NYC's Day Labor Markets
Roosevelt Ave. between 73rd and 74th Sts. is the site of one of New York's busiest casual labor markets. These are places where men gather on the street in search of a day's wages. Most of the men are immigrants, invariably Latin American, and they usually work for independent contractors in the construction industry.
One of the men, Juan, is a laconic 30-year-old from Pueblo, Mexico. He works as a painter, a sheetrocker and a carpenter's assistant. "I get here around 8 o'clock. Some people get here at 6. Then you just wait. I'll wait until 2 in the afternoon before I go home for the day. The pay depends. It's between $5.50 and $10 an hour. But sometimes you will work all day and they will only pay for eight hours."
Juan's friend Eduardo jumps in to provide more detail. "The worst are the Chinese. And the Indians. They only pay $6. The Koreans are a little better, maybe $8. The best boss is American, and then you can get up to $12 an hour."
Asked how he came to New York, Juan says he's been here for two years. He crossed the border in Tijuana and flew from San Diego. "It cost me $800. The people in Mexico give you a loan to get here and then you pay back little by little." Juan says that he finds work about three times a week and has already paid back his loan. It would seem difficult to support oneself working only three days a week, but Juan says he lives in an apartment in Roosevelt and the rent is cheap.
Eduardo scoffs at this answer. "Nice apartment! It's cheap rent because it's seven people and only one bedroom."
Juan replies, "Yes, we are seven people, but it's a real apartment."
I ask Juan if he thinks his story is typical of other day laborers in New York. He says no, people come from all over and everyone is different. This appears to be true. A mile west of Roosevelt, outside the Tsigonia hardware store in Astoria, most of the men looking for work are from the Andean countries. Jorge, a thickset man in his 40s, is from Honduras, "The best country in Central America."
Jorge says his expertise is plumbing. He is willing to do work of all sorts, but he is reluctant to take a job for less than $10 an hour. "I've lived in Brooklyn for 16 years. I have papers. Many people have papers. But it's a big problem because every boss, he thinks you're illegal. They try to take advantage. They say they'll pay you on Saturday. You have to make them pay right away."
The crowd in front of Tsigonia lingers all day long. By early afternoon a few of them are already drunk, and it is not unusual to hear a man talk dirty to a passing girl. I asked Jorge if there was ever any trouble with the police. "Some people don't come for work. They can be alcoholic people. People with no respect." He says that most of the trouble is caused by men urinating on the street. This upsets the local homeowners and sometimes they call the cops. But, says Jorge, this happens only occasionally. "Mostly, nobody bothers us."
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The lack of fuss about day laborers in New York City is somewhat remarkable. Throughout the rest of the country, and notably in Long Island, the presence of casual labor markets stirs up a great deal of anger. Late last year two men were convicted of attempting to murder a pair of day laborers from Farmingville, NY, and in townships from Glen Cove to Brookhaven local politicians are caught up in a nasty fight between immigrants rights groups on the one hand and anti-Mexican organizations like American Patrol on the other. Around the five boroughs, however, men gather where they please and most New Yorkers don't seem to care. I left messages with the Mayor's office, two city councilmen and three community boards. It was two weeks, and my deadline passed, before anyone called back.
Bobby is a business owner in Astoria. I asked him to explain why there are so few problems surrounding day laborers in the city. "It's a different mentality in New York," he says. "I mean Queens has a lot of illegal workers, but don't forget it has a lot of first-generation Americans. They look at it and say been there, done that. If you weren't born in the States and you see someone who's trying to make a living, you don't mind. You don't mind because once upon a time maybe you did the same thing."
Born in Cyprus, Bobby is now a U.S. citizen. He recently hired a group of workers from outside Tsigonia to help him refurbish his laundromat. He knows a great deal about the casual labor markets because he used to manage apartments in Queens.
"Let's say you have a vacant apartment and you have to clean it up. The building might have a super, but he won't do manual labor. So you take the workers off the street. That's the lowest you can pay. They do demolition, painting, plaster, but you have to assume they don't know anything. Maybe the guy says he's a plumber, but you don't play with these things. It's playing with fire. If you hire somebody off the street to do plumbing and he doesn't do it right, do you know how much that will cost you afterwards?"
Bobby says that most small building owners in New York depend on illegal immigrants to maintain their properties. I ask him how hard it would be to find legal workers to fill the same jobs. "The daily work, no. Impossible. Impossible! You know what you might find, you might find someone to do a job part-time. Maybe it's the holidays or something and he needs extra money. You might even find American citizens to work part-time. But these people, they're still gonna work illegally. They won't take checks. They ask for cash. It's the same thing, exactly the same ballgame." Bobby goes on to say that most contractors are forced to use day laborers because the other options are just too expensive. "People are asking for so much money. You can't afford it. On the street you pay less than $10. If you take someone from the union you have to pay maybe $30. Imagine five people working all day for $30 an hour. You can't do it."
?
Richard Weiss, the communications director of Local 79, objects to this line of reasoning. Local 79 represents laborers in the construction industry. Just a block away from another casual labor market in Queens, the union has placed a giant inflatable rat in front of what used to be the UA/Astoria movie theater on Steinway St. The theater has gone out of business, and the union is protesting the use of the untrained day laborers on the building's renovation.
I ask Weiss if the rat outside the theater is the same one that used to be across the street from the New York Public Library. "Probably not. Our organization has six rats at this point, and a lot of other unions have them too. We were the first to use them in the New York area, but now they're going up all over the city. We're infested with rats."
I ask Weiss if the union has a position on the immigration status of the city's undocumented workers. He says he is in favor of a broad amnesty. "Let them become Americans like everyone else who came to this country. People talk about 'illegals.' You can't be an illegal person."
Weiss has a point, but the subtlety of it is quickly lost on workers, among whom the difference between citizen and noncitizen means everything.
Josef is a 28-year-old who describes himself as an interior designer. When I ask him about his immigration status he quickly and proudly declares that he is 100 percent American. "Born and bred in the Bronx," he says.
It's early in the morning and Josef is one of many men looking for work outside the Janovic Plaza on 3rd Ave. and 67th St. in Manhattan. "Sometimes you get high designers who need really good people. I'm a plasterer and painter and they know me. Sometimes I'll do demo, but it doesn't pay as well. If you're good you can make as much as $200 a day. The best jobs are on 5th Ave., the west side. Then you get sloppy jobs downtown around 2nd Ave."
A friend of Josef's approaches and our conversation is interrupted. Like Josef, the friend is Hispanic, but he has blond highlights in his hair and he speaks with a soft California accent. He is wearing an Ecuadorian sweater decorated with llamas. It is the sort of sweater that Ecuadorians themselves do not wear but that is very popular with American tourists who have visited Ecuador. He has just returned from six months of painting houses in San Francisco.
"What are you doing back?" asks Josef.
"Looking for work," says the friend. They commiserate briefly about the current scarcity of jobs in New York.
Josef says that two years ago it was much easier to find jobs. "But there's been a big drop-off. Especially since 9/11. There's nothing now. Sometimes I come out here four days in a row and I don't get a single job." I ask him what he does when he can't find work. "I go to classes if I'm in school. I like to go rollerblading in the park."
Josef admits that not all the day laborers in New York are legal residents and that some of them get paid under the table, but he is surprisingly adamant about the question of his own payment of taxes. "This is a job like anything else. I get paid in checks all the time and you bet I pay taxes. That's the law. Everyone's got to pay taxes."
It is impossible to confirm this point, so I move on to ask Josef if he knows of other casual labor markets in Manhattan. He says there are people looking for work outside almost every hardware store in the city (although my own search did not confirm this). I ask him if he ever goes out to Astoria to look for work. "You mean like near Tsigonia? No, I'd never look for work out there. Tsigonia is bad. Those people are not real workers, they're more just homeless people and drunks."
It's nice to know that even in the world of day laborers Manhattan retains its cachet.