Life in the Secondary Labor Market

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny–daylabor-abuse0211feb11,0,5435007.story

Widespread abuse of day laborers shows gap in legal aid By CARA ANNA, Associated Press Writer, February 11, 2006, 10:00 AM EST

KINGSTON, N.Y. — Sergio de la Cruz says the abuse began when he was picked up at a day labor site in Yonkers.

He was taken to a construction site in the Bronx, where he says his boss took his Mexican identity papers and locked him in at night. For four months, de la Cruz says he was locked into three separate sites, most of the time sleeping on a plank bed and defecating into a plastic bag.

As America’s use of day labor grows, legal aid experts say this is one of the more striking complaints. But just as striking, they say, is de la Cruz didn’t know someone could help him.

In the first national survey of day laborers, released last month, nearly half of 2,660 workers interviewed said they’d been cheated out of pay in the past two months. Almost 45 percent said they hadn’t been given food and water. More than one-fourth had been abandoned at a work site.

And 70 percent said they didn’t know where to report such abuse, or how.

The survey illustrates a key problem in the story of day labor: About three-quarters of the estimated 117,000 day laborers in the United States are here illegally. What happens when they say they’re treated illegally as well?

“Most people don’t know employment law applies despite their immigration status,” says Tricia Kakalec, co-founder of the Kingston-based Workers Rights Law Center. “They want the jobs, you know what I mean? They just want to get paid.”

The center is one of a growing number that offer legal help to day laborers. The National Legal Aid and Defender Association in Washington, D.C., says there’s no good estimate of such legal aid centers in the United States, but the national survey found 63 day labor worker centers offering legal or other services in 17 states.

KJ