Study sheds new light on day laborers
BY Ajay singh
Today Staff Writer
You see them waving from street corners, sometimes mobbing cars that stop. Most are undocumented immigrant day laborers looking for work — fixing a roof, erecting a fence or helping you move — and they’re a vital but widely abused part of the nation’s labor market, according to a new study co-authored by Abel Valenzuela Jr., associate professor of Chicano/a studies and urban planning.
The study, “On the Corner: Day Labor in the United States,” released Jan. 23, is the first systematic and nationwide analysis of day labor. Its other authors are Nik Theodore, director of the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago; Edwin Meléndez, professor of economics at the New School University in New York City, and Ana Luz Gonzalez, a doctoral student in urban planning at UCLA.
Based on a nationwide survey of 2,660 day laborers at 264 hiring sites across 20 states and the District of Columbia, the study provides groundbreaking empirical data on a largely invisible population that takes great financial and personal risks to enter the United States to perform tough and dangerous jobs many Americans don’t want.
On a typical day, some 117,600 day laborers hunt for jobs, congregating mostly outside home improvement stores or at gas stations, public parks, parking lots, even churches. Others seek work through day labor worker centers run by community organizations. They earn a median wage of $10 an hour and rarely make more than $15,000 annually on average.
They’re a bewildering demographic mix: 59% come from Mexico, 28% from Central America, and 7% — the third-largest group that includes blacks and whites — are born in the United States. Further, 75.4% are unauthorized immigrants (although about 11% of them have applied for permanent residency), 41% have never married, and 37% have no children.
“There are three factors why they are in this niche industry,” said Valenzuela. “They don’t have documents, they live day-to-day, and there’s a demand for them.” Some 40% of the workers have had nine or more years of schooling and 86% seek regular permanent employment, but the day labor market provides “limited pathways for some workers to enter the formal, mainstream economy,” the study notes.
The workers are vulnerable to wage theft and other abuses because they willingly take almost any job, the authors write. Nearly half of those studied were underpaid or not paid for their work at least once; 44% were denied food and water breaks; 27% were abandoned.
But that’s changing, thanks to 63 day labor worker centers and 15 community organizations in 17 states, which record employers’ names, monitor working conditions and even offer laborers entertainment and emergency services. The study strongly supports these centers as “a community mechanism to stem conflict, restore worker rights, improve employment opportunities and minimize and hold accountable unprincipled employers.”
The centers have lately been the target of nationwide protests by anti-immigration activists. “These folks thrive on hate and misinformation,” said Valenzuela. “They paint undocumented workers as day laborers, when the fact is day laborers are a miniscule fraction of undocumented workers.” More information about the study can be found at www.sscnet.
ucla.edu/issr/csup/index.php.
Sidebar:
Students give day laborers a voice
Men looking for work gathered in the morning at a downtown L.A. day laborer center to wait for a chance to earn a day’s wages.
They were also waiting for an opportunity to learn. These immigrant day laborers were anticipating the arrival of a group of young volunteers, UCLA students who serve as their English teachers.
The 20 UCLA students who participate in Proyecto de Jornaleros (the Day Laborer Project) spend every Friday and Saturday morning holding English classes at two day laborer sites in downtown and West Los Angeles.
Their motivation comes straight from the heart. “We teach these English classes so they know how powerful words are, so they aren’t stopped by a language barrier,” said Jesus Gonzales, 22, a UCLA senior and one of the project coordinators. “They are able to stand up for themselves.”
“This population is completely ignored in society and is at the bottom of a caste system,” said junior Marianne Armenta, in her second year of teaching the day laborers.
For this service project, run under the UCLA Community Programs Office, the students develop lesson plans around relevant themes, such as the general election, politics in Latin America, worker negotiations and immigrant rights. They even supply the men with snacks — sandwiches, chips and fresh veggies.
Both day laborer centers are run by the Instituo de Educacion Popular Del Sur De California
(the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California).
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