the guys
bought me Mother's Day presents," she remembered, laughing. "They were tacky things, like plastic flowers that blinked. (The men) said, 'We
don't have our wives or sisters or mothers here. You're our replacement.'"
Cities from all around the country have contacted her about running similar day laborer centers. She can't see herself quitting her niche profession
anytime soon.
"You do get burned out. When things are going bad and a worker comes back and doesn't get paid ... that's when you feel it. "But when they go
off to work and come back with money in their pocket and they're all happy and dirty ... you feel recharged."
[ Sonia Krishnan Contra Costa Times
[ November 12, 1999 ] DLRI Model Turns Around Austin's Problem
Day labor in Austin had been troubled from the start, due largely to the deleterious mixture of workers and the homeless and transient population
that mingled together on the downtown streets. Only about 30 or so men a day were getting work inside the site. Outside, there was chaos. There
was crime. And there was the general feeling of menace to the citizenry that the sight of a collection of shabbily dressed men of color walking the city streets often provokes.
Last spring's Computer Science Corp. deal forced the program off the city-owned land at Cesar Chavez and Lavaca to I-35 and 50th, where it faces
the freeway but backs up to a residential neighborhood, the attendant uproar caused city leaders to focus on the program long enough to see that it had to change. And change it has.
A little over three months into the operation of the new, nonprofit First Workers Corp., the number of workers getting jobs is more than double
what it was at the downtown site. Employers say they're pleased with the new, more organized format. The neighborhood protestors who picketed
the site in its first days of operation have gone home. Officials of the Austin Police Department, INS, and the city of Austin have all expressed pleasant surprise at the way the program is going.
Lynn Svensson, the consultant who has presided over a string of day-labor overhauls in California, and whom the city hired to help remake day
labor in Austin, is not surprised by the reaction.
"This is what everyone hoped, but many doubted, would happen when the day labor site moved from its downtown home."
Why the turnaround? Mostly everybody agrees there are two main reasons: First, the program moved away from the Austin Resource Center for
the Homeless. And second, the program is now run by the workers themselves. According to the model instituted by Svensson, anything that
happens at the center is a result of consensus on the part of the workers.
Workers participate in the administration of the site, helping run the all-important "list" that contains the order of names for the day, and decides
who goes out to work when. They also patrol the neighborhood in crossing guard-orange safety vests to make sure nobody is loitering about in
the neighborhood or -- horror of horrors -- soliciting work outside the day labor site. The workers themselves have collaborated to write the set
of rules to which they voluntarily subject themselves. Workers agreed not to allow free food to be handed out at the site. Workers plan to start
paying dues to use the site, in hopes that it can become self-supporting.
Assistant Police Chief Bruce Mills says that although APD has not yet put together crime statistics to be compared to the neighborhood crime
level before the site opened, "So far, it has been without incident."
"The measure of a day labor program's success is whether or not it gets workers off the streets," Svensson said.
[ Jenny Johnson ]
[ June 19, 1999 ] Los Angeles Times Reports Day Labor Stats
The Los Angeles Times today reported on a survey of LA area day laborers which revealed that a significant number of them have worked
day labor for years. 31% of those surveyed have been day laborers from 2 to 5 years; 20% from 6-10 years; 5% for more than 10 years. 78% of
those surveyed were from Mexico, while 20% were from Central American countries. The report suggests that many men prefer day labor over full time employment.
In DLRI surveys of over 3000 day laborers at five day laborers centers, and several large unorganized day laborer corners, here in Southern
California, 95% of day laborers say they want fulltime work. In fact, the job centers in Glendale, Pomona and El Monte have placed over 500 day
laborers in fulltime work. On street corners day laborers also find fulltime and long term work, often returning to the corners only if this work runs out or on their days off in order to supplement their income.
Although the DLRI applauds all legitimate efforts to better understand day laborers, we strongly believe that policy decisions which effect day
laborers should always keep in mind what day laborers really want, and must be based on good research techniques and practical experience.
[ Hely Benitez DLRI ]
[ March 22, 1999 ] Women Join Center's Day Labor Pool
Women seeking jobs as maids, nannies and secretaries can also be hired through a day labor service founded for men looking for work in
construction, painting, and landscaping. The Temporary Skilled Worker Center, founded two years ago to help men who had been solicting work
on street corners, now has a pool of 18 women available temporarily or permanently to clean homes or offices or to work as nannies and secretaries.
Female workers are much in demand, center officials said, and the center usually gets more requests to hire them than it can fill. The center
serves about 200 male day laborers, and they decided employment services should be offered for women too.
The Temporary Skilled Worker Center was started as a joint effort of the Catholic Charities the city, the Glendale Police Department, the
community and the men who stood on street corners soliciting work, said Lynn Svensson, a UCLA graduate student who helped organize the effort.
Captain Ron De Pompa of the Glendale Police Department said the center has helped to end the congregation of day laborers on city streets,
and the accompanying traffic swarm of would-be employers. "It has worked very effectively and has helped to alleviate what had been a
long-term problem in this city," De Pompa said. "We haven't encountered any problems with the center to date. It's very well run, and has a very good record."
[ Mary Lou Aurelio Daily News ]
[ February 27, 1999 ] The Miracle on San Fernando
In the pell-mell bombardment of new problems in Glendale, few people seem to have noticed that one of the ugliest and longest-festering of
the city's past problems has evaporated. Disappeared. Checked out of town.
The problem was the locations where droves of day laborers hung out seeking temporary employment.... at Dunn Edwards on Broadway, at
Home Depot on San Fernando Road, and at the U-Haul on Brand Boulevard. For 30 years these venues were sources of constant calls to police,
were health threats, campaign issues, dampers on nearby businesses, and general blights on the community. They were problems labeled
"unsolvable" by many in city government and local social service agencies that had failed at one strategy after another to correct them.
Over the years the INS tried to dampen the problem with raids, and local police tried strategies of arrests and crackdowns using every available
law. Social service agencies tried centers stocked with coffee, meals and compassion. None of these solutions worked. Such congragations of
day laborers are still as onerous as ever in other communities, but Glendale has become the utopia of day labor.
The Glendale model is being replicated in city after city. Together with the local business community, and consultants Tom McCarty and
Lynn Svensson, the Glendale Police Department's Community Oriented Policing and Problem Solving (COPPS) program worked with the crowds of
men to invent a worker-designed center. The result is Glendale's Temporary Skilled Worker Center at 5101 San Fernando Road, across the street from Home Depot.
There, 365 days a year, those who need temporary workers and those who want temporary work work make their match in an orderly process.
The contrasts between the problem days and the new system are dramatic. In the chaotic old days workers hired out for $2 to $5 an hour.
Today, their minimum is $7 an hour. Formerly, in a typical day only 15% of the men got work. Now, 90-100% get work on most days. In days
gone by, drug dealers melted into the crowd, and thieves showed up daily for jobs as movers. These bad apples left town and never showed up at the new center.
The day laborers run their center with the pride of what they consider a noble profession. They refer to themselves as skilled workers, not day
laborers, and they reject charity, despising those "welfereros" who accept it. The money to pay for the operation comes from the workers
themselves, who assess themselves monthly dues for this purpose. The center was started in 1997 with only $35,000 in city seed money, from
federal block grant funds. Social service agency models in other communities cost between $112,000 and $240,000 year after year.
[ Nat Read Los Angeles Times ]
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