Monday, Jan. 23, 2006

By Peter Prengaman
ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOS ANGELES – The immigrant men who wait for work on street corners across the United States have families, attend church regularly – and their bosses are more likely to be individual homeowners than construction contractors.

The first nationwide study of day laborers also reported that one in five has been hurt on the job and nearly half have been stiffed by employers.

The study offers the most detailed snapshot to date of the mostly Hispanic and often undocumented immigrants who've become a focal point in the increasingly heated immigration debate. It was based on interviews of 2,660 workers at 264 hiring sites in 20 states and the District of Columbia.

The authors said they were surprised by the level of community involvement among men often thought of as transient hands for hire.

"The day labor corner is not as disconnected from society as people think. It's seen as a shadow economy, but that's really not the case," said professor Nik Theodore from the University of Illinois at Chicago, one of three study authors. The others were from the University of California, Los Angeles and New York's New School University.

Standing outside a Home Depot store Sunday morning in suburban Burbank, 33-year-old Raul Sanchez wondered whether he would get work.

The Mexico native said that when he's not working, or waiting for work, he's involved in church and tried to start a soccer league for fellow day laborers. He has been in the United States seven years and lives with his wife and two children, ages 13 and 14.

Sometimes he worries about on-the-job dangers at small work sites with little safety equipment.

"We know nobody is going to help us out if we get hurt," Sanchez said. "There are risks, but what are we going to do – not work?"

As often as not, a day laborer's employer will be a private citizen.

Forty-nine percent of respondents said they were regularly hired by homeowners for everything from carpentry to gardening, with 43 percent getting jobs from construction contractors. Two-thirds said they are hired repeatedly by the same employer.

In all, researchers estimate there are about 117,600 day laborers nationwide, though they warn that number is probably low. They extrapolated the number based on interviews and counts at each site, but did not give a margin of error for their results. The researchers said it would be impossible to count the number of sites nationwide, since some can be spontaneous.

Among the other findings based in interviews conducted between July and August 2004:

– Just over half of day laborers said they attended church regularly, 22 percent reported being involved in sports clubs and 26 percent said they participated in community centers.

– Nearly two-thirds had children, 36 percent were married and seven percent lived with a partner.

– More than 80 percent rely on day labor as their sole source of income, earning a median wage of $10 an hour and $700 a month. That meant the vast majority earned less than $15,000 a year, putting them close to the 2005 federal poverty guideline of $12,830 for a family of two.

– Of the 20 percent of respondents who reported on-the-job injuries, more than half said they received no medical care because they couldn't afford it or their employer refused to cover them.

– Three-fourths were illegal immigrants and most were Hispanic: 59 percent were from Mexico and 28 percent from other Central American countries.

The study comes as Congress and the White House haggle over proposed guest worker programs amid increasing friction surrounding day laborers, who have drawn the ire of groups opposed to illegal immigration while providing a supply of cheap labor to employers.

A handful of municipalities have built sites where workers wait for jobs, and Home Depot has as well.

Those sites have prompted a handful of lawsuits demanding the government enforce immigration law as well as protests – including at the Home Depot in Burbank, where Cesar Martinez was among those awaiting work Sunday.

Martinez, 45, is a Guatemala native who has been in Southern California for 15 years without legal documentation. He said he sends $300 to $500 home every month to support his six children, ages 2 to 14, but that sometimes an employer rips him off – including one who stiffed him after three weeks of work.

"I couldn't complain because I'm not here legally but I was so angry because I need every cent," he said. "I'm always thinking, 'Are they going to pay me, am I going to get to work 8 hours on this job, will I get hurt doing it?'"