Three-and-a-half years after its inception, a committee established by the city of New York has released a report highlighting the growing need for employment support for immigrant day laborers.
The final report, issued by the 16-member Temporary Commission on Day Laborer Job Centers, examines the feasibility of creating public-private partnerships to develop and run facilities and programs to assist immigrant workers in the areas of workplace health and safety, English language education and job placement services.
According to the commission, the population of day laborers, which “can be considered to be one of the most vulnerable segments of America’s workforce,” totals over 10,000 men and women in the New York metropolitan area.
The commission – comprised of members from the public, private and academic sectors – announced its recommendations on Thursday, April 16, at the Jackson Heights office of the Latin American Workers’ Project (LAWP), one of four community-based organizations currently operating day laborer job centers in New York City and Westchester County.
While the LAWP-operated center in Brooklyn and the Staten Island-based El Centro del Inmigrante (The Immigrant Center) recognize the importance of their programs, the commission found that the city-based centers “cannot fully meet the needs of the day laborer population given their limited resources.”
Each center can accommodate no more than 20 to 30 workers per day, the report said, despite the hundreds of laborers who gather in nearby streets early in the morning, hoping for a day’s pay.
Committee Chairman Guillermo Linares, who is Commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, said at the unveiling of the report that new job centers and programs would be “open to all low-wage workers, including 45 percent of the workforce that is foreign born.”
The commission’s plan, should Mayor Bloomberg and the New York City Council adopt it, would “help accelerate the economic recovery process” for low-wage workers, Linares said, adding that the city would determine where and how to implement and develop the centers.
Specifically, the commission recommends that the city encourage and facilitate the development of “appropriately located and configured” community centers that would provide job programs and services to low-wage workers and day laborers; the city should assist in the creation of safety, health and education programs and evaluate and support such initiatives; and the city should foster collaboration among community-based organizations and public entities such as the Police Department, the State Department of Labor and the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
“We’re here to say that immigrants are the stimulus,” said Chung-Wha Hong, a commission member and the Executive Director of the New York Immigration Coalition. The commission’s proposal, Hong said, would “help them [day laborers] contribute their maximum” back into an economy that will only remain vibrant if the necessary support is provided to the labor force.
Commission member Oscar Paredes, the Executive Director of LAWP, underscored the importance of providing day laborer support when he cited instances in which laborers had worked for months without pay and under dangerous conditions.
Thanking the day laborers for their help and feedback in fashioning the commission’s recommendations to the Mayor and the city, Paredes vowed, “We will keep going forward.”
It has taken a few years to move forward, however.
Mayor Bloomberg signed the legislation that established the commission in October, 2005 and charged it to issue a report in nine months.
In “Ghost Workers,” The Queens Courier’s fall 2007 investigative series about day laborers, the newspaper highlighted the importance of job centers and called for a public/private partnership to fully fund a center in Queens.
At that point, the commission was already 25 months old – and it took another 16 months for a report to be released.
Linares maintained that a spate of scaffold-related injuries – which led the Mayor to convene a Scaffold Safety Task Force in 2006 – had slowed the pace of the commission, whose research also included public hearings and site visits. Linares said the commission waited so that it could include the findings and safety benefits of the Task Force in its report.
According to the report, several private contractors testified before the commission that workers from job centers “are more reliable and available on shorter notice.” The day laborers themselves – a handful of who were at LAWP for the commission’s announcement – are highly supportive of the commission’s recommendations.
“I have been in some situations,” said Gilberto Valderama, a laborer from Mexico City, “and we need support. It’s a very difficult situation.”
Valderama, who has been in the United States for a year, said he has seen a 50 percent increase in day laborers waiting for work since he arrived in New York this past January. A day laborer job center, he said, might help him find steady work, “move up” and realize “The American Dream.” But Valderama wants to make some money and in a few years live that dream in Mexico – at home, where his wife and two daughters are waiting for him.
