Job Center a Year Later : Costa Mesa Plan to Get Dayworkers Off Street Lauded, Assailed

Each morning around sunrise, Jose Cordoba, a silver-haired gardener from the Mexican state of Michoacan, joins about 50 Latino men to wait for day labor jobs at the Costa Mesa Job Center.

“Before I started coming here, I waited for work on the street and made only about $30 for 12 hours,” said Cordoba, who now lives in Costa Mesa. “Here, if they offer less than $5 per hour, I won’t take it and neither will anybody else, so they have to pay more.”

Cordoba is one of several hundred Orange County Latino residents who have taken advantage of Costa Mesa’s 11-month-old job center, said to be the nation’s only municipally sponsored hiring hall. Each day, about 50 men show their Social Security cards and drivers’ licenses--proof of their legal status in this country--to center staff members. Then they wait for construction foremen, gardeners and others to drive by in search of workers.

A half-dozen Southland communities are considering following Costa Mesa’s lead, and the center has drawn widespread attention. Backers claim that it has improved dayworkers’ wages and eased the burden for employers who face fines if they hire undocumented workers.

Opposition Claims

But a growing chorus of critics is charging that the center is a tool to isolate undocumented workers who seek jobs from street corners and eventually drive them out of the city. By requiring people at the center to show proof of their legal status, they argue, the city is violating the civil rights of the workers.

Though the job center at 1697 Placentia Ave. has marginally improved working conditions for legal workers, they say, it has worsened conditions for undocumented workers and for those who have applied for citizenship by excluding them from seeking work there.

Job centers for day labor in California go back to the turn of the century. Longshoremen sponsored the first hiring halls in the state around 1900, and other unions followed suit. Public sponsorship of job centers began in San Francisco and Los Angeles around 1913 when the areas suffered a mini-depression.

“Cities have generally opened these kinds of centers in times of depression,” said James Gregory, professor of labor history at UC Berkeley. “Most of the work has been taken over by states and the federal government, but cities come back to it when there is a high unemployment rate.”

Employers’ Reluctance

In Orange County, though, where the official unemployment rate has settled in the full-employment 3% range in recent years, the Costa Mesa day-labor center satisfies a different need. Crowds of Latinos stand each morning on street corners in Costa Mesa and across the Southland looking for work. They are generally non-English speakers who say they cannot find full-time work, either because they do not speak English or because employers will not hire Latinos.

“I’ve left applications at eight landscaping companies in the area since I got permission to work in May,” Jose Cordoba said. “One of the companies even looked at my identification card and said, ‘No that’s not legal,’ even though it was given to me by the government.”

Since passage of the Immigration and Reform Act of 1986, employers have been required to check documents of all employees to ensure that they are permitted to work. In Orange County, 184,000 people have been granted amnesty since the act was passed. But an estimated 150,000 undocumented workers remain, and many of them regularly seek work as day laborers, according to a study published by the Orange County Commission on Human Rights.

Many employers, fearing INS penalties for hiring illegal workers, have been discouraged from using any Latinos.

“In Orange County, there’s discrimination because employers are afraid all Latinos are illegal, and I think it has increased since they passed (the immigration reform act),” said Leo Chavez, a UC Irvine professor of anthropology who specializes in immigration. “Ever since (the immigration reform act) was passed, people won’t hire Latinos like they used to.”

In Costa Mesa, officials considered the issue for at least a year before opening the center. Mexican and Central American refugees, both legal and illegal, had long crowded Lions Park and several other areas around the city each morning, causing neighbors to complain.

“We just thought it was unacceptable to have a hundred people in a city park walking up and down the sidewalks, littering and waiting for work,” said Costa Mesa Mayor Peter F. Buffa. “We really only had one concern when we set up the center--to find work for legal workers.” So Costa Mesa approved a plan last fall to spend $3,000 to $4,000 a month to rent and staff a rehabilitated gas station where workers could wait in comfort and out of the way. Buffa said it was decided to allow only documented workers to use the center because the city is prohibited by federal law from spending public funds on undocumented workers.

“Our idea was to tell people to go to the job center if they had documents . . . and if they didn’t have them, to apply for amnesty,” Buffa said.

The city hired three bilingual aides to coordinate English-speaking employers and Spanish-speaking workers, and soon local people donated furniture and food as well.

Though only a few people showed up the first day, by the end of the job center’s first month, 879 people had been through the doors and more than 300 jobs had been delivered.

A few problems were encountered, though.

“At first, we handed out jobs on a first-come, first-served basis,” said Costa Mesa intergovernmental relations officer Cheryl Friedling, who helped set up the center. “Because they were so eager to work, they came earlier and earlier, sometimes with sleeping bags so they could be first in line, and we decided that was inhumane.”

Job center managers started drawing lots for the first job when the center opened at 6 a.m., and user numbers grew steadily. During the facility’s first six months, the number of day laborers who signed up each day grew from about 25 to as many as 85 in March. Consistently, for the first few months, 40% of those who arrived found work. Dozens of workers continued to stand on the streets near the center, but their numbers dwindled as the facility was increasingly successful.

Construction Employers

About 25 employers, mostly construction companies, also started coming to the center each day to pick workers for a day or two of manual labor.

“These people (at the center) are great for demolition and concrete work,” said Jerry Perez, a residential remodeler, as he hired two workers at the center on a recent morning. “I pick them up here, take care of them, buy them lunch, and then bring them back in the afternoon.”

Perez said he starts off workers from the center at $6 per hour. Like most other center users, Perez said one of the major reasons he uses the center is because its three clerks have been trained by the INS to check working papers. Others agree.

“We used to have to pick up workers at the doughnut shop or the park like everyone else,” said John Bennett, co-owner of Evans Plumbing Inc., a small Costa Mesa firm that now hires two or three workers every couple of weeks. “They’ve already shown somebody their green card and that takes responsibility off our back.”

Workers are nearly as satisfied with the center as employers, but many say the amount of work available through the center is declining. And although work is sporadic, most say overall that they are better off than before the center was opened.

The city offers no formal wage control to workers, but a center employee occasionally asks if any of the workers have had problems collecting their wages. If problems crop up, Costa Mesa Police Officer Dennis Jefcoat, who last spring received an award from the Orange County Human Relations Commission for his work with Latin laborers, is called.

Jefcoat points out that the only problems of non-payment of wages or labor theft reported recently in Costa Mesa have come from the group of mostly undocumented workers who still gather each morning at Lions Park, not from those who frequent the job center.

“The people at the center are being treated better, and those in (Lions Park) are getting the message that Costa Mesa isn’t a good place to find work,” Jefcoat said.

Critics’ Lone Complaint

Even critics of the job center, which include the American Civil Liberties Union and Catholic and Latino groups, laud its efforts to help the newly legalized and non-English-speaking population. They complain only that undocumented workers are denied entry and that the city is trying to drive out workers in other parts of the city. Checking documents is the responsibility of federal rather than city government, they contend.

“Costa Mesa has chosen to discriminate and is denying people the right to work,” said Father Jaime Soto, vicar for the Hispanic Community of Orange County. “If the city is going to address the problem of day laborers, they should make a center open to all workers.”

Along with Latino groups, the ACLU recently threatened the city with a lawsuit, citing both a city ordinance denying funds to groups that serve undocumented workers and the practice of denying those workers entrance to the center.

“A hiring hall has to be open to all residents, not just documented workers,” said Rebecca Jurado, an ACLU attorney. “When a local body takes it upon itself to check documents before they give somebody a job, they’re being overbroad and unconstitutional.”

Recently, use of the center has declined. In July, the total who arrived each morning dropped to its lowest point since January and the percentage of workers hired fell to only 34%, the worst rate since the center opened.

Competition from illegal aliens standing on the street has increased and many gardeners are heading there, say workers at the center. That could mean that center users will eventually return to the streets.

“At the center, it’s better than in a factory, but we only work about two days a week,” said Juan Ruiz, 35, who came to this country three years ago from Mexico. “I’m not really thinking about going back to the park to look for work, but there is a chance that I might have to eventually.”

But authorities on the subject contend that the center will continue to draw workers and employers, if for no other reason than the convenience.

“Employers won’t leave Costa Mesa to find workers, and as long as there’s a center some will come there,” UCI’s Chavez said. “It’s an implicit part of their agreement that workers come to where the employers are . . . and that probably will never change.”