Thursday, December 08, 2005

Day Laborer for a Day

Posted by The Dean of Cincinnati

It’s 4:30 in the morning, and I’m cutting through Washington Park on my way up to the corner of Liberty and Elm.  Most people up at this hour in Over the Rhine are not going for a morning jog, dressed in their monochromatic American Eagle sweatsuit with matching headband.  I am no exception to the norm, sporting my finest blue jeans, flannel, and horribly mismatched brown plastic bag from Kroger.

Like many homeless individuals in Cincinnati, I have gotten up this early to try to find work at one of the many temp agencies in the city, all for the purpose of better understanding what it is like to be homeless and have to work day labor.  Day labor and temp agencies offer anyone who shows up to their labor halls a chance at performing unskilled labor for a daily check.  The work is generally the dirtiest, most dangerous, most arduous, and most undesirable work there is.  For a person experiencing homelessness, this is often the only option for solid work. 

Unfortunately, as one of the new civil rights advocates for the Coalition, I have heard numerous accounts of the civil rights and labor violations enacted by some of these agencies.  I figure that the next best thing to talking to day laborers is being one myself, if only for a day.  So today I seek my fortune at one of the most controversial labor halls: One Force/Labor Solutions.

I arrive at the labor hall a little after 4:30am and join the handful of people sitting on the curb by the building, waiting for the hall to be opened.  At 5:00am, a middle aged woman arrives and opens up the place.  We enter and put our names down on the sign in sheet, then sitting and waiting in what looks like seating ripped out of an old movie theater. 

The inside looks like a converted body shop, with two large garage doors and a front counter that is six feet off the ground, placing the supervisors in a significant position of power.  There is no water fountain and the bathroom is locked up tight.  I don’t inquire about a key.  On the back wall is a list of shelters and food pantries.  The agency is obviously aware that most of their workers are homeless.
Over the next hour and a half, more workers trickle in; many of them have return tickets from the day before, meaning that they are the first picked for work.  The rest of us are to be picked on a first-come-first-served basis, or so I think.  Several buses come by around 6:15 and 6:30, and a list of names is called out for work assignments.  Yours truly is not called.  The chosen ones are dispatched on the buses to their sites. 

By 7:00am, almost everyone is gone from the waiting area, save those of us who had shown up first at 4:30.  When Jesus said that the last shall be first and the first shall be last, I don’t think that this was what he had in mind.  I ask the lady in charge, and she says that there’s no more work; I should try back at noon for the next shift.

It is not uncommon for day laborers to wait two or three hours and not get any work.  Those with return tickets get first crack at the ongoing jobs, and preferential treatment seems to by the norm among many labor hall supervisors.  Also, the word on the street is that One Force/Labor Solutions has been particularly dicey with their clients, so they’ve been losing contracts left and right.  This means fewer jobs for those that show up.  My morning has been wasted, and I am no closer to gaining work or a paycheck.  I guess I’ll just come back at noon.

I return at a quarter till noon to find a sizable group already huddled in the shade around the locked up labor hall.  It’s the hottest day of the year sofar, with the temperature in the middle nineties; I didn’t bring any water with me, and I’m really starting to worry about the fact that there is no water fountain in waiting area. 

A half-hour later two guys open up the place, and I repeat the morning’s sign up routine.  Another hour and a half of sitting and waiting goes by before I notice one of the supervisors looking at me.  “Hey Archie, come here,” he says.  “Let me see your ID.”  I’ve been called a lot of names in my day, but this is a first for “Archie.”  I comply, showing him my driver’s license and waiting patiently.  After a few minutes, he hands it back to me.  “You wanna go to Crisco?”  I have no clue what exactly he’s talking about, but I decide to play it cool: “Yeah, sure.  I can do that.”  He pauses a second and responds simply, “Okay, we’ll see.”  As I sit down, I can’t help but wonder why I, a new guy, was singled out from the relatively large group of around thirty people.  Racism is a common complaint of day labor and temp agencies; I look around and notice that I am one of two white guys in the waiting area.

Finally at 2:35pm, almost three hours after I arrived at the labor hall, one of the supervisors calls out a list of names.  Miraculously, my name is called.  We line up to go through the dispatch office, where we submit ourselves to a mandatory breathalyzer test and are given safety equipment: a hard hat, safety goggles, rubber steel-toed boots, Kevlar gloves, and an orange vest.

As I get on what very well could have been the same school bus I rode in elementary school, I realize that I hadn’t inquired as to where I was going.  Day laborers are rarely told of their work assignments or how much they will be paid; from what I understand, asking doesn’t usually get you much of an answer, anyway.

My answer comes when the bus pulls into the Rumke Recyling Plant on Spring Grove Road in St. Bernard: I will be picking through trash.  We arrive around 3:00pm and spend an hour in a dingy break room waiting for our shift to start.  There is a men’s and a women’s restroom – although both are flooded – as well as two water fountains.  The city has declared a heat emergency, so I hydrate myself as best as possible.

By the time our shift starts at 4:00pm, I have waited well over four hours for the opportunity to be on the clock.  I am assigned to the paper line with Tasha (her name changed for this article), where I stand beside a conveyer belt, picking out cans, bottles, plastic bags, and foreign objects from the tons of paper products that drift by.  The work is dirty and smelly, despite the gloves and the industrial fans at our station.  Mounds of cardboard caked in mud and God-only-knows-what are the most prominent hazard, along with broken glass bottles and heaps of unused Arby’s coupons.

After two hours of work on the paper line, I’m starting to feel a little faint, not so much from the odiferous fumes of wet, decomposing paper products so much as from dehydration.  The work is not incredibly taxing, but the hot and humid weather has left me sweating buckets.  To my relief, we take a break a little after 6:00pm.

All the workers congregate in the break room, where we are given free bottles of Gatorade by the Rumke staff.  I load up on Gatorade and water before we resume work after a fifteen minute rest.  Once back on the line, we get barraged by a particularly nasty load, leaving my arms coated with a fine, black layer of dirt, dust, and glass particles.  Tasha and I converse a bit, and I learn that she has worked temp labor at Rumke on and off for six years; for that reason she is often put in charge of new workers and special projects.  That doesn’t sound like temporary work to me.

Interestingly enough, we spend much of our time working alongside permanent employees of Rumke.  The day and temp laborers, however, do not enjoy their higher wages and health benefits, despite the fact that they often engage in the same work.

While sweeping up before the shift ends at 9:00pm, a few of the workers ask me if I plan on coming back tomorrow.  I say, “We’ll see,” knowing full well that I’ll resume my normal day-to-day projects with the Coalition come morning.  They just laugh and remark, “Yeah, we know what that means.”  I feel the privilege that I was born with burn inside of me.  It hurts more than usual as we file out at 9:00pm.
The bus is surprisingly on time – definitely not the norm from the comments of those around me – and we make our way back to Over the Rhine as the sun disappears.  Checks are distributed during the ride, causing spirits to lift a little.  “Man oh man,” remarks a guy sitting next to me, “that break was one for the record books.”  I ask him: “Why’s that?  With the free Gatorade and all?”
“No,” he replies, “we ain’t never got no break before.”

I get back to my apartment a little before 10:00pm, exhausted and dirty.  I’m the last one off the bus, except for a guy who is continuing to the One Force/Labor Solutions Covington office to work the third shift.  I had been at “work” for ten hours, but only engaged in five official hours of paid labor.  Such is the nature of day and temp labor.

For my efforts, I was paid $32.50, or $6.50 an hour – not bad by day labor standards.  Minus $3.17 for taxes – I kept as much as I could for myself – puts me at $29.33. 

But here’s the kicker: they take out $5.00 to pay for my transportation to and from the work site.  That docks me down to my final paycheck total of $24.33 for five hours of labor (in which I invested five additional hours just to have the “opportunity” to work).
But wait, there’s more!  It is One Force/Labor Solutions policy to deduct for safety equipment rental that should have cost me an additional $3-4.  For some reason I wasn’t charged, perhaps because one of the supervisors liked me or felt bad about calling me “Archie.” 

I should also factor in the fact that most day and temp laborers do not have bank accounts and must cash their checks at places that charge at least a dollar or two.  Many labor halls cash checks, but charge outrageous fees.

It is also not uncommon for labor agencies to provide a lunch to workers and charge – again, sometimes OVERcharge – for that meal.  Realistically, my final pay could have just as easily been well below $20.  That’s for ten hours of my time, not including the time I had spent fruitlessly waiting for work in the early morning.

Many of these pay deductions, conditions, and overall practices are illegal in some states.  Legal or illegal, they still prey on vulnerable populations and expedite the cycles of poverty and homelessness.

These types of work with these types of conditions and these types of wages are not a sustainable way of living.  No one can support themselves, let alone a family, on so little money for so much time and effort.  And even if there was enough affordable housing in Cincinnati – there is a severe shortage in Cincinnati and Hamilton County – working day and temp labor would not even pay for it.  The time has come to change this.  Stay tuned.

Keep your eyes on future Streetvibes for more information and developments on day and temp labor, as well as how anyone can take action.

Interested in getting involved in improving day and temp labor conditions?  Do you work day labor and wish to file a grievance or help organize?  Contact the Cincinnati Fair Day Labor Advocates: Don Sherman @ Cincinnati Interfaith Center for Worker Justice (513)621-4336 or John Lavelle @ GCCH (513)421-7803.

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