ONLY A MONTH AFTER Portland’s first day labor site opened—to media frenzy and a lone protester—the site’s organizers are battling criticism that the center is a failure.
While the site has found jobs for roughly 20 workers a day, many folks (mainly immigrants, mainly men) still continue to seek work by waiting on street corners around E Burnside’s industrial area, resulting in the blaring headline “Day-Labor Site Falls Down on the Job” in last week’s Portland Tribune.
But organizers for VOZ, the organization that runs the site, say it’s too soon to judge success. Moreover, those involved with the pro-ject say that the site is beneficial even if there are still workers on the street corners.
“Truly, I don’t think we’re going to have 100 percent [of workers] in the center,” says Ignacio Paramo, as he stands in the middle of the site he directs for VOZ, built on a gritty asphalt lot on NE MLK. “There will always be some people who don’t want to follow the rules.”
As some home owners and construction site managers looking for cheap daily workers continue old habits of hiring from street corners, the number of men standing on sidewalks has not visibly decreased since the center opened a month ago. Workers who go to the center put their names in a lottery for available jobs, and typically more than half of the 40 to 80 day laborers who turn up in the morning wind up without work.
“We need to educate not just day laborers, but also employers. That takes time,” says Paramo. “As soon as we have more jobs here, we will have more workers coming.”
To be sure, some neighbors expected the day laborer site to get workers off the corner entirely, thereby improving the image of the neighborhood and, area business owners hope, improve their business. The mayor’s office buoyed that idea: “A day laborer hire site offers a number of solutions to all those affected…. Small businesses benefit from no longer having workers congregate on streets or impede business traffic,” Mayor Tom Potter’s website notes.
“The whole idea of the grant was to eliminate those two spots, it was not to make a third,” says Darrell Chasteen, who owns Precision Motors near the site and says he is frustrated—not with workers or VOZ, but with the city for granting money to a venture he believes could never work. “I drive by these places every day and I’ve seen no change in the number of guys out there.”
But creating an alternative to street corner hiring, rather than eliminating it entirely, is exactly what day labor sites are able to do, judging from other cities’ examples.
“From the very beginning, it’s very important to not have the expectation that [hiring sites] get everybody off the street. That has never happened anywhere,” says Hilary Stern, executive director of Seattle’s CASA Latina hire site. In 1999, CASA Latina opened the day labor center in Seattle that Portland now looks to as a model.
“A center should never be measured by whether it gets people off the street. It’s a safe alternative for people who choose to use it,” says Stern, pointing out that CASA Latina provided a place for communication between day laborers and the area’s residents and business owners.
Even after nine years of operation, CASA Latina’s hiring statistics resemble those of Portland’s fledgling site: every day, between 25 and 30 percent of workers who turn up looking for work actually get hired. To get to that point, Stern remembers CASA Latina volunteers chasing down trucks which stopped to pick up workers on street corners, to hand them flyers with information about the hire site.
Paramo points out that the center is succeeding at things that matter to the workers. Most significantly, Paramo says the day labor site has not had a single day laborer hired at the site complain about mistreatment by employers (who give their info to site staff). Workers at the site recall stories of getting shortchanged by bosses who pick them up from the corner—one Spanish-speaking man who now opts into the center’s daily job raffles once spent a week building a deck, only to be refused payment at the end.
Like the site organizers, Precision Motors owner Chasteen agrees that getting employers to utilize the site is the key to fulfilling the promises the city made—like reducing the number of workers occupying street corners. “If those corners don’t go away, I’d never sign off on this again. It’s not working,” says Chasteen.
That grant money is going to the building owner and CASA Latina. You won’t get rid of the corner. For one thing, about 30% of them standing out there are selling drugs. THAT, is why they are there all the time. Another small percentage has warrants out on them in other states and want to be off the paperwork radar. These same dirtbags mooch off Sisters of The Road and get loaded on 40’s + drugs and ramble around the streets at night in inner SE area. This is taxpayer money, supposedly subsidizing illegal immigrants, who don’t have citizenship or pay taxes, but in actuality, it’s giving money to CASA for Latino election votes and a little money to the property on rent, while placating the residents and business owners.It’s not going to get better because it was never meant to work to begin with. I lived in that area for over a year. I know exactly what goes on there.
Your tax money at work by THE NANNY STATE. Have fun paying.
Ex-cellent!
Fixing the problem of workers congregating on SE 6th has to involve a two part process to have any effect on the situation.
Step 1) Provide an official hiring site. Check!
Step 2) Once you’ve provided the official site, start policing the unofficial ones and citing people for the various offenses that take place there, all day, every day… still waiting on this one.
I see multiple offenses on a daily bases, but only see the police down there maybe once a week. I’ve called the police a couple of times and because most of these calls are “non-emergency”, they only show up a portion of the time, and generally too late to actually catch anyone doing anything wrong.
I know it’s asking a lot to devote dedicated officers to regularly check up on that area, but I think it’s asking more to spend $200,000 of our tax dollars and not having much to show for it.
I’m not racist, anti-day labor, and although I see both sides of the illegal immigration issue, I do agree with the state that immigration is a federal issue. I AM against a lot of the activity that goes on down there on SE 6th though, and it would be great to see more down about it.
Oh, and one more thing that would help:
The VOZ site closes at NOON. On SE 6th, these guys wait for work (and occasionally get it) well into the afternoon. If the city run site isn’t even open when these guys are looking for work, of course they’re going to use the older established locations, which never close.
The whole concept is to keep things off the books and unofficial.
I think it was a good effort even though its failing
I really enjoy how Ignacio Paramo says “There will always be some people who don’t want to follow the rules.”
This entire site is essentially skirting the rules. They are more a less a temporary employment agency as they connect employers with prospective employees, yet do not enforce any workplace laws such as collecting taxes or the workers compensation is paid. Much less check to make sure the employees are legal to work in the US.
I agree immigration reform needs to happen, I just spent 15 months struggling through the system to bring my wife, who I lived with for 2 years outside of the states, to the US. I think though that any people here illegally should have to return home and apply for visas as legal residents have. I do however favor a preference for those who have worked years in the US illegally to come back legally with a visa.
Ah it’s great to see the racist, anti-liberals get their keywords per minute up. There is a war in Iraq in which billions of dollars is going straight out the window, government deregulation has destroyed our country, yet it’s those darn immigrants who are taking our jobs.
In my opinion, VOZ offers a partial solution that is a work in progress. You have to be naive to think that there wouldn’t be any bumps in the road. You have to be a cold hearted monster not to sympathize with guys trying to get work. Finally, you have to be stupid to ignore the problem and not try something.
But that isn’t as satisfying as blaming all the worlds problems on the lowest economic rung of society.
Ah it’s great to see the racist, anti-liberals get their keywords per minute up. There is a war in Iraq in which billions of dollars is going straight out the window, government deregulation has destroyed our country, yet it’s those darn immigrants who are taking our jobs.
In my opinion, VOZ offers a partial solution that is a work in progress. You have to be naive to think that there wouldn’t be any bumps in the road. You have to be a cold hearted monster not to sympathize with guys trying to get work. Finally, you have to be stupid to ignore the problem and not try something.
But that isn’t as satisfying as blaming all the worlds problems on the lowest economic rung of society.
that Huh guy,
you might want to do research. like at the labor center, you work for your meal at Sisters of the Road. I got exactly one meal there for free, my first, after that I bartered or paid for the rest. you may not understand this, but bartering there can lead to other things. it gives you the dignity to think that you actually might be worth a job somewhere else. there are many things wrong with portland, including it being rather conservative for a progresive city, but sisters of the road is not one of those problems, they are part of the solution.