Street-Corner Labor Pools Jammed by Jobless

A dozen Latino men, some leaning against a chain link fence, others standing in groups and smoking cigarettes, gathered early one morning on a South El Monte street corner, repeating what they say is an increasingly frustrating ritual.

The men, all but one of them illegal immigrants, were hoping to be hired by the building contractors, gardeners and home repairmen who cruise by the southwest corner of Mountain View Avenue and Weaver Street looking for cheap labor. Suddenly, the group’s somber mood turned to mild expectation.

In Broken Spanish

In broken Spanish mixed with English, a man said he needed someone to pour a concrete driveway in Baldwin Park. “I can do that. $40,” a teen-ager said in Spanish, as another man translated the offer into English. After some haggling, the Mexican youth struck a deal. The teen-ager, the only one on the corner to get work that day, would earn $35 for the job.

Among those left behind was Edwardo Cen, a dark, broad-chested man from southern Mexico who is a legal resident alien. Still, he said jobs he has picked up on the street corner have provided him his only employment since he lost his job as a shipping and receiving clerk last December. Despite his weekly trips to an employment office, he has failed to land a job that pays more than the minimum wage, he said. In the meantime, Cen said he has fallen three months behind on his mortgage payments.

At two other locations in the San Gabriel Valley, one in Pasadena and the other in the City of Industry, similar scenes are repeated as often as six days a week.

While men have been seeking work from the streets for years, what they are finding is changing, according to the workers, union leaders, immigration officials, state labor officials and immigrants’ rights activists.

More people are seeking work and fewer are finding it. Alien in the country legally are competing with undocumented workers as the job market has tightened. As a result of increased competition for jobs, the men seeking work have moved closer to prospective employers by gathering near building supply businesses. And opposition to the practice is growing from unions who say their members lose jobs to the street-corner labor pool.

Alien Numbers Growing

Although no official figures are available on the numbers of workers or pickup points, Harold Ezell, regional commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), said both have increased because of the growing number of illegal aliens crossing from Mexico.

While the INS may occasionally raid the pickup points to apprehend illegal aliens, it is more productive to concentrate on large businesses and illegal crossings at the border, Ezell said.

Immigrants’ rights advocate Antonio Rodriguez, an attorney with the Los Angeles Center for Law and Justice, said that more people are seeking work at pickup points, but he thinks chronic unemployment in the Latino community, not increased immigration from Latin America, is leaving legal and undocumented Latino workers no choice but to seek work on the streets.

“The problem is unemployment,” said Ignacio Ruso, 47, of Hacienda Heights as he stood in front of a building supply store in the 200 block of South Turnbull Canyon Road in Industry. “Because here, you can have papers and not get work,” said Ruso, a mason from Bogota, Colombia, who said he is a legal resident of this country. The handsome gray-haired man said he has not landed a job in 15 days, but in recent years had been getting work at least once a week.

Weeks With Nothing

“Work is bad right now, and there are more people on the street,” said a pale, 20-year-old youth as he stood near a two-block-long pickup point east of Marengo Avenue on Villa Parke Street in Pasadena. “There are weeks I get nothing,” said the youth, an illegal alien who asked not to be identified.

Seraphin Espinoza, a community worker at the Villa Parke Community Center in Pasadena, comes into daily contact with the workers who gather in front of the center. In the last five years, Espinoza said, the number of men seeking work on the street jumped from about 15 a day to 60 or more.

Because of stiffer competition for jobs, he said, those seeking work stand alone or in pairs. “To them it’s life or death,” Espinoza said. “If they can stand by themselves, they can negotiate a better deal than with a bunch of guys swarming around saying they can work cheaper.”

Mexicans Have Dominated

Unemployment, Rodriguez said, is also pushing growing numbers of citizens and legal residents aliens to join the labor pool dominated since the 1940s by Mexicans, and which today includes workers from throughout Central and South America.

An official with the state Division of Labor Standards, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified, said that black workers are also joining street labor pools.

Because long-established pickup points are becoming crowded, some of the workers have staked out new locations where they wait to be hired.

For example, the South El Monte pickup point, only three months old, is located across the street from a building supply store, workers and local merchants said. Additional pickup points near building supply stories have also started in Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley and Santa Monica during the last two years.

Spokesmen for three union locals with members in the San Gabriel Valley say they are particularly vulnerable to street-corner labor contracting.

Easy for Unskilled

Isidro Rocha, business manager in El Monte for Local 1082 of the Laborers International Union of North America, said many of his union’s construction contracts do not require skilled workers, providing unskilled Latinos easy entry into the industry.

“They’re eroding our wage structure, our working conditions,” said Rocha, who supervises contract compliance in the San Gabriel Valley for his 1,400 union members. Five years ago, he said, few undocumented workers could be found on major construction projects. But today, these workers find work as unskilled laborers at or below the federal minimum wage of $3.35 an hour.

Workers interviewed at pickup points said their pay could range from about $40 a day to as little as $20 a day. The average wage among Local 1082 members is $116 a day, Rocha said.

Al Mendoza, an organizer for Laborers Local 300 in Los Angeles, said more building contractors seem willing to hire undocumented workers to save money, giving them an advantage over contractors who pay union wages.

If that trend is not reversed, other union officials said, the San Gabriel Valley and Los Angeles could become like Houston, where an estimated one-third of building trades jobs are filled by undocumented Latino workers, many recruited at street-corner pickup points. Repeated attempts to talk with building contractors hire the workers were largely unsuccessful.

Not Illegal to Hire

The state labor official said it is not illegal for contractors to hire undocumented workers. But they must comply with labor laws that require employers to deduct Social Security and workmen’s compensation from paychecks, he said.

Although they may take jobs from legal residents, the foreign workers sometimes pay a heavy price, union and state officials said.

The most common complaint from the workers is that they sometimes are not paid. An example, said Espinoza, was a 30-year-old worker who said he had been cheated out of $130.

Espinoza said the man told him he had come to California from Mexico without any money and was hired at the Pasadena pickup point by a contractor for three days’ work. The man said he ate only what the contractor gave him for lunch each day. After completing his job, Espinoza said, the contractor paid the man with a deposit slip.

When the man went to a bank to cash what he thought was a check, “the teller thought it was a robbery, so she called the police,” Espinoza said. “Finally, the police realized what happened. They all had a big laugh, except the man. He broke down in tears. He was tired and hungry. He wanted to go home.” Espinoza said he raised enough money so the man could go back to Mexico.

Landscaping Contractor

But one Pasadena landscaping contractor, the only employer who would talk with the Times, said he does not mistreat his workers. “I don’t exploit them,” he said. The contractor, who asked not to be identified, said he regularly hires workers from the Pasadena pickup point. He said he hires two to three workers off Villa Parke’s sidewalks about 50 days each year, paying them $4 an hour for such tasks as digging trenches and unloading equipment.

Besides saving money, the contractor said he uses the workers because they take pride in their work, even if it is hard manual labor.

“I don’t like to have to cheat the way I do, but there’s no other way to get good people to work,” he said. “They don’t give you any crap and they are very appreciative.”

A Mexican worker interviewed at Villa Parke agreed with the contractor. “Once I was paid $15 for 10 hours of work. What American is going to do that?”

Workers also complain that proper safety procedures are not always followed and that they often do not receive medical insurance, workmen’s compensation or Social Security benefits, said Gilbert Moreno, director of the Consumer Action Center, a federal and state-funded program in Pasadena that investigates worker complaints. For example, he said, tree trimmers might be provided with only “a ladder and a chain saw hanging down their backs. If the man get’s hurt, the contractor goes and gets another fresh body.”

Small Claims Court

Moreno said that his agency helps four or five Villa Parke workers each month file actions in small claims court against employers who refuse to pay. He added that his center has not lost a claim, often because most contractors do not want to spend time in court. Even if the workers are not legal residents, they have the right to file court claims, Moreno said.

Rodriguez said some of the problems could be solved if the workers were organized into unions. But Mendoza said his union has met resistance from workers who are intimidated by their employers.

One 50-year-old man nicknamed “El Presidente” said experienced undocumented workers who seek work on the street corners try to warn the younger workers about contractors with bad reputations.

“The boys are new and they don’t know,” said the man, who seeks work at the Industry pickup point. The man said he is from Mexico and has worked in the United States 26 years. He said he came to the Industry pickup point about five years ago because the corner of 1st Street and Gage Avenue in Los Angeles became too crowded.

Many workers said the long hours, possible problems with employers and occasional raids by INS are worth the dangers.

Said a youth at the Pasadena pickup point, “Here, with two, three days work, you can pay the rent. And sometimes, I have some left over to send home.”