Daylaborers - Muster Zones - NY Times - Drawing Workers, and Some Critics

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The New York Times, Sunday, April 30, 2006
Long Island

Drawing Workers, and Some Critics

By ALLAN RICHTER

AS federal legislators debate a national immigration policy, Long Island officials are wrestling with the most visible aspect of the immigration issue in the suburbs: the laborers who gather in busy locations in many Long Island communities every morning, hoping a contractor will pick them up for a day's work.

Where these day laborers gather spontaneously, a host of problems seem to follow. Business owners and area residents complain about traffic congestion, petty crime, litter and other nuisances, while advocates for the laborers say they often suffer abuse from passers-by and from the people who hire them.

To cope with these problems, a growing number of communities are looking into establishing official hiring sites for day laborers. Three sites are already operating, in Freeport, Huntington Station and Glen Cove, and officials in North Hempstead and Southampton are weighing plans for more.

But the hiring sites generate disputes of their own, and the Island is a long way from a consensus about whether they function as intended.

The question of how and where the 100,000 illegal immigrants estimated to be in Nassau and Suffolk get work is taking center stage in the Islandwide debate, to some extent eclipsing fights over where and how they live, which flared last year in communities like Farmingville that have seen an influx of immigrants.

Now, advocates for day laborers are redirecting their efforts to places like Roslyn Heights, the latest community facing criticism for the way day laborers who gravitate there for work are treated. A recent Hofstra University study of eight communities on the Island singled out Roslyn Heights as the place where immigrant laborers faced the most harassment and abuse.

The biggest problem faced by workers there, the Hofstra researchers said, is mistreatment by contractors, who were more likely to put them to work in unsafe conditions, short their pay or renege on paying them altogether.

"They bring you to the house and want you to paint a room for $40 or $50," said Israel Romero, 47, one of a group of laborers gathered outside the Willis Paint and Design store in Roslyn Heights on a recent morning.

Mr. Romero, a Salvadoran who has been in the United States for a decade, said that a fair rate for such work would be $125 to $150 a day, but that contractors commonly pay substandard wages.

Hofstra researchers said that complaints about abuses by contractors were probably high in Roslyn Heights because most of the work there consists of small jobs on single-family homes, rather than large jobs at apartment complexes or commercial buildings that better-established contractors would bid on.

Willie Chicas, a 31-year-old Salvadoran, said he painted a home in Roslyn Heights last month, a week's work, and was promised $900. He was given a check when the job was finished, he said, but before he had a chance to cash it, the contractor had stopped payment.

Mr. Chicas said he used to seek work at the Home Depot store near his home in Hempstead, but recently switched to the area near Willis Paint on Mineola Avenue to get away from unrelenting police scrutiny, a source of trouble for workers that was also cited in the Hofstra study.

Jon Kaiman, the North Hempstead supervisor, said he took issue with the Hofstra researchers' findings about Roslyn Heights.

"I don't doubt that some of it takes place," Mr. Kaiman said of the claimed mistreatment of workers. "By the nature of the relationship between day laborers and contractors, abuses, I'm sure, occur and probably frequently." But he said his office had received no complaints about abuses in Roslyn Heights.

Nadia Morin Molina, executive director of Workplace Project, a Hempstead advocacy group and sponsor of the Hofstra study, said it was not surprising that day laborers had not complained to the town. Most, she said, want to avoid attracting official attention because of their immigration status, and see little they can achieve by complaining.

"It's so far underground right now," Ms. Molina said. "There's a lot of information you need to find the contractor and enforce the law, but you can't. There are no pay stubs."

When all a day worker may know about the contractor who hired him is a first name and the color of his truck, it's really hard to follow up, she said.

One of the goals of official hiring sites is to protect workers from these kinds of problems. Contractors and workers are typically asked to register, and the hiring process is monitored. But advocates acknowledge that having an official hiring site does not stop fly-by-night contractors from continuing to seek laborers at unauthorized locations.

"It's a difficult situation because the workers are just looking for work and are willing to take it at almost any cost," Ms. Molina said. "The contractors know that, so they're always looking to undercut the official hiring sites."

Public officials who oppose the hiring sites voice bigger objections than that, though. Steve Levy, the Suffolk County executive, said the sites put legitimate businesses at a disadvantage by helping provide cheap labor to contractors who are willing to break the law.

Mr. Levy said a better solution is to enforce the federal Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which makes it illegal to knowingly employ illegal immigrants.

"If that were properly enforced, those who are here now illegally or come here illegally in the future won't find work and will go back home," he said. "Work will be found by those immigrants who go through the proper channels."

Gregory M. Maney, an assistant sociology professor at Hofstra who conducted the research study, said that one commonly voiced motive for creating the sites — shifting the day laborers out of the public eye — may plant the seeds for the sites to fail.

"Residents say they want them out of sight, out of mind, and then they put them in commercial districts where they're tough to find for contractors," Dr. Maney said, citing as an example the City of Glen Cove's shape-up site in an out-of-the-way industrial area on Sea Cliff Avenue.

Ralph V. Suozzi, the mayor of Glen Cove, said that setting up the site has helped ease traffic congestion in areas formerly frequented by day laborers, and that he thought crime had abated there as well, though he had no statistics. Still, he acknowledged that the new site now has traffic problems of its own, and not all of the city's day laborers use it.

"It's a partial solution," Mr. Suozzi said. "There are still issues, but it's going in the right direction."

Less than a mile from the Glen Cove site on a recent late morning, six workers waited outside Carmen's Deli hoping for work. Before the official site opened, there would have been three times as many, a deli worker said.

Manuel Diaz, 36, a Salvadoran wearing an American-flag baseball cap, said he and other day laborers knew that some contractors still went to the deli looking for workers, probably to sidestep the monitoring at the official site.

David Mejias, a Nassau County legislator from North Massapequa who favors creating more official hiring sites, said that once they are open, the county must crack down on contractors who continue to recruit day laborers from unauthorized sites, especially in residential areas.

Day laborers who stay away from the official sites say the lottery system used at some sites to match workers and employers takes no account of their skills and experience.

Rony Arriaza, 40, a Guatemalan who lives in Hempstead but seeks work at Willis Paint, said that although he is a skilled drywall worker and painter, under a lottery system, "somebody doesn't know that work, and they go first."

At the Glen Cove site, for example, workers are supposed to be hired in the order their names are pulled from a brown paper bag and then written on a blackboard.

But some contractors ignore the blackboard. Just after 9 on a recent morning, one contractor sought a particular worker he had hired before, and left empty-handed when he learned he was not there.

A few minutes later, Robert Czernicki, an owner of apartment buildings in New York City, came by looking for a cleanup man for a building in Kew Gardens. He, too, skipped the posted list, and also passed over a man he had hired before who he knew could speak little English.

Still, Johnny Rivera, 34, a Salvadoran who lives in Glen Cove, said he recently started seeking work at the official site because it was safer and more orderly than the relative chaos of the streets, and workers there were more likely to earn what many of them regard as the minimum fair pay for a day's work, $100.

"It's much better for us, because we don't have any problems with the people outside," Mr. Rivera said.

Workers at the Roslyn Heights site said they were not waiting for the government to step in to get organized. Many have agreed among themselves not to accept less than $100 a day, and several said they were trying to learn English because they thought contractors were less likely to take advantage of bilingual workers.

Mr. Chicas, the victim of the $900 bounced check, said he was able to recoup the wages by enlisting help from the Workplace Project advocacy group.

"They think we're scared, but contractors have to know that we have organizations working for the people, for the immigrants," Mr. Chicas said. "We are here, and we are not going back. This country has the money. This is the American dream. This is the place to find some jobs."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/30lilabo.html?pagewanted=print

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