Street Numbers Growing : Day Laborers: A Fight for Survival

It has been going on for generations, but the once small clusters of foreign laborers seeking work on street corners across Los Angeles County have turned into crowds at some locations, straining relations with neighbors and frustrating city, state and federal officials.

From a handful to several hundred bleary-eyed men gather early each morning at a growing number of street labor pickup spots, from Redondo Beach to the San Gabriel Valley and from downtown Los Angeles north across the San Fernando Valley. The same ritual is repeated each day as a wide array of employers, from homeowners to building contractors, drive by the well-known spots, stopping only long enough to pick out a few laborers from the crowd to take along for a day’s work.

The informal street-corner labor pools are drawing criticism, not only from neighbors who view them as unsightly annoyances, but also from labor unions and building contractors who say undocumented workers and unlicensed contractors--the mainstay of this mushrooming underground economy--pose unfair competition.

And, among the growing numbers of workers themselves, job competition has turned so intense that they complain about having to settle for whatever wage an employer offers, and sometimes finding no work at all or being cheated out of a day’s pay altogether.

The fact that most of the workers, predominantly Mexican and Central American nationals, are in the United States illegally is not lost on them, nor on their employers.

“There are lots of people who want us here. We are useful. We are cheap. We work and we don’t give problems because we can’t,” said Guadalupe Montejano Cervantes, 28, standing with a group of workers at a corner pickup spot in Pasadena. Over the past 11 years of coming to the United States to work to support his wife and their five children in Mexico, he has found jobs in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley, in restaurants and now in construction.

“We need the work and, because we’re illegals, we can’t complain. We’re vulnerable,” he said. “Who else is going to do this work? Who else is going to work for you for $30 a day?”

Immigration and Naturalization Service officials peg the proliferation of the corner labor pickup spots to increased illegal immigration and high national unemployment. Some immigrants’ rights advocates maintain that chronic joblessness among minorities leaves the undocumented--and an increasing number of legal Latino and black workers--no choice but to seek work on the streets.

The growing problem was spotlighted earlier this month when immigration officers descended on Sawtelle Boulevard in West Los Angeles--one of the oldest and largest street labor gathering spots in the Los Angeles Basin--and arrested more than 100 workers. INS officials said that they went to the neighborhood to clear squatters’ camps of aliens living under two nearby freeway overpasses, and that the workers’ arrests on the street was an afterthought.

The day after the raid, men who were back on the street predicted that most of those who had been arrested and deported to Mexico would rejoin them within a few days. INS officials agree.

Indeed, federal and state officials say there is little, if anything, they can do about this underground economy.

Calling the highly visible congregations of undocumented workers an “embarrassment” to the agency, immigration officials nevertheless say that their resources are better spent pressuring large employers to hire legal residents, thus short-circuiting the job magnet that attracts foreign workers to the United States.

Similarly, officers for the state Division of Labor Standards Enforcement concentrate their efforts at stemming the proliferation of unlicensed contractors at construction sites, where they say they can be more effective than at the street pickup spots.

Crowd Regulation

Efforts by local merchants and police departments at regulating the growing crowds have also been frustrating and only temporarily effective at best.

Whether along Sawtelle Boulevard or along Kester Street near Victory Boulevard in Van Nuys, the complaints against the crowds are the same: Public drinking, urinating in alleys, litter, comments made to passers-by.

“If you have a lady coming into your business and she has to walk through a group of five or 10 unsavory-looking men, it’s intimidating,” said Jim Harper, owner of a Van Nuys printing firm. “Even if they run off five customers, that’s a lot of business.”

A woman who lives in a ground-floor apartment nearby said she lives in fear, knowing that every morning dozens of men are standing at her front door. And, across town in the Atwater District, another woman who recently had car trouble on her way to work--and stopped her car at a street corner crowded with about 100 job-seeking men--said she was frightened when two men, apparently thinking that she had stopped to offer them a job, jumped into her car.

‘It Hits Home’

“The problem isn’t going to go away until the overall problem of illegal immigration is addressed,” said Michael Flynn, an INS district supervisor in Los Angeles.

“There are thousands working in sweatshops downtown,” he said, adding that those who complain about the street labor pools are probably wearing garments manufactured in those shops. “But residents don’t think about that because they don’t come in direct contact with the work force. When they see workers in their own neighborhoods, it hits home.”

For those who daily congregate on street corners in search of work and who have become the object of the growing controversy, the battle is one of simple survival.

“I know some people don’t like us coming to this country,” said Jorge Alberto Hernandez, 31, an articulate and politically aware Salvadoran who looks for work with scores of men at the Van Nuys pickup spot. “But we don’t come because we’re greedy. We come so we can survive.”

‘You Can’t Live’

If he could, he would return to El Salvador, but there is no work at all there because of his country’s internal strife, he said.

“Even if you don’t get caught up in the war, you can’t live. . . . No one is building anything. There are too many people out of work,” said Hernandez, who is not married, but supports three brothers and two nephews back home. He held a post office slip for a certified letter in his heavily calloused hands. It showed that he had just sent them $100.

“I’ve been here seven years and I have nothing in the bank. Absolutely nothing. I send every centavo I don’t need back to my family, so they can eat,” he said.

“I work, I eat and the years go by. And at the end of each year I look back on the year and I think, ‘Well, I survived.’ ”

The pay at many of the street hiring spots ranges from $30 to $50 a day. But often there’s not enough work to go around.

Worked for Decades

Although many of the workers are newcomers to the country, a surprising number have worked as day laborers for a decade or more. Some have held long-term jobs, but have had to return to the streets during slow work seasons or because of layoffs.

About 50 men, mostly black and Latinos, gather daily at the corner of San Pedro and 7th streets to compete for jobs loading trucks. This group is different from most in that it is made up of a more established work force primarily serving the wholesale grocery businesses that line those downtown back streets. The largely silent, wary group lacks the camaraderie found at other labor gathering spots.

One tall black man wearing old but clean and well-pressed jeans and polished shoes said he came to Southern California from Arizona 20 years ago, and hasn’t been able to find steady work for about five. Like others on the street, he refused to give his name.

“For folks like me, there aren’t any steady jobs anymore,” he said. Although he did “pretty good” when he first started coming to San Pedro Street, this year he’s been able to pick up only “a couple of hours here and there.”

‘We’re Hard Up’

“People know it, they know we’re hard up,” he said. “You can wait around here all day and only see two or three guys picked up.”

In most parts of the county, the jobs offered are primarily in construction; the labor gathering pools appear to ebb and flow in response to the amount of development in an area.

Merchants in Glendale, for instance, report a surge in the number of men at corner gathering spots there over the past six months, and city officials attribute this to the record rate of new high-rise office and apartment construction and the resulting demand for day laborers.

And, as the more traditional labor sites have become overcrowded, workers have been gravitating to other corners, often near building and gardening supply stores frequented by prospective employers.

Union officials complain that this underground migrant labor force is eroding their wage structure and working conditions. Isidro Rocha, business manager of the Laborers International Union Local 1082 in El Monte, said that his union members averaged $116 a day, contrasted with the going rate on the street.

Increase in Complaints

Roger Miller, head of the Los Angeles bureau of the state Division of Labor Standards Enforcement, has noted a substantial increase in the number of complaints from “legitimate” contractors against unlicensed contractors who frequent the casual labor sites. Miller said that the unlicensed contractors, operating outside the law, undercut their lawful competitors by hiring undocumented workers at below union wages. The contractors pay cash, without deducting Social Security and workmen’s compensation.

Although Miller’s agency follows up on a handful of such complaints, he said his office lacks the manpower to initiate comprehensive action against street labor pool activity.

Workers may also file complaints with the agency against employers who don’t pay fair wages, but few do, Miller said. For the most part, they remain captives to sometimes unscrupulous employers.

Workers cited numerous instances of abuse. They said some employers paid only a fraction of what was promised, paid them with bad checks or failed to return on the last day of a job to pay workers.

Injured on Site

Jose Reyes, 23, of Mexico, standing with a group of co-workers at a corner on Villa Park Street in Pasadena, rolled up his trousers to show an ugly four-inch scar across his knee. He said he gashed it when he slipped in mud while working a few days at a construction site.

“My trousers were soaked with blood,” he recalled, but the contractor refused to provide needed medical attention and told him to keep on working. Unable to pay to see a doctor, Reyes said he bought medicine and a syringe at a pharmacy and gave himself an anti-tetanus shot.

When he returned to work the next day to claim his pay for the three days he had worked, his employer told him “he’d never seen me before,” Reyes said.

Similar stories abound on Sawtelle Boulevard, where Santos Arcenio, 28, of El Salvador, respected among his colleagues as a good worker, has acquired a renown that no one envies. A tall, soft-spoken man of gentle manner, Arcenio has become known as the man with the biggest loss around.

Refused to Pay Him

After working for three weeks at a construction site, Arcenio said the contractor refused to pay him the $600 he owed him. Arcenio went back repeatedly to ask for his pay until the contractor warned him: “If you come back again, I’ll call the INS on you.” He never went back.

Along the four-block stretch of Sawtelle Boulevard between Santa Monica and National boulevards, men begin gathering well before 6 a.m., driving or traveling by bus from throughout Los Angeles. Mexicans and Mexican-Americans come from as far away as East Los Angeles. Many Salvadorans, Hondurans and Guatemalans come from “Centro America Chiquita” (Little Central America), the area around MacArthur Park that has long been a landing point for immigrants from that region. Some of the men, who live along Sawtelle Boulevard in apartments where they split the $230-monthly rent among four or five fellow workers, merely walk out their front door to join the throngs on the sidewalk. Hundreds congregate on the corners of Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri and Mississippi streets, talking, sipping coffee but rarely spending money for food. For many, the coffee will be their only sustenance during the work day, which may lead them as far away as Pacific Palisades or North Hollywood.

Signs of Labor

Their trousers carry the stains of the paint jobs they have done, and the leather of their boots is often cracked from cement. One group of men showed little patience with a blond-haired man who walked by, beer can in hand, and tried to engage them in conversation. They stared at him without replying.

“He never worked,” one of the men said contemptuously. “He’s a wino.”

Despite the growing numbers along the boulevard and elsewhere, city and police officials say they are powerless to do anything about it, since the men who gather at the labor pickup spots are breaking no law.

“They are looking for work. It is within their rights to stand on public property as long as they aren’t hurting anybody,” said Glendale police spokesman Sgt. Steve Campbell, echoing others.

“We can keep the peace, but having illegal aliens on our sidewalks is a problem the INS needs to handle,” said Los Angeles City Councilman Marvin Braude, whose district includes the Sawtelle Boulevard area.

Involve Local Agencies

While conceding that illegal immigration is the responsibility of the federal government, INS Regional Commissioner Harold Ezell contends that local law enforcement agencies must also help address the issue.

“Local agencies need to get involved in finding a solution and not just throw up their hands and say it’s Uncle Sam’s problem,” he said.

But attempts by some municipalities to address the issue have proven fruitless.

In Redondo Beach, repeated efforts over the past three years to disperse workers who have congregated at a popular spot for the past 20 years have been short-lived.

Police succeeded in moving the workers away from a residential neighborhood near Marshall Field and Rindge lanes, only to have them congregate down the street, at a commercial strip on Rindge Lane at Artesia Boulevard.

When merchants complained, the city posted no-stopping signs along the boulevard so that officers could cite motorists who stopped in the area to pick up workers. But a suit challenging the new traffic regulations--and drive-by employers who skirt the restrictions by simply pulling into parking lots to pick up workers--have dulled the effect of the measures.

In Van Nuys, merchants along Kester Avenue came up with a different approach.

Committee of Merchants

“We didn’t want to just come out and stop people from trying to earn a living,” said Bruce Ackerman, an officer of the local chamber of commerce. So, a merchant’s committee established an alternate pickup spot in the parking lot of a nearby church, where they offered coffee, telephone and bathroom facilities, he said.

But it wasn’t enough to lure the workers off the street. Employers were unwilling to turn into the parking lot to pick up the men, who also found it easier to jump in trucks at the intersection, Ackerman said.

Next, the merchants’ committee hired two private security guards to patrol the Oxnard-Kester intersection and keep the workers off private property. This merely succeeded in moving the crowd up the street to the Victory Boulevard intersection.

“At this point, we can see it’s a never-ending battle,” a committee merchant said.

Staff writers Roy H. Campbell, Stephanie Chavez, David Ferrell, Denise Hamilton, Jesse Katz, Dean Murphy, Peter Pae and Victor M. Valle contributed to this article.