Day Laborers Deserting City-Run Hiring Center

Dozens of day laborers have abandoned Los Angeles’ first city-operated hiring center in Harbor City, returning to the same intersection where complaints of curbside loitering led city officials to devise a way to get the workers off the streets.

The men, mostly Mexican and Central American immigrants, said there is not enough work to go around at the city’s central hiring site at Harbor Regional Park, only blocks away from the street corners where they congregate.

City figures kept at the Harbor City center indicate that only about 18% of the workers who come to find work by lottery can expect to take home a paycheck on any given day.

The exodus of laborers from the city’s site, which still attracts anywhere from 125 to 200 men daily, threatens to delay the city’s plans to open five other day labor centers in Los Angeles, Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores said.

Other officials and many laborers, however, said they view the city’s program, established as a six-month pilot project, as a success.

“We will never get everybody off the street corners. There are just too many coming across the borders,” said Bill Molina, management analyst for the city’s day labor program.

Los Angeles City Council members created the site at Flores’ urging last October. It was established after residents and business owners in Harbor City and elsewhere complained that workers were impeding traffic, loitering and harassing women as they sought jobs.

Though the hiring center--where workers can drink coffee and learn English while waiting--makes for better surroundings, workers who have returned to the street say the odds of finding work are better through the time-honored method of hailing passing cars and trucks.

“Here I have much better luck,” Jose Alberto Gudiel said in Spanish as he waited for work at the corner of Belle Porte Avenue and Pacific Coast Highway last week. “If a boss comes, I can run faster than everybody else to get to him.”

More than 30 others who clustered on the sidewalk agreed, saying the lottery at the hiring center can mean long dry periods between jobs.

“Two or three days a week you can find work here (on the street.) But at the center, it is all luck. Some guys might get work every day in one week, but you can also go 15 days without a job,” Jose Angel Perez said.

Some of the street-corner hopefuls said the center is better suited to workers with families who can help pay food and housing costs during a job drought. Many said they do not have family and friends in this country to turn to for assistance.

With the pilot project set to be reviewed by the City Council next month, Flores said, the continued street-corner hiring could doom the innovative effort.

“This could disrupt the whole program. This is only a pilot program, and if it does not work here, it is not going to work anywhere,” Flores said. “That could mean raiding (by immigration officials) could start.

“These people (on the street) need to be told they are not only dooming themselves, but they are dooming their countrymen,” she said.

Employers who hire undocumented immigrants technically can be fined under the 1986 federal Immigration Reform and Control Act. But U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service agents have agreed to stay away from the city’s hiring center because it helps reduce problems on the street.

City administrators say employers who continue visiting street corners should shoulder most of the blame for the continued foot-race hiring.

“There are two kinds of employers doing that: one group that just doesn’t know we are here, and another that just wants to exploit workers,” said Eduardo Gonzalez, who helps run the hiring center for the city.

Gonzalez said signs the city posted on the Harbor City corner directing employers to the park may be too high for most to notice from their cars and trucks.

The center, Gonzalez noted, also provides protection for workers. City officials require information from employers, and they must provide workers with names and addresses when they pay for a day’s work.

The center also offers legal advice to help workers who are not paid, but Gonzalez said there has only been one such instance since the program began.

Gathered at tables and under trees where they play guitar, talk or read newspapers while waiting for their numbers to be called, laborers say the center represents a marked improvement over hustling for dollars on the pavement.

“Here we have more security, bathrooms and a nice place to wait,” said Miguel Angel Sierra. “We can find work here, and we are protected from being robbed. Sure, there are weeks when you don’t find work, but here we all have the same luck.”

But those who take their chances dodging in and out of traffic in pursuit of jobs insist that they are not often exploited, and that they usually make a better hourly wage than the $5 requested, though not required, by the hiring center.

“I can sometimes make $50 or $60 a day. If somebody does not pay me, I can write down their name and address and tell the company. I can also tell other workers not to work for them again,” said Jorge Vasquez, who is taking night classes to learn English.

Many of those who wait on the barren street corners are from Central American countries such as Guatemala and El Salvador. They say they have been made to feel unwelcome at the center, and that they have been threatened by some Mexican nationals who have formed tight-knit cliques.

“It is more dangerous there than here for me,” said Perez, who is Guatemalan.

Although the men on the corner don’t refrain from occasional catcalls or wolf-whistles at passing women, they mostly pass their time sitting on walls talking among themselves or eating food purchased from catering vans that stop by.

Police say they still receive complaints from neighbors about trash and harassment, but fewer since the hiring center opened. Officer Margaret Mazotta of the Los Angeles Police Department said police regularly patrol the area around Belle Porte Avenue and Pacific Coast Highway, occasionally ticketing loitering workers and employers who commit traffic violations.

One business owner in the area says he thinks there are actually more laborers on the corner than there were before the center opened, but he agreed that problems have lessened.

“There’s more out here than before. They seem to find more work here than at the center,” said Anthony Tonsich, owner of Harbor City Discount Auto Center. “But since they have been rousted out, there is not as much catcalling and they are keeping the area cleaner.”

Molina said he believes it is the employers who should suffer the consequences of their transgressions, not the laborers.

“It is the same old story, employers are going out to try and get the best bargain in town. The men that go to the corner are just a little more desperate,” Molina said. “We should not punish them. It is the employers who are really breaking the law.”