Work Dries Up for Day Laborers

By Peter Costantini, IPS News. Posted December 24, 2008.

In some areas, worker centres that support day laborers are encountering a new trend: some employers are offering lower hourly wages. With a recent base wage of around 10 dollars for unskilled work, even many workers who could find jobs were already struggling to pay the rent, buy food, and send a little home to their families in Mexico or Central America.

As demand drops for day laborers, supply appears to be swelling with workers laid off from jobs in the formal economy. Nationally, unemployment has risen from 4.7 percent to 6.7 percent in the past year. Now day laborer advocates are seeing more U.S. citizens seeking work on the corners along with immigrants.

In an atmosphere where federal raids on workplaces have branded immigrants as criminals, local treatment of day laborers in the economic downturn has varied widely across the country. In Arizona, aggressive street sweeps by one sheriff have intimidated and angered immigrants and citizens across the political spectrum. Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, recently passed an ordinance aimed at clearing day laborers out of the centre of town.

Other cities, though, have resisted pressures on local law enforcement to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. Los Angeles recently passed an ordinance requiring new and renovated big-box home-improvement stores to create plans for accommodating the day labor markets they have attracted. This could include providing shade, water, restrooms and other basic amenities for day laborers.

Existing centres outside such stores already offer a "host of benefits to both workers and consumers, such as better wages, an orderly hiring process and more reliable workers," according to Professor Abel Valenzuela, Jr. of the University of California, Los Angeles.

In response to the economic crash, some workers say they are planning to return to Mexico or Central America. In the past, it was common for workers to make the trek home in the off season and return the next year, but now the increased costs and dangers of crossing the border make circular migration a more difficult option.

In northerly cities like Seattle, some day laborers have traditionally left for the southern U.S. in the winter. But now local economies are even worse in much of California and the Southwest.

The coordinator of an organisation of Mexicans abroad, Al Rojas, told the Mexican daily La Jornada that he expected thousands of migrants to leave the U.S. in coming months because of the collapse of construction.

Immigration to the U.S. from Mexico has already dropped off dramatically, 42 percent in the past two years according to the Mexican government's statistical institute. The U.S. Census Bureau found that immigration from all countries declined by nearly one half in 2007.

Many day laborers, though, say that economic conditions at home are even worse than here. The best among bad alternatives? Come back to the corner tomorrow and hope for work.

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