Work Dries Up for Day Laborers

Outside a Home Depot store, it's a typical December morning in Seattle: cool and gray with a light sprinkle falling. At 7:30, about 50 men wait at the entrances to the parking lot. Most wear jackets, jeans and work shoes, and some carry day packs with tools, water and lunch. They stand silently with hands in pockets, alone or in knots of three or four, baseball caps or sweatshirt hoods deployed against the chilly mist.

Occasionally someone lights up a cigarette; here and there a conversation unfolds in Spanish. A young man with a ponytail and his sleeves rolled up shoots the breeze with another, gesticulating with both hands and pacing. They all scan the street for approaching cars and trucks.

Three hours later, around 10:30, a crew-cab pickup truck finally pulls up. A stampede of men engulfs it, shouting and jockeying for position. The driver points to four, who jump into the cab. Others try to squeeze in the door behind them, and the new hires have to fend them off to close it. As the truck drives off, the others retreat back to the sidewalk, a few grumbling, most silent.

A young man from Chihuahua jokes: "You have to be fast and strong to get a job here." Lately, he says, only two or three vehicles are stopping to hire people on an average day. Most hire only one or two workers.

Until recently he had a regular job with a small contractor two to three days a week, but he was laid off. "The whole country is like a gigantic hospital," he says, full of people with problems. When he can afford bus fare, he'd like to go back home to Mexico and his family to live.

The transaction around the pickup truck is the signature of an informal but high-profile marketplace that opens for business every morning outside home-improvement, paint, gardening and equipment-rental stores across the United States.

The resulting work is dispersed among neighbourhoods and job sites: a crew laying down roofing on a new condominium development, a couple of workers mowing a lawn, laborers helping to pour a concrete retaining wall.

The cheapness and productiveness of day laborers has kept many homeowners, as well as residential construction and gardening contractors, coming back for more over decades. And it has reduced the cost of living for millions.

Although day labor markets have existed in the United States for at least 170 years, their recent boom has been partly a response to the housing bubble of the past decade, fueled by an increase in immigration from Mesoamerica. The plentiful supply of cheap labor, in turn, has helped to lower costs and drive increased housing construction.

When the bubble began to deflate, day laborers were among the first and hardest-hit casualties. "Day labor is where the rubber meets the road in the economic downturn," observed Chris Newman, legal director of the National Day laborer Organising Network, a consortium of support organisations across the country.

As residential construction and discretionary income flat-lined, most network members reported sharp drops in jobs, beginning a year ago and accelerating this fall.

"We're having people losing their houses, people not investing in their homes. So that's having a huge impact on the day laborer population nationwide," said Veronica Federovsky, NDLON West Coast coordinator. She estimates that total day labor hours could be down 60 percent from a year ago: not only is the number of jobs reduced, but remaining jobs tend to last only a day or two rather than several days or weeks.

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.