Regulating Day Laborers

It’s one of those suburban hypocrisies that seem never to go away: Homeowners hire day laborers at street corners for a few bucks an hour to do backbreaking chores and then complain to whoever will listen when the workers return to their corners to wait for work another day. Although the men who bargain daily with employers over wages and working conditions represent capitalism in its simplest, freest form, these casual arrangements have gotten out of hand in communities from Agoura Hills to Glendale--leading to police crackdowns and job centers luring day workers off street corners and out of hardware store parking lots. Recognizing its role in the cycle, hardware giant Home Depot has teamed with an agency that places temporary workers to build a fancy job center outside its nearly-finished store in Woodland Hills.

The experiment is the latest in a string of efforts to regulate what some call a “brown market” in labor. Most of the laborers are immigrant Latino men who work for as little as $5 an hour. Although the Home Depot center, operated by Tacoma, Wash.-based Labor Ready, could ease problems associated with the laborers, it probably won’t make much difference in the end. Successful campaigns to regulate day laborers depend not just on carrots--which the 3,000-square-foot Labor Ready building surely is--but also on sticks--such as making it illegal for the men to seek work on the street. So far, the Los Angeles City Council has been reluctant to ban the solicitation of work on public streets, fearing it would criminalize the activities of men who often want nothing more than to put food on the family table.

In Glendale, city officials took the right approach by building a job center and then enacting laws that ban laborers from seeking work on the street and employers from hiring them. That’s the kind of dual attack necessary to clean up the problems many merchants and residents associate with crowds of day laborers. Workers go where the work is. Forcing contractors and homeowners to hire from established job centers lures the workers to places where they have restrooms, chairs and the guarantee that they will be paid for their labor.

While The Times applauds the corporate responsibility of companies such as Home Depot, much remains to be done. The new job center will attract some workers, but many more will continue to operate on the fringes. The allure of tax-free wages is strong. Only when employers stop trolling parking lots to pick up workers on the cheap will the crowds dissipate and head to the centers. The surest way to do that is to crack down on those who hire day laborers. Heavy fines send clear messages. That is, if those who complain about day laborers are serious about getting them off the streets--and serious about paying the costs.