<i> Jornaleros</i> Deserve Dignity
“To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else,” writes Barbara Ehrenreich in her new book about America’s working poor, “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.” The working poor’s anonymous donations come in the form of underpaid labor.
Some of those “anonymous donors” are meeting this weekend in Los Angeles. Day laborers-- jornaleros , as they are known in Spanish--from as far away as Chicago and as near as Pasadena are taking a weekend off from pruning shrubs, painting houses and doing construction to forge the National Day Laborer Organizing Network that will spearhead their campaign for visibility, dignity and fairness.
Only in a world teetering on the surreal could day laborers--men who make less than $7 an hour, $1,000 in a good month, one-third as much in a lean one--become the benefactors whose contributions to society provide quality of life for so many others.
They are unlikely philanthropists. They don’t endow foundations. Their names aren’t etched in stone at the entrances of museums. Day laborers want recognition, but, frankly, what they really want is dignity. In Southern California, an estimated 20,000 jornaleros look for work on the street each day. Nationwide, the figure is far higher, although no government agency or academic researcher has bothered to tally it.
On the streets, they are subject to indignities no one in our society should be asked to tolerate. They are cheated, paid with bad checks, abandoned at work sites, hurt on the job. In dozens of cities in Southern California as well as throughout the country, they are literally banned from the sidewalks.
What day laborers want is decent working conditions. They would be grateful for more job centers like the ones that exist in L.A. Here, we have six--far more than any other city in the country. The job centers provide for the workers’ most basic needs: tarps under which they can stand in bad weather and toilets. They provide an identity card that reassures employers and police. They distribute jobs in a way that ensures that not only the youngest, strongest workers get work. They foster fraternity in a market that is viciously competitive. They provide literacy, computer and citizenship courses. And, at the end of the year, they offer advice for those day laborers, who--as legal residents--pay taxes.
Some of the job centers are just trailers on vacant lots; few Angelenos even notice them. But few cities are willing to pay for them, even after a report released earlier this year indicated that job centers not only provide needed services to day laborers but resolve the complaints that the workers’ presence sometimes disturbs residents.
The jornaleros of the new National Day Laborer Organizing Network want to follow in the footsteps of another L.A. labor force recently made visible.
Like L.A.’s janitors, day laborers are tired of making anonymous gifts. They are tired of the way U.S. society rewards their generosity. They don’t want a library named in their honor. All they want is dignity and fairness.
