Worse than begging: day laborers and the economic crisis

Since May of this year the U.S. economy has finally shown signs of stabilizing. Industries like healthcare, retail and trade have even made some considerable gains. But that’s little consolation for those who are out of work. The total number of jobs lost during this recession has hit 7.7 million. Nearly 10% of the U.S. workforce is unemployed and millions more are underemployed.

Some of the industries that continue to suffer are manufacturing and construction, areas where immigrants have long found work. Many of them are day laborers and they often lack legal status. Every morning they hit the street corners all around the Bay Area looking for the little work that’s out there.

In this piece from our archives, KALW’s Martina Castro reports on the multiple sides to this often hidden part of our economy

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MARTINA CASTRO: There are many truths to each story. Some of them so contradictory that it seems impossible for them to coexist. On the surface, this story is about day laborers and how they are being impacted by the economic crisis. So let’s start there, with Amadeos.

I meet Amadeos outside a Kelley More paint store on the corner of Oak and Divisadero in San Francisco’s lower Haight. It’s where many day laborers congregate in the city. Amadeos gives me a business card that describes him as a “handyman’s profesianal”, professional spelled with an A where there should be an O. It lists his cell and home phone numbers, his email address and his skills, but it doesn’t include his last name. Just, Amadeos.

Amadeos is from El Salvador, and he has been living and working undocumented in the United States for six years.

AMADEOS: When I arrived here six years ago, this was the corner where you could count on getting picked up. But now there are a lot of people here, but we still support everyone, we say, eventually business will pick up.

For months, Amadeos has been showing up here at the Kelley More every day at 7 a.m. He stands there with 60 or so other men, waiting for someone to come by looking to hire help for job. Lately, he says weeks will go by with nothing.

AMADEOS: So in all honesty, you get desperate, because you have a desire to return back to your home country, but there things are even worse than they are here. So, I talk to my family a lot back in El Salvador and they say, it is really bad here. And I tell them, well it’s difficult here too. For the most part, people don’t want to pay that much for your work because they see you standing there and they think, "Ah, those illegals, we give them $10." They don’t want to pay you what you’re worth. That’s happened to me a lot.

I spoke with day laborers at various corners around the Bay Area. One told me he was just trying to save up enough money to get back to Mexico. Another told me many day laborers are homeless. He said to be a day laborer right now is worse than begging because no one offers them loose change or a bite to eat, let alone jobs these days.

On any given day there are over a 100,000 day laborers seeking work in the United States and about three quarters of them are undocumented. They are primarily hired by homeowners and construction contractors, who want to avoid paying workers compensation benefits, insurance and taxes.

MICHAEL COLOMBO: It’s a form of cheating is how I see it…

That’s Michael Colombo.  He is a remodeling contractor and has been in this industry for close to 30 years. He tells me that he refuses to hire undocumented workers or to work with anyone who does.

COLOMBO: I know contractors who it is a standard part of their business, has been even before the economic downturn.

Colombo says for him, hiring undocumented workers would be endorsing a system that depends on a labor force without giving them equal rights. 

COLOMBO: I don’t think it’s a healthy thing to keep attracting people who are living in really marginal situations in central America to make this perilous journey to come up here, to find out that the opportunities really aren’t here.

Colombo is willing to take a financial hit in order to keep playing by the rules, but I visited with another contractor who isn’t. On condition of anonymity, he admits to hiring undocumented day laborers because otherwise, he says he wouldn’t be able to stay afloat.

CONTRACTOR: I’ve had legal American people with workers comp. I’ve done it twice, and both times I came very close to losing my business. It’s so hard to stay on top of those payments.

The contractor is currently working on a job in El Cerrito, one of the few places I’ve seen at least five construction projects underway on the same street. He says in the years before the recession, it was common to see twice as many. But he hasn’t been hurting for work. He says his business is doing fine. Still, he says it would be impossible to make ends meet if he didn’t depend on paying his workers under the table. 

CONTRACTOR: putting the burden of health care and insurance on the employer is just a crusher, and it destroys small companies. So in that regard, you have to on some level either get on the boat, or be the luckiest guy in the world, you know.

An employer who works with undocumented immigrants can face heavy fines. So that’s why the contractor doesn’t want me to use his name. But he admits, he’s not really that worried. 

CONTRACTOR: The city of Berkeley has signs up where people sit. They talk about the places where it is appropriate to pick up these laborers and where it is not. There is such amazing tacit approval of this system within the system, that I can’t imagine that it would be an issue for me.

Back in San Francisco, immigrant workers take an English class at the San Francisco Day Labor Program. This is one of many centers organizing day laborers to demand fair wages and to prevent discrimination. I talk to the director of the program, Renee Saucedo, over breakfast at a café nearby.  She says she doesn’t buy either of the contractor’s stories about why they use or don’t use immigrant labor.

RENEE SAUCEDO: All contractors can respect workers comp laws, unemployment, wage and hour laws, even when they hire undocumented workers, see that’s the thing. A lot of employers don’t do that because their bottom line is profit, and many of them perceive undocumented workers as being vulnerable. I can't tell you how many employers say to us well, "You tell your little Mexican that if he complains I’m going to report him to immigration."

Saucedo does see some hope in this economic crisis. While it makes life challenging for the day laborers in the short term, she says it’s simultaneously motivating them to organize. 

SAUCEDO: We are seeing this creation of a very powerful immigrant rights movement, and I think that people including undocumented immigrants understand and realize that they are not going to achieve equality and justice in this country unless they fight for it.

Saucedo doesn’t think tensions between the undocumented and legal workers is anything new. She says they have existed for years, and tend to go up and down with economic cycles. That’s a point U.C. Berkeley labor professor Harkely Shaiken agrees with. Shaiken argues that everyone should be concerned when it comes to protecting the rights of day laborers, because: 

HARLEY SHAIKEN: If one worker loses rights, all workers become more vulnerable, and that is one of the ways in which the entire workplace is impacted minus comprehensive immigration reform specifically, and most dramatically those on the street corner, but those not on the street corner are not immune to these pressures.

Back on the corner of Oak and Divisadero in San Francisco, it has gotten so bad for Amadeos that he tells me he doesn’t eat during the day in order to save money. He even avoids drinking too much water because to use the bathroom in any of the local stores, he would have to buy something first. 

AMADEOS: Yes, the situation is very difficult here in the U.S., and friends and family back home perhaps say, "Oh he’s there, I wish I was there too." But they don’t know what we are suffering here.

It would be easy to say that this story is about day laborers, or about the economic downturn … because it is. But it is also about contractors and the struggle of the small businessman to make ends meet. It’s about nationalism and immigration policy. It’s a little about greed, and a lot about hope. But it is ultimately about the many faces of the American Dream, and how it lures people to do both great and questionable things, depending on whom you talk to. 

This story originally aired on April 15, 2009