Market for Day Laborers Sours With Economy

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Posted October 19, 2008

Market for day Laborers Sours With the Economy

BÉATRICE DE GÉA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Day laborers rush to a car to negotiate for potential wok in a Home Depot parking in Hempstead, N.Y.

By KIRK SEMPLE

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. — More than 50 day laborers stood, bored, anxious and mostly silent, in the sun-blasted parking lot of a Home Depot here last week, tracking the ebb and flow of customers and hoping for work. The hours crawled by. Six, maybe seven men scored jobs. The rest just waited.

“To stand here doesn’t make a lot of sense to a lot of people,” Jairo Mancillas, 29, a day laborer from El Salvador, said glumly as he waited on a grassy median in the parking lot. “But to us, it’s a very important thing. It means a lot.”

This bleak scenario is playing out at scores of day laborer sites across the region. Here on Long Island; under the elevated No. 7 line on Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens; at the intersection of Port Richmond Avenue and Castleton Avenue on Staten Island; along Bay Parkway in Brooklyn; near highway on-ramps in Westchester; and into New Jersey and Connecticut, clusters of day laborers, their numbers swelled by people laid off from full-time jobs, wait for work that, more often than not, never comes.

Two years ago, when the economy was booming and home-building was thriving, many of these same laborers were working every day. Now, they are lucky if they work twice a week, many of them say. Their lives have become a test of wits, patience and hope.

Simple lives have become simpler. The laborers, most of them illegal immigrants, said they had stopped eating in restaurants, buying new clothes, and sending money home to their families. In interviews with more than a dozen laborers in New York City and its suburbs, many said they were thinking about returning to their homelands.

Carmelo Pena Garcia, 59, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who waits for work every day at Roosevelt Avenue and 69th Street in Queens, said he is trying to make just enough money to buy a plane ticket home. “Sometimes you don’t sleep because you are thinking about work and nothing else,” he said on a recent morning.

“The American dream isn’t an American dream,” said Mr. Mancillas, here in Hempstead.

The amount of money sent by immigrants in the United States to Latin America and the Caribbean is expected to increase this year over last year, according to the Inter-American Development Bank, which has been tracking remittances since 2000. But when adjusted for inflation, the value of the remittances is actually expected to decline. The bank attributed the drop to several factors, including the economic downturn in the United States, inflation and a weaker dollar.

Like other day laborers, Mr. Mancillas came to the United States with the intention of making money to help his family. In his village of Ahuachapán, El Salvador, he was a tailor and worked from home, making trousers for adults and children. But he was barely scraping by and decided to try his luck in the United States.

He left his wife and two young daughters behind, and with the help of a smuggler, whom he paid $2,500, traveled through Guatemala and Mexico, sneaked across the border into California, then made his way to Hempstead in 2005.

Work came quickly at first, he said. Every morning just after dawn he and many other day laborers would gather outside a Home Depot, and most days, he was hired. In flush times, he made as much as $800 a week. He would send $600 home and use the balance for food, clothes and his half of the $500 monthly rent for a tiny room he shared with another laborer in a rooming house in Hempstead.

He and his friends made enough to be able to eat meals in restaurants and buy clothes — for themselves and their families — at the mall. Mr. Mancillas would fill boxes with toys and other goods and ship them to his daughters in El Salvador.

But work slowed last year and now has nearly dried up: in the past several months, like many other laborers, he has been working once or twice a week, making between $80 and $200.

The drop in wages for Mr. Mancillas has resulted in sacrifices, large and small.

Mr. Mancillas said he now shops for clothes at the Salvation Army. He no longer eats out and instead subsists on basic home-cooked food or rice and beans from Latino delicatessens. He has also stopped buying clothes and toys for his family.

As the economy has worsened, the number of laborers gathering at the Home Depot here has grown, making the competition for fewer jobs that much fiercer. The newcomers have arrived from other cities, thinking things would be better in New York. Or they have been laid off from semipermanent jobs in manufacturing and construction, either as a result of the economy or tougher crackdowns on illegal immigrants.

As demand for day labor has plunged, some employers have taken advantage of the glut of workers by paying them less or not paying them at all, several workers said.

One of Mr. Mancillas’s friends, David, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, said a contractor did not pay him for several days of work soon after he arrived last year in Hempstead. But he did not seek help from the authorities because he was afraid of being deported.

“He owed me $1,000,” said David, who refused to give his last name. “But fear kept my mouth shut.”

The crowd thinned throughout the day as workers gave up and went home, most to shared rooms in houses full of other laborers with little to do but watch television. By midafternoon, fewer than 20 remained. Some sat alone on the curbs of the medians, seemingly lost in their thoughts, but still keeping an eye out for potential employers.

“When you return to the house and you haven’t worked and you can’t provide for your family, you feel really bad,” Mr. Mancillas said.

Another of Mr. Mancillas’s friends, a 23-year-old Salvadoran named Junior Garcia, spotted a Home Depot customer trying to wrestle some lumber into the back of a van and sprinted over to help him. (Mr. Garcia would get a $10 tip out of it, a small windfall.)

A few minutes passed. The men watched cars drive by.

Wilfredo Hernandez, 38, who was also from El Salvador, broke the silence. “I used to go to restaurants all the time, drink beers,” he said. “One night I went to the restaurant Hooters. You know Hooters?” He itemized his meal from that night: a hamburger ($10) and four beers ($20). “I gave the waitress $36,” he said wistfully.

The men said they did not know much about the turmoil in the financial markets. “The investment in the war in Iraq is the reason, right?” Mr. Mancillas asked. But while the details might have been obscure to them, the realities of the country’s economic malaise were plainly, and painfully, evident.

“The situation in the United States has gotten bad,” Mr. Garcia said, fiddling with a paint-splattered tape measure he carried on his belt. “I didn’t think it was going to come to this.”

“Let’s see what sort of changes a new president brings,” Mr. Hernandez said. “If it continues the same, I’ll go back.”

The men grew silent again and continued to scan the lot. The idea of returning home was not a popular topic. And anyway, the day was not over yet, and there was still a chance, however slight, of work.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company. Reprinted from The New York Times, New York Region, of Sunday, October 18, 2008.

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