RedCeltic
26th July 2001, 16:40
No where in the United States is the population of Imagrant Day workers larger than in New York. The Village Voice recently published a story on what life on the corner is like. Here are some clips from that article which show what life is like for a day worker.
Williamsburg, Brooklyn: Polish cleaning women wait to be hired by Satmar
Jews.
At the corner of Bedford and Division in Brooklyn, a burgundy minivan
veers
out of traffic toward the curb, setting off a commotion among the 20 or so
men standing on the corner. They charge forward, weaving through a line of
cars at a dead run.
"Who wants to work?" shouts the driver. The men jostle for a spot at the
window, calling back, "I'm a good worker," and "I'll work hard."
The driver points to five men; they quickly climb in.
Names and pleasantries are skipped: "We're loading a trailer—five, maybe
six
hours. How much you want?"
The day laborers speak to each other in Spanish. "Eight dollars an hour,"
someone says.
"No, I pay six out here all the time."
Everyone in the van knows this is a lie—seven is the norm—but the men are
angling for an extra 50 cents an hour.
"You want eight, I offer six, we agree on seven." The negotiation is over.
The driver pulls away from the curb, tires screeching.
One of the workers won't give up.
"No, I want $7.50."
The driver stops the van. "OK, get out. There are plenty who will work for
less."
The man climbs out; the others stare through the windows at the idle
workers
on the curb. Silently they decide seven an hour will do.
Minutes later, the four workers are in a downtown Brooklyn factory,
loading
boxes into a tractor-trailer. The work site is a union shop steward's
nightmare: piles of rotting garbage; hundreds of burned-out lightbulbs;
and
an open elevator pit, exposing the workers to a 40-foot drop. Unbeknownst
to
them, the building has been ordered closed because it contains asbestos.
Before the day is out, two of the laborers will be involved in a workplace
accident, and the others, covered in sweat and dust, will be witness to
another. There are no breaks, no unions, and no taxes—the men don't even
know the boss's name. Yet, at the end of the day, they will go home $35
richer. Tomorrow they'll be back on the corner, looking for another job.
Williamsburg, Brooklyn: Polish cleaning women wait to be hired by Satmar
Jews.
Wordlessly, the negotiation has already begun. The Jewish woman, a member
of
the ultra-orthodox Satmar sect, looks tentatively at the Polish woman,
approaches her uncertainly. The Polish woman ignores her, but monitors her
advance out of the corner of her eye. The Polish woman has mouths to feed
in
her country. The Satmar woman needs her house cleaned. They come to do
business on Williamsburg's south side, on the corner of Hooper and Lee.
"You busy, busy? You want to work?" asks the Satmar woman, looking a bit
forlorn in her housedress, slippers, and wig.
The question begets a question: "How many hours?" asks Teresa, the Polish
woman.
"Four, maybe five."
"How much you pay?"
"Seven."
"No, I charge eight."
"I pay seven, my regular woman is sick today."
"Bye," says Teresa, turning her back.
The Satmar woman works her way through the crowd of Polish women, but
other
potential employers are arriving: housewives, husbands in long black
coats,
even young girls—children, really—proffering scraps of paper with their
grandmother's address. Demand is high today—the Sabbath begins at sundown;
the local housewives have shopping to do, dinner to cook, numerous young
children to care for, and a house that needs to be cleaned. Those who wait
too long will have to settle for one of the brown-skinned women who stand
near the light pole, speaking Spanish, or even Marie, the Haitian woman
who
sits by herself on a milk crate and is always the last one chosen.
The Jewish woman works her way back to Teresa, "OK. Eight," she says. "I
pay
eight." "No, I change my mind," says Teresa, and turns her back again,
leaving the woman staring at her platinum-blond dye job, a stunned look on
her face. Loud enough for the Satmar woman to hear, Teresa says, "She tell
me four to five hours, that means three and a half. And she's a liar; I
see
it. I finish and she pays me seven, then we fight. You like the Jewish
people? I hate them. When I see them on the street, I feel nauseous. She
like a witch."
Teresa's attitude is not unique. Resentment is high between the Satmar
Jews
of Williamsburg and a hundred or so Polish day laborers who clean for
them.
A half-century after the war, the slaughter of their brethren burns the
Jews
like a live wire. Ask nearly any Satmar to define the neighborhood and he
or
she will tell you, "We're a community of Holocaust survivors." They're
keenly aware that Poland's large Jewish population was annihilated during
the war. Ask the Polish women how they like their work, and many ignore
the
question: "The Jews blame us for the death camps in Poland," they say.
Echoing the Polish government's longtime position, they add, "It was the
Nazis that killed the Jews. Not the Polish people."
"We want to be respected," the Polish women say, fairly seething as they
talk about standing on the corner like prostitutes, about scrubbing
someone
else's floor, about the good jobs they had in Poland before the end of
Communism. ("How can they say they are so religious? God doesn't want you
to
be so cheap about money," says one disgruntled woman.) Now the Poles are
on
the street corner, asking the Jews for a job, Jews with numbers tattooed
on
their arms, Jews for whom the names of Polish towns—Auschwitz, Treblinka,
Sobibor—are etched in memory. The irony is lost on no one.
Many of the cleaning women are divorced or widowed. They come to New York
on
tourist visas and so do not have green cards. The corner supplies work,
friendship, and referrals—where to find an apartment, a doctor, or a cheap
meal—and it keeps them off the government's radar screen. Most are of a
certain age; some, like Kaya, are elderly. Her hair is thin and her teeth
are bad. "I wouldn't be here if the Communists were still in
power—everybody
worked, we had free health care," she says, speaking through a translator.
She first came to New York two years ago on a tourist visa. "The work was
so
hard, and I missed my family. I cried every night. I lost 20 pounds. They
give everyone a false view of how life is in America," she says. A nervous
breakdown sent her back to Poland.
She arrived home to find her children unemployed, her grandchildren unable
to afford college. She remembers thinking, "My life is over, but my family
still has their life ahead of them." She returned to Williamsburg, where
she
lives in a single room with three other women.
Her grandchildren are back in college. She pays for their education with
60
hours a week, scrubbing and dusting and wiping
118th Street and 97th Avenue, Queens
The Italians and Irish are gone now from Richmond Hill. They took Jesus
Christ with them, pulled his image down from the wall of the squat brick
building that was once a Catholic church, at the corner of 118th Street
and
97th Avenue. Today pictures of other long-haired, bearded men who fell
victim to religious strife—Sikhs killed in combat with the Indian
army—hang
on the wall. The former church is now the Gurdwara Sahib, the largest Sikh
temple in New York City. Half an onion dome has been grafted onto the
aluminum-sided rectory. In tattered clothes and faded turbans, 35 men
stand
outside in the early morning, waiting for work.
Ranjit Singh is one of those men. When he came to New York, he knew no
one,
had no money, and slept on the temple floor. He left India in 1995 after
twice being tortured by the Indian police, he says. "They tied my arms
behind my back, threw the rope over a beam, and pulled me into the air
until
I passed out." His alleged crime was speaking out against government
repression of the Sikh minority, which makes up about 2 percent of India's
population. Violence has been a constant since the early 1980s, when the
Hindu government shelled the Sikhs' Golden Temple. The Sikhs responded by
assassinating Indira Gandhi. For $10,000, an "agent" arranged Mr. Singh's
journey to Queens: a half-dozen plane changes in countries whose names he
never learned, a walk through the Mexican desert into southern California,
then on to New York by train.
The U.S. government granted him political asylum and a work permit. Yet
job
opportunities are limited for 50-year-old men in turbans who speak no
English. A farmer by trade, Mr. Singh found a job in Jersey stocking
shelves—$5.50 an hour minus train fare left him with $25 a day. He had a
family to bring over, a wife and four children. He heard you could make
more
money standing on the corner, getting hired by the dozens of Sikh
contractors who live in Richmond Hill.
In New York's construction industry, carpenters are Irish, Mohawks still
work the high steel, and South Asians do the brickwork. At some point in
its
life, every brownstone in New York City will have to be pointed. A man on
a
scaffold fights a bucking, screaming electric grinder through the grid of
brick and stone, cutting the loose mortar from the joints, then trowels
freshly mixed grout into the gaps. The work is tedious, loud, dirty, and
occasionally dangerous. Getting hired off the corner month after month,
Mr.
Singh, the Indian farmer, gradually became a New York City mason. Day
labor
paid his family's passage to Queens, as well as the rent on a small
apartment until his teenage sons found work. In the late 1990s, when work
was plentiful, Mr. Singh made $15,000 a year.
Some, like Mr. Singh, come for freedom. Some just come for the money. They
arrive on short-term tourist visas won through a U.S. government lottery
program. Union construction workers make upwards of $250 a day, and so a
skilled Sikh day laborer—though undocumented and nonunion—can make a flat
rate of $100 or even $125 a day. Untrained laborers start at $70, or if
things are quiet, $65. The workers refuse to go lower—to do so would set a
bad precedent and drop wages for everyone. On this much the workers agree.
Yet for Sikhs, as for others, engendering cohesion among a transient
workforce is an uphill battle.
On a recent morning, Chaumtoli Huq, an attorney at the Asian American
Legal
Defense and Education Fund, stood in front of the temple cajoling the men,
her small frame wrapped in traditional South Asian finery, a diamond stud
through her nose. "One finger alone is weak," she told a group of
laborers.
"A whole hand is strong—what if you banded together and demanded more
money
from the bosses?" But some workers were fearful; from the edge of the
crowd,
a laborer complained about contractors threatening to hire "Spanish"
workers
for $45 a day. As if to further undercut her position, a van pulled to the
corner, and a dozen or so Sikhs closed in to compete for a single job.
Huq, who has brought lawsuits on behalf of Sikh day laborers cheated of
their wages, persisted, urging them to keep records and mark down license
plate numbers. Still, in an interview, she acknowledges the difficulty in
organizing workers who are inherently in competition with one another.
"When
these men get visas, the whole family—sometimes the village—pools money so
they can afford the trip. Some are only here on three- or six-month
visas,"
says Huq, who is Bangladeshi. "They're trying to make every dollar they
can
before they return." Back in India, their labor will net them about $4 a
day.
Mr. Singh's two oldest sons in America work in construction also, but do
not
stand on the corner. They speak some English, are younger, of course, and
so
have found steady work. And slowly, inexorably, they are becoming
Americanized. Their father would like them to have arranged marriages, but
this is doubtful; already the boys have cut their hair and do not wear
turbans. This is difficult for Mr. Singh. It is difficult also to work
alone
on a scaffold, 75 feet in the air, eyes and throat burning from the
concrete
dust. He thinks about the green fields of Punjab, his two sons who stayed
behind, friends who have died without his good-byes. Still, "We're not
going
back. . . . We love America," he says. "The work is dangerous, but it's
better than getting beat up by the police."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Port Richmond and Castleton, Staten Island
First NAFTA flooded the markets in Hidalgo, Mexico, with Idaho potatoes,
then Javier Vasquez's wife got pregnant. With local wages falling, and
living doubled-up on his father's farm, he left for New York in mid-May.
"Those that came to New York and returned are living much better," he says
of the men in his village who have made the trip. "They have their own
houses; they buy new cars."
In early June, it had been 25 days since he headed for the border, 21 from
the night he watched coyotes beat a rival smuggler bloody with an
extension
cord, 18 since he hopped a bus heading east from Denver, and fifteen from
his arrival at Port Authority. His New York City welcome wagon was a gypsy
cab, whose Mexican driver charged him $90 for a journey that costs about
$4
via public transit. The cabbie said he would take Javier to a place where
there was much work, and many Mexicans.
The Mexicans were there, standing in small groups in the Port Richmond
neighborhood of Staten Island. By noon Javier had lined up a bed for the
night. The next morning he went out to the corner of Port Richmond and
Castleton with the others. But he did not find work that day, or on 10 of
the next 15 days either.
Hatchet-thin, in pants too short and a threadbare sweater, the Mexican
farmhand's almost embarrassingly earnest and friendly attitude stands out
on
the corner of jaded men, many of whom have been cheated of wages, or
injured
and abandoned by employers. At 7 a.m. on a damp June morning, he is in the
shape-up. He passes the time studying a list of English words he thinks
might be useful: dig, work, grass, shovel, dirt, dollar, the numbers one
through 10. The other men begin to drift in, moving wraithlike through the
Staten Island mist along a seedy stretch of Port Richmond Avenue, past the
rolled-down gates, used furniture shops, and a dozen storefronts where you
can send money to Mexico.
They gather in small groups. The Chilangos from Mexico City stand in front
of No. 1 Chinese Food, the Oaxacans near the bank. Up the block, the
cholos—down-on-their-luck gangbangers, all baggy pants, bandannas, and
dead
eyes—are blowing a joint in a doorway. The sweet smoke washes over the
others as they watch for a van or a beat-up pickup with a telltale
lawnmower
lashed down in the back.
Yet it has rained nearly every day for weeks, and there is little yard
work.
El Diario says 14 Mexicans died in the Arizona desert. Every man here
crossed the same way, some with wives and children in tow. They pass the
newspaper around in silence. For two miles down the avenue, there are
small
clusters of men staking out corners—maybe 400 in all—groups and subgroups
of
Mexicans, Peruvians, even a lone Ecuadoran (whom everyone calls just
"Ecuador"). They lose themselves in endless strategy sessions: Should they
walk a block east or west, or cross the street?
A few minutes past 8 a.m., a gleaming black Lincoln drifts to the
sidewalk.
The driver, a young white man with a brush cut and a gold chain, holds up
one finger. Javier and two dozen others bolt from the wall like sprinters
leaving the blocks. In an instant the car is surrounded by a mass of
pushing, shoving bodies.
"Off the car, off the car," shouts the gold-chain man. Then, to no one in
particular, "Geez, it's like a fucking zoo around here." He leans toward
the
window: "I need one guy. Anybody speak English, English? Wash buses all
day.
Buses, buses, understand? English! Anybody speak English?" The laborers
want
to know three things, the sum of which, for many of them, comprises the
extent of their English: "How much you pay?" "How many hours?" and "You
buy
lunch?"
The Lincoln has four doors. Three door handles have hands on them. The
gold-chain man begins to negotiate: "Sixty a day, but if it's less than
eight hours—" The sentence is left unfinished as a Mexican yanks open a
rear
door and vaults into the car. The Lincoln pulls out into traffic and is
gone, leaving Javier and the others to return to the wall.
"I thought there would be a regular job you go to each day," says Javier,
speaking in Spanish and looking around despondently. "I thought things
here
were going to be easier." After two weeks in the U.S., his goal now is
simply to make enough money to return home.
"The labor market is way oversaturated," says the Reverend William Harder,
administrator of Saint Mary of the Assumption, where he has worked with
the
Mexican community for six years. "There are just too many men arriving. .
.
. Each year, the number of men standing on the street nearly doubles."
Workers and advocates agree that day labor sparked a decade-old Mexican
migration to Staten Island.
Much of L.A.'s day labor scene is built around freeways; the same is true
on
Staten Island. Without access to highways—where contractors can easily
jump
off to pick up workers—most shape-ups quickly die. It is likely that
Staten
Island's first day laborers—who appeared around 1990—were veterans of
L.A.'s
shape-ups. They chose a perfect location—just minutes from three bridges,
an
expressway, and the suburban sprawl of north Jersey and Staten Island,
with
thousands of lawns and pools in need of care.
The Mexican laborers quickly put down roots. "We went from having day
laborers here to having people going back and bringing their families,"
says
Reverend Terry Troia, executive director of Project Hospitality, which has
worked closely with the workers. "Then they'd go back again and bring
their
sister's family. Now P.S. 20 is full of Mexican children." The result? A
428
percent increase in Mexicans on Staten Island, the largest jump of any
group
in any borough, according to the 2000 census.
Out on the corner, 11 men have been hired by midday. Thirty more drift
away,
to rooms where they will watch TV or nurse Coronas. The others say he is
wasting his time, but Javier is desperate and stays on the street well
into
the afternoon. Around 2 p.m., a man approaches and asks if he wants to
work.
Javier spends the rest of the day stacking boxes at an import-export
company, and in the evening, the patron, seeing that Javier is
industrious,
offers him a job—54 hours a week for $275 cash. Within the week, he is
saving money to send home to his wife, the first payment on the new house.
In less than a month, day labor has given him a route into the permanent
workforce.
Williamsburg, Brooklyn: Polish cleaning women wait to be hired by Satmar
Jews.
At the corner of Bedford and Division in Brooklyn, a burgundy minivan
veers
out of traffic toward the curb, setting off a commotion among the 20 or so
men standing on the corner. They charge forward, weaving through a line of
cars at a dead run.
"Who wants to work?" shouts the driver. The men jostle for a spot at the
window, calling back, "I'm a good worker," and "I'll work hard."
The driver points to five men; they quickly climb in.
Names and pleasantries are skipped: "We're loading a trailer—five, maybe
six
hours. How much you want?"
The day laborers speak to each other in Spanish. "Eight dollars an hour,"
someone says.
"No, I pay six out here all the time."
Everyone in the van knows this is a lie—seven is the norm—but the men are
angling for an extra 50 cents an hour.
"You want eight, I offer six, we agree on seven." The negotiation is over.
The driver pulls away from the curb, tires screeching.
One of the workers won't give up.
"No, I want $7.50."
The driver stops the van. "OK, get out. There are plenty who will work for
less."
The man climbs out; the others stare through the windows at the idle
workers
on the curb. Silently they decide seven an hour will do.
Minutes later, the four workers are in a downtown Brooklyn factory,
loading
boxes into a tractor-trailer. The work site is a union shop steward's
nightmare: piles of rotting garbage; hundreds of burned-out lightbulbs;
and
an open elevator pit, exposing the workers to a 40-foot drop. Unbeknownst
to
them, the building has been ordered closed because it contains asbestos.
Before the day is out, two of the laborers will be involved in a workplace
accident, and the others, covered in sweat and dust, will be witness to
another. There are no breaks, no unions, and no taxes—the men don't even
know the boss's name. Yet, at the end of the day, they will go home $35
richer. Tomorrow they'll be back on the corner, looking for another job.
Williamsburg, Brooklyn: Polish cleaning women wait to be hired by Satmar
Jews.
Wordlessly, the negotiation has already begun. The Jewish woman, a member
of
the ultra-orthodox Satmar sect, looks tentatively at the Polish woman,
approaches her uncertainly. The Polish woman ignores her, but monitors her
advance out of the corner of her eye. The Polish woman has mouths to feed
in
her country. The Satmar woman needs her house cleaned. They come to do
business on Williamsburg's south side, on the corner of Hooper and Lee.
"You busy, busy? You want to work?" asks the Satmar woman, looking a bit
forlorn in her housedress, slippers, and wig.
The question begets a question: "How many hours?" asks Teresa, the Polish
woman.
"Four, maybe five."
"How much you pay?"
"Seven."
"No, I charge eight."
"I pay seven, my regular woman is sick today."
"Bye," says Teresa, turning her back.
The Satmar woman works her way through the crowd of Polish women, but
other
potential employers are arriving: housewives, husbands in long black
coats,
even young girls—children, really—proffering scraps of paper with their
grandmother's address. Demand is high today—the Sabbath begins at sundown;
the local housewives have shopping to do, dinner to cook, numerous young
children to care for, and a house that needs to be cleaned. Those who wait
too long will have to settle for one of the brown-skinned women who stand
near the light pole, speaking Spanish, or even Marie, the Haitian woman
who
sits by herself on a milk crate and is always the last one chosen.
The Jewish woman works her way back to Teresa, "OK. Eight," she says. "I
pay
eight." "No, I change my mind," says Teresa, and turns her back again,
leaving the woman staring at her platinum-blond dye job, a stunned look on
her face. Loud enough for the Satmar woman to hear, Teresa says, "She tell
me four to five hours, that means three and a half. And she's a liar; I
see
it. I finish and she pays me seven, then we fight. You like the Jewish
people? I hate them. When I see them on the street, I feel nauseous. She
like a witch."
Teresa's attitude is not unique. Resentment is high between the Satmar
Jews
of Williamsburg and a hundred or so Polish day laborers who clean for
them.
A half-century after the war, the slaughter of their brethren burns the
Jews
like a live wire. Ask nearly any Satmar to define the neighborhood and he
or
she will tell you, "We're a community of Holocaust survivors." They're
keenly aware that Poland's large Jewish population was annihilated during
the war. Ask the Polish women how they like their work, and many ignore
the
question: "The Jews blame us for the death camps in Poland," they say.
Echoing the Polish government's longtime position, they add, "It was the
Nazis that killed the Jews. Not the Polish people."
"We want to be respected," the Polish women say, fairly seething as they
talk about standing on the corner like prostitutes, about scrubbing
someone
else's floor, about the good jobs they had in Poland before the end of
Communism. ("How can they say they are so religious? God doesn't want you
to
be so cheap about money," says one disgruntled woman.) Now the Poles are
on
the street corner, asking the Jews for a job, Jews with numbers tattooed
on
their arms, Jews for whom the names of Polish towns—Auschwitz, Treblinka,
Sobibor—are etched in memory. The irony is lost on no one.
Many of the cleaning women are divorced or widowed. They come to New York
on
tourist visas and so do not have green cards. The corner supplies work,
friendship, and referrals—where to find an apartment, a doctor, or a cheap
meal—and it keeps them off the government's radar screen. Most are of a
certain age; some, like Kaya, are elderly. Her hair is thin and her teeth
are bad. "I wouldn't be here if the Communists were still in
power—everybody
worked, we had free health care," she says, speaking through a translator.
She first came to New York two years ago on a tourist visa. "The work was
so
hard, and I missed my family. I cried every night. I lost 20 pounds. They
give everyone a false view of how life is in America," she says. A nervous
breakdown sent her back to Poland.
She arrived home to find her children unemployed, her grandchildren unable
to afford college. She remembers thinking, "My life is over, but my family
still has their life ahead of them." She returned to Williamsburg, where
she
lives in a single room with three other women.
Her grandchildren are back in college. She pays for their education with
60
hours a week, scrubbing and dusting and wiping
118th Street and 97th Avenue, Queens
The Italians and Irish are gone now from Richmond Hill. They took Jesus
Christ with them, pulled his image down from the wall of the squat brick
building that was once a Catholic church, at the corner of 118th Street
and
97th Avenue. Today pictures of other long-haired, bearded men who fell
victim to religious strife—Sikhs killed in combat with the Indian
army—hang
on the wall. The former church is now the Gurdwara Sahib, the largest Sikh
temple in New York City. Half an onion dome has been grafted onto the
aluminum-sided rectory. In tattered clothes and faded turbans, 35 men
stand
outside in the early morning, waiting for work.
Ranjit Singh is one of those men. When he came to New York, he knew no
one,
had no money, and slept on the temple floor. He left India in 1995 after
twice being tortured by the Indian police, he says. "They tied my arms
behind my back, threw the rope over a beam, and pulled me into the air
until
I passed out." His alleged crime was speaking out against government
repression of the Sikh minority, which makes up about 2 percent of India's
population. Violence has been a constant since the early 1980s, when the
Hindu government shelled the Sikhs' Golden Temple. The Sikhs responded by
assassinating Indira Gandhi. For $10,000, an "agent" arranged Mr. Singh's
journey to Queens: a half-dozen plane changes in countries whose names he
never learned, a walk through the Mexican desert into southern California,
then on to New York by train.
The U.S. government granted him political asylum and a work permit. Yet
job
opportunities are limited for 50-year-old men in turbans who speak no
English. A farmer by trade, Mr. Singh found a job in Jersey stocking
shelves—$5.50 an hour minus train fare left him with $25 a day. He had a
family to bring over, a wife and four children. He heard you could make
more
money standing on the corner, getting hired by the dozens of Sikh
contractors who live in Richmond Hill.
In New York's construction industry, carpenters are Irish, Mohawks still
work the high steel, and South Asians do the brickwork. At some point in
its
life, every brownstone in New York City will have to be pointed. A man on
a
scaffold fights a bucking, screaming electric grinder through the grid of
brick and stone, cutting the loose mortar from the joints, then trowels
freshly mixed grout into the gaps. The work is tedious, loud, dirty, and
occasionally dangerous. Getting hired off the corner month after month,
Mr.
Singh, the Indian farmer, gradually became a New York City mason. Day
labor
paid his family's passage to Queens, as well as the rent on a small
apartment until his teenage sons found work. In the late 1990s, when work
was plentiful, Mr. Singh made $15,000 a year.
Some, like Mr. Singh, come for freedom. Some just come for the money. They
arrive on short-term tourist visas won through a U.S. government lottery
program. Union construction workers make upwards of $250 a day, and so a
skilled Sikh day laborer—though undocumented and nonunion—can make a flat
rate of $100 or even $125 a day. Untrained laborers start at $70, or if
things are quiet, $65. The workers refuse to go lower—to do so would set a
bad precedent and drop wages for everyone. On this much the workers agree.
Yet for Sikhs, as for others, engendering cohesion among a transient
workforce is an uphill battle.
On a recent morning, Chaumtoli Huq, an attorney at the Asian American
Legal
Defense and Education Fund, stood in front of the temple cajoling the men,
her small frame wrapped in traditional South Asian finery, a diamond stud
through her nose. "One finger alone is weak," she told a group of
laborers.
"A whole hand is strong—what if you banded together and demanded more
money
from the bosses?" But some workers were fearful; from the edge of the
crowd,
a laborer complained about contractors threatening to hire "Spanish"
workers
for $45 a day. As if to further undercut her position, a van pulled to the
corner, and a dozen or so Sikhs closed in to compete for a single job.
Huq, who has brought lawsuits on behalf of Sikh day laborers cheated of
their wages, persisted, urging them to keep records and mark down license
plate numbers. Still, in an interview, she acknowledges the difficulty in
organizing workers who are inherently in competition with one another.
"When
these men get visas, the whole family—sometimes the village—pools money so
they can afford the trip. Some are only here on three- or six-month
visas,"
says Huq, who is Bangladeshi. "They're trying to make every dollar they
can
before they return." Back in India, their labor will net them about $4 a
day.
Mr. Singh's two oldest sons in America work in construction also, but do
not
stand on the corner. They speak some English, are younger, of course, and
so
have found steady work. And slowly, inexorably, they are becoming
Americanized. Their father would like them to have arranged marriages, but
this is doubtful; already the boys have cut their hair and do not wear
turbans. This is difficult for Mr. Singh. It is difficult also to work
alone
on a scaffold, 75 feet in the air, eyes and throat burning from the
concrete
dust. He thinks about the green fields of Punjab, his two sons who stayed
behind, friends who have died without his good-byes. Still, "We're not
going
back. . . . We love America," he says. "The work is dangerous, but it's
better than getting beat up by the police."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Port Richmond and Castleton, Staten Island
First NAFTA flooded the markets in Hidalgo, Mexico, with Idaho potatoes,
then Javier Vasquez's wife got pregnant. With local wages falling, and
living doubled-up on his father's farm, he left for New York in mid-May.
"Those that came to New York and returned are living much better," he says
of the men in his village who have made the trip. "They have their own
houses; they buy new cars."
In early June, it had been 25 days since he headed for the border, 21 from
the night he watched coyotes beat a rival smuggler bloody with an
extension
cord, 18 since he hopped a bus heading east from Denver, and fifteen from
his arrival at Port Authority. His New York City welcome wagon was a gypsy
cab, whose Mexican driver charged him $90 for a journey that costs about
$4
via public transit. The cabbie said he would take Javier to a place where
there was much work, and many Mexicans.
The Mexicans were there, standing in small groups in the Port Richmond
neighborhood of Staten Island. By noon Javier had lined up a bed for the
night. The next morning he went out to the corner of Port Richmond and
Castleton with the others. But he did not find work that day, or on 10 of
the next 15 days either.
Hatchet-thin, in pants too short and a threadbare sweater, the Mexican
farmhand's almost embarrassingly earnest and friendly attitude stands out
on
the corner of jaded men, many of whom have been cheated of wages, or
injured
and abandoned by employers. At 7 a.m. on a damp June morning, he is in the
shape-up. He passes the time studying a list of English words he thinks
might be useful: dig, work, grass, shovel, dirt, dollar, the numbers one
through 10. The other men begin to drift in, moving wraithlike through the
Staten Island mist along a seedy stretch of Port Richmond Avenue, past the
rolled-down gates, used furniture shops, and a dozen storefronts where you
can send money to Mexico.
They gather in small groups. The Chilangos from Mexico City stand in front
of No. 1 Chinese Food, the Oaxacans near the bank. Up the block, the
cholos—down-on-their-luck gangbangers, all baggy pants, bandannas, and
dead
eyes—are blowing a joint in a doorway. The sweet smoke washes over the
others as they watch for a van or a beat-up pickup with a telltale
lawnmower
lashed down in the back.
Yet it has rained nearly every day for weeks, and there is little yard
work.
El Diario says 14 Mexicans died in the Arizona desert. Every man here
crossed the same way, some with wives and children in tow. They pass the
newspaper around in silence. For two miles down the avenue, there are
small
clusters of men staking out corners—maybe 400 in all—groups and subgroups
of
Mexicans, Peruvians, even a lone Ecuadoran (whom everyone calls just
"Ecuador"). They lose themselves in endless strategy sessions: Should they
walk a block east or west, or cross the street?
A few minutes past 8 a.m., a gleaming black Lincoln drifts to the
sidewalk.
The driver, a young white man with a brush cut and a gold chain, holds up
one finger. Javier and two dozen others bolt from the wall like sprinters
leaving the blocks. In an instant the car is surrounded by a mass of
pushing, shoving bodies.
"Off the car, off the car," shouts the gold-chain man. Then, to no one in
particular, "Geez, it's like a fucking zoo around here." He leans toward
the
window: "I need one guy. Anybody speak English, English? Wash buses all
day.
Buses, buses, understand? English! Anybody speak English?" The laborers
want
to know three things, the sum of which, for many of them, comprises the
extent of their English: "How much you pay?" "How many hours?" and "You
buy
lunch?"
The Lincoln has four doors. Three door handles have hands on them. The
gold-chain man begins to negotiate: "Sixty a day, but if it's less than
eight hours—" The sentence is left unfinished as a Mexican yanks open a
rear
door and vaults into the car. The Lincoln pulls out into traffic and is
gone, leaving Javier and the others to return to the wall.
"I thought there would be a regular job you go to each day," says Javier,
speaking in Spanish and looking around despondently. "I thought things
here
were going to be easier." After two weeks in the U.S., his goal now is
simply to make enough money to return home.
"The labor market is way oversaturated," says the Reverend William Harder,
administrator of Saint Mary of the Assumption, where he has worked with
the
Mexican community for six years. "There are just too many men arriving. .
.
. Each year, the number of men standing on the street nearly doubles."
Workers and advocates agree that day labor sparked a decade-old Mexican
migration to Staten Island.
Much of L.A.'s day labor scene is built around freeways; the same is true
on
Staten Island. Without access to highways—where contractors can easily
jump
off to pick up workers—most shape-ups quickly die. It is likely that
Staten
Island's first day laborers—who appeared around 1990—were veterans of
L.A.'s
shape-ups. They chose a perfect location—just minutes from three bridges,
an
expressway, and the suburban sprawl of north Jersey and Staten Island,
with
thousands of lawns and pools in need of care.
The Mexican laborers quickly put down roots. "We went from having day
laborers here to having people going back and bringing their families,"
says
Reverend Terry Troia, executive director of Project Hospitality, which has
worked closely with the workers. "Then they'd go back again and bring
their
sister's family. Now P.S. 20 is full of Mexican children." The result? A
428
percent increase in Mexicans on Staten Island, the largest jump of any
group
in any borough, according to the 2000 census.
Out on the corner, 11 men have been hired by midday. Thirty more drift
away,
to rooms where they will watch TV or nurse Coronas. The others say he is
wasting his time, but Javier is desperate and stays on the street well
into
the afternoon. Around 2 p.m., a man approaches and asks if he wants to
work.
Javier spends the rest of the day stacking boxes at an import-export
company, and in the evening, the patron, seeing that Javier is
industrious,
offers him a job—54 hours a week for $275 cash. Within the week, he is
saving money to send home to his wife, the first payment on the new house.
In less than a month, day labor has given him a route into the permanent
workforce.