Opportunities slow and pay plummets for day laborers

The search for work from the streets of Silicon Valley has turned desperate for hundreds of men who gather each morning hoping they'll be picked to crush concrete, paint fences or plant flowers.

As quickly as the region's economy has slowed, so has the flow of contractors and homeowners pulling to the side of the road looking for day laborers. Competition on corners is fierce as workers worried about supporting families in Mexico and Central America sprint toward any minivan or pickup truck that stops.

``Whoever opens the door first gets the job,'' said Mario Morales, a 36-year-old trying his luck recently on Third Avenue in San Mateo. But these days, ``You have to run real fast.''

Families even farther than Mexico are affected as well. At St. Joseph the Worker Center in Los Altos, a day-labor dispatch center, men from India have been showing up following cutbacks at Hewlett-Packard and National Semiconductor. They, too, need the work now to survive.

But opportunities for California's day laborers have plunged this year. Many haven't worked in days or even weeks. The pay is down, too, from a high of $10 to $12 per hour to $6 or even $5, the workers say.

Jorge Nicolas Gomez, 26, is among the laborers from San Francisco to San Jose who say they are now planting, painting or patching only once or twice a week. Last year, they'd work three or four daylong jobs in a week.

For Gomez, this changes the mood in his cramped East Palo Alto apartment, where eight men have divided the space and share daily meals and household chores.

``When we haven't worked, we all go to our rooms,'' he said. ``We're like lions pacing back and forth.''

It's a problem facing day laborers across the country, estimated by academics and labor authorities to be 2 million-strong. Work is even down at the country's oldest day-labor center, in Los Angeles, said Victor Narra of the National Day Labor Organizing Network.

Job matches at the Harbor City site have declined by 25 percent in what should be a peak season. Last year at this time, half of the more than 100 day laborers, or jornaleros as they are called in Spanish, were matched with employers on a given day.

Day labor is unregulated and compensation is often set with little more than a handshake and paid in cash. Some, but not all, day laborers are undocumented.

``The crisis has hit us hard,'' said Efraim Mendez Gallerdo, a 25-year-old who waited fruitlessly all week on El Camino Real near an upscale Atherton neighborhood for his employer to return with his promised pay. Gallerdo and three others spent two days ripping out poison oak plants, and his face is covered in a burning rash from the work. One of the workers stayed home Friday because his eyes were swollen shut.

``He didn't want to give us money for the medicine, and now that we're infected, he doesn't want to pay us,'' Gallerdo said, speculating that the San Mateo subcontractor knows he can find others to finish the job.

Times should be better for day laborers, whose work increases in the summer months as homeowners get around to backyard projects and good weather aids larger construction projects.

``When the economy is doing well, people are more willing to invest in improvements to their houses -- the kind of work you'd need a day laborer for,'' said Renee Saucedo, director of the San Francisco Day Labor Program.

Employers need workers ``but they can't pay,'' said Morales, who supports his six children in Michoacán, Mexico, with the money he earns as a day laborer in San Mateo. Morales pays $200 a month for space in a three-bedroom house he shares with 24 others. ``They always tell me that's the problem, that they'd like to hire three or four people but can only pay one.''

Officials from firms such as Labor Connection, which dispatches workers from a center in Concord, said they haven't seen a deep slowdown. But Will Collette, a researcher for the Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO, who follows day labor companies, said executives of some large firms are worried about their numbers of jobs leveling off.

Collette said he is not surprised laborers are having more difficulty finding work, although he said economic trends could favor them -- some contractors might use more day laborers to cut payroll costs.

But this summer, the matches are harder to make.

``There's very high frustration. The workers are so discouraged,'' said Mary Mendez, site manager for San Jose's St. Joseph the Worker Center.

In August 2000, the center matched 60 percent of the 100 or more men who showed up each day with jobs. Last month, 29 percent found work. As a result, the center has changed its policy by cutting off sign-ins at 10 a.m. Before, workers could register throughout the day.

St. Joseph's Los Altos site reports a similar decline in job offers. That center is dealing with the added burden of losing its lease in October.

But the slowdown does not mean jornaleros are headed back to Mexico or Central America, said Abel Valenzuela, a University of California-Los Angeles professor and a leading expert on day laborers. It's just too expensive and risky to make the trip back, he said.

Life for at least half of all day laborers is one of constant transition anyway, according to research Valenzuela conducted in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Maryland and Chicago. The average day laborer placed by a temporary agency works only 90 hours, or 14 days, before moving on in search of better opportunities.

For those who stick it out, the economy's downturn has dramatically altered life.

Jornaleros say that when work slows down, they send less money home, affecting their families in Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Honduras. They also have to pull closer together -- take in a few more roommates, chip in for more bulk foods.

``Poverty here is better than poverty there,'' Gomez said, just before he managed a successful leap into a pickup truck that swerved off El Camino Real. ``It's three times better.''

DAY LABOR An estimated 2 million people in the United States, mainly men, find work each year through casual day labor. Approximately 150 community-based centers across the country match day laborers with jobs.Many more find work from street corners. In 1999, the UCLA Center for the Study of Urban Poverty conducted the first comprehensive research on day laborers in southern California and across the country. Through 481 interviews in 87 different sites, it was found that:

Day laborers are mainly young Latino men, predominantly from Mexico. In some parts of the country, African Americans and other ethnic groups also work as day laborers.

Homeowners and subcontractors are the two primary employers.
Day labor pays about $2 more per hour than the federal minimum wage.

Half of all day laborers report at least one instance of not being paid by an employer. Other types of employer abuses include partial payments, no breaks and no water provided at work sites.
Ninety-four percent of day laborers have homes. In other industrialized nations, such as Japan, a higher proportion are homeless.

Two in five day laborers surveyed cited lack of documents as their reason for not entering the formal labor market. Other factors included discrimination and lack of English skills.

At least one-third of day laborers have more than nine years of schooling.

One in four day laborers have been in the market for more than six years; 40 percent have been day laborers for less than a year.

Abel Valenzuela, an associate professor and director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Urban Poverty

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.