Jornalero News

La Asociacion de Jornaleros/San Diego Day Laborers Association www.myasjd.org | Source: Foundation4change.org

Organizer, Mark Day re-caps the wage theft workshop:

Our wage theft workshop on Oct. 29 in Oceanside was a huge success thanks to the teamwork of college students, organizers, guest speakers, jornaleros, and household workers who attended. Special thanks go to the Mira Costa college students of the Human Rights Committee of Oceanside for setting up the workshop at the Mira Costa Community Learning Center and for coordinating the food and other tasks.

Our special guest was attorney Renee Saucedo from the Centro Legal de La Raza in San Francisco. Renee encouraged us to take direct action against employers who refuse to pay their workers. She also told the story of how the San Francisco day labor center got started 20 years ago, and how it has become so successful. The bottom line, said Renee, is that we have to keep organizing–and eventually we will reach our goals.

Veronica Federovsky of the National Day Labor Organizing Network advised day laborers and household workers on how workers can do to protect their own interests when dealing with employers.  This includes being paid in cash the same day of the work and taking careful documentation on the employer in case he/she fails to pay. Click to continue »

By Chris De Benedetti | Source: Hayward Daily Review/MercuryNews.com | January 4, 2012

HAYWARD — The Hayward Day Labor Center, a nonprofit agency hit by burglars over the New Year’s holiday weekend, is asking for help replace some stolen items.

The job-training organization — which provides a variety of social services to those in need in the greater Hayward area — lost computers printers, and gardening tools in the burglary, said Gabriel Herndandez, the center’s executive director.

The burglars also damaged a book-dispensing vending machine and stole soccer uniforms from Tennyson High School that Hernandez, the squad’s head coach, was storing at the center.

The estimated cost of the stolen and damaged goods was between $8,000 and $10,000, Hernandez said. The crime took place sometime between Friday and Sunday morning, when a delivery person discovered that the center had been robbed, police Lt. Roger Keener said.

Anyone wishing to donate to the center can write a check made payable to Community Initiatives, c/o Hayward Day Labor Center, and mail it to the center at 680 W. Tennyson Road, Hayward, CA 94544.

BY TAMMY GRUBB, tammy.grubb1@yahoo.com | Source: ChapelHillNews.com

CARRBORO - The Chapel Hill and Carrboro Human Rights Center may have found a new home around the corner from its old neighborhood.The center put a three-bedroom, brick ranch house at 107 Barnes St. under contract Dec. 23 for $155,000, director Judith Blau said. County records show the 1,075-square-foot house was built in 1970 and is owned by Dorothy and Bernard Atwater. It is valued at $138,363.

They still need to close on the house, but after the sale goes through, Blau said they might improve the gravel driveway and build another room.

Interim Town Manager Matt Efird said the group first must seek a home occupation permit or some type of rezoning. The exact requirements will depend on the information center officials submit, possibly by early spring, he said.

Blau and center community organizer David Rigby said they couldn’t have found the home so quickly without the local NAACP and its president the Rev. Robert Campbell, Community Realty agent Bronwyn Merritt, Carrboro town officials and members of Occupy Chapel Hill-Carrboro. Click to continue »

January 1, 2012 | Source: Fox News Latino

Close to 70 agricultural day laborers arrive every day at the Centro de los Trabajadores Agricolas Fronterizos (Border Farmworker Center) in El Paso in hopes of being hired to harvest nuts and red chilis, but with little hope at all for next year.

Around 1:00 a.m. the farmworkers gather in the street hoping that the overseers or farm owners will soon show up to hire them.

“The harvest season is almost over, which is why the overseers can pick and choose the workers they want. They always prefer the youngest and strongest,” Mexican laborer Roberto Miranda told Efe.

Once in the fields, he said, they put what they pick in baskets and get paid 80 cents for each basket they fill.

“After eight hours of work without anything to eat, they give me between $25 and $30. But some days I only earn $10,” Miranda said.

Many of his fellow farmworkers also complain about the meager pay they get for toiling in the fields, but are universally afraid to say anything about it in public. Click to continue »

Posted by Kevin Coughlin on December 22, 2011 | Source: MorristownGreen.com

They sit with shovels and rakes and spades, waiting.

The faceless day laborers in Ron Ritzie’s painting, Waiting Game, are a face of Morristown that he cannot ignore.

“You see their images all around town, looking for work,” Ron said on Wednesday at the Morristown Neighborhood House, where he donated a signed giclée (digital ink-jet) print of the painting to Pathways to Work.

That program, now in its third year, matches workers with people seeking to hire casual labor.

'Waiting Game,' by Morristown artist Ron Ritzie. he donated a print of the painting to the Pathways to Work program at the Neighborhood House. Photo by Bill Lescohier

Pathways Manager Rosa Chilquillo said she was “escstatic” about Ron’s gift. “It depicts what Pathways to Work is is,” she said. “We work with anybody who is unemployed, who needs work.” Click to continue »

Paresh Dave | December 21, 2011 | Editor-In-Chief | Source: NeonTommy.com

Reuniting With Friend, Losing All Income

Fifty-year-old Michael Kembe, a professional cook and dishwasher, knows he’s in the middle of a simple problem.

“Everybody wants to work,” he says in his accent, like a father imparting life advice to his son. “In today’s economy, there’s no jobs.”

After a decade of saving some his some earnings from working at Baguettes and Bagels Deli just outside of Atlanta, Georgia, Kembe arrived in Los Angeles in mid-2010 to reconnect with his only friend in America.

Finding a steady job in L.A. has turned out to be much more impossible than the optimistic Kembe had expected. At most, he thought it would take three months to find a job. It’s been 15 months.

“Everywhere you go they say the business is slow,” he said. “I mean everybody, business slow, business slow. Even the warehouse, business slow. It’s not just the restaurants. Warehouse. Security guards.” Click to continue »

Dan Watson | December 21, 2011 | Editor-In-Chief | Source: NeonTommy.com

“A day laborer’s life is a very sad one. A very hard one. They have this idea that when they come to the U.S. their problems are solved. They don’t realize, their nightmare is about to begin.” - Art Zepeda, CARECEN Day Labor Program Organizer

Carlos Vareli wakes up most mornings knowing he won’t find work.

Regardless, he still gets out of bed while most of Los Angeles sleeps. He might drive if he has gas money. A car allows him to pack his priceless tools, but it’s been awhile. Instead, these days he usually bikes or walks the three miles, leaving behind those tools, and his wife in their one-room apartment at Washington and Western.

At the downtown Home Depot parking lot, a last-gasp wilderness awaits.

At 7:30 a.m., the parking lot is brimming with hundreds of desperate men like Vareli; each hoping his spot will be the lucky one today. Scores of them are scattered throughout the lot, some along the driving lanes, others behind truck beds, more bursting out of the landscaped islands; every nook and cranny.

Vareli once was a professor in Central America. Today, in the U.S., he is a day laborer.

Among the jobless in Los Angeles, day laborers have been hit especially hard — “it’s never been worse,” Vareli says. While more than 26,000 L.A. County day laborers hope for a few hours of work every day, the housing crisis and recession have abandoned most to a fruitless search, made even tougher by anti-immigration sentiments, ineffective city-funded day laborer centers and an influx of Latin American immigrants, all competing against a much larger demographic than previously existed.

“I have not heard of positive signs for day laborers yet,” said Lynn Svensson of the Day Labor Research Institute. “I believe that day laborers may be the last to get the benefits of the ‘recovery’ because their wages are determined on the spot by employers.” Click to continue »

Source: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, December 15, 2011

PHOENIX — Gov. Jan Brewer has asked a judge to dismiss a request by opponents of Arizona’s immigration law to block enforcement of the law’s ban on people blocking traffic when they seek or offer day-labor services on streets.

The ban was among a handful of provisions in the law that were allowed to take effect after U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton halted enforcement of more controversial elements of the law.

Opponents had sought a court order to block enforcement of the day-labor provision under the argument that it unconstitutionally restricts the free speech rights of people who want to express their need for work.

Brewer’s lawyers argued that the First Amendment doesn’t protect the blocking of traffic and that the law is aimed at promoting traffic safety.

By: Ed Langlois, Staff Writer | 12/13/2011 | Source: CatholicSentinel.org

Catholic Sentinel photos by Ed Langlois. During Guadalupe procession by day laborers, Jesus Sanchez carries statue while Paul Riek, Matt Cato and Francisco Aguirre sing.

In the corner of a former Northeast Portland garage, day laborers on Dec. 12 lovingly pieced together a shrine with a two-foot-tall statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe. One worker with rough hands gently slipped a rose into a soda bottle and placed the flower beside the image, one of the most important symbols in Latin American Catholicism.

“It’s a very special day. It’s like my heart,” 29-year-old Marcos Alvares said through a translator.

A native of Michoacan, Alvares recalls celebrating the Dec. 12 feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe as a boy — songs in a splendid church at midnight, steaming cups of cocoa and trays full of sweets. On this Guadalupe day, 17 years after he came to the U.S., he’s happy to huddle for warmth with other men hoping to be hired for manual labor. Click to continue »

By Joe Rodriguez | jrodriguez@mercurynews.com | Posted: 12/11/2011 | Source: MercuryNews.com

Silicon Valley’s first hiring center for day workers might be forced to downsize or close at the end of the year, another victim of hard times that stretch from the streets to San Jose City Hall.

“I don’t know what I’d do,” Francisco Sanchez said recently at the Day Worker Center just east of downtown. The 58-year-old Mexican immigrant and “jornalero,” or day laborer, didn’t get a job that day, but he did get a free haircut, one of the many social services the center offers.

“I don’t want to join the guys standing in front of Home Depot,” Sanchez said. “I used to do that when I was young, but I’m not young anymore and the jobs don’t come as easy as they did.”

After the Great Recession, housing bust and financial crisis, the steady stream of contractors and homeowners who needed temporary help in flush times slowed to a trickle.

Directer Mary Mendez, left, talks with Martin Martinez, 52, an out of work dry waller who once made $54 an hour and now registers for day work at the Day Worker Center in San Jose, on Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2011. In the background are some of the computers available for job search. The first day-worker hiring center in Silicon Valley may fall victim to San Jose's budget crisis. Started by a Catholic nun in East San Jose at the peak of anti-immigrant hysteria in California 18 years ago, the center, now located closer to downtown, on Story Rd., is scrambling for the $100,000 it needs to operate next year. (Karen T. Borchers/Mercury News) ( KAREN T. BORCHERS )

So did the grants, city subsidies or philanthropic donations that kept the hiring center humming for most of its 18 years. Its last, big funding source–a three-year, $300,000 grant from Home Depot funneled through the city–runs out Dec. 31. The nonprofit Center for Training and Careers, which took over the hiring center three years ago, knew the grant would expire but had expected to replace it by now.

“With the competition out there, it’s really tough,” said Lori Ramos a vice president and grants writer at CTC.

Councilwoman Madison Nguyen, who represents much of the East Side, said the city can’t afford to rescue struggling nonprofits anymore. Instead, she’s asking a private foundation to come to the rescue of the center.”Everybody needs money at this time, every nonprofit in the city,” she said. “Obviously, it’s a very unique center. We’re trying to save as many jobs as we can. They are part-time jobs, but they’re still jobs.” Click to continue »