By Scott Brinton
Mendoza, 34, dressed in dusty, worn blue jeans and a gray T-shirt, was standing on the north side of Sunrise, just east of the Dunkin Donuts in Freeport.
He and more than a dozen mostly-Latin American men, all day-laborers, had come to this street corner on a recent Friday to rally support for the Worklink Community Center of Freeport. Catholic Charities and the Village of Freeport created the Worklink Center this past summer as a hiring site for the laborers. On this Friday, the center was yet to open.
Just west of the men, a nearly equal number of Sachem Quality of Life members staged a protest, calling on Freeport and Catholic Charities to shut the Worklink Center down before it even opened. Many from the Long Island-wide organization waved the American flag high above their heads, while others brandished signs that read "Illegal Aliens by Glacken," referring to Freeport Mayor William Glacken, who supported the Worklink Center.
The two sides never clashed. Each, however, privately hurled accusations at the other. The day laborers said Sachem is a hate group that opposes immigration in general, but especially from Latin America.
Sachem members insisted they favor legal immigration. Day laborers, they charged, are mostly illegal immigrants who pay no taxes on work they perform, while taking advantage of government services.
In the end, the Worklink Center opened last week.
Controversy generated by the center now has focused attention on the myriad issues surrounding day labor across Nassau County's South Shore. Previously, day labor was seen primarily as an issue for Suffolk County and the North Shore, where hiring centers like Worklink have divided communities, often along racial lines.
Hiring center
open for business
The Worklink Center is a grayish, metal trailer with a bathroom, coffee pot and chairs, which sits on village property in an industrial section of Freeport between Sunrise Highway and the Long Island Rail Road tracks, just over the Merrick-Freeport border.
The center, which the village erected for $4,500 and Catholic Charities runs, gives day laborers such as Mendoza a place to wait indoors for any number of construction contractors or landscapers to pick them up for a day's work.
The roughly 100 laborers who gather regularly in Freeport often work in outlying communities around Freeport, such as Merrick-Bellmore, East Meadow, Baldwin and Rockville Centre, though many said they've taken jobs as far as Long Beach, Valley Stream and even Manhattan.
Scott Stepp is public-affairs coordinator for Catholic Charities, the social-service arm of the Rockville Centre Diocese. Stepp said the Worklink Center serves two purposes. One, it gives day laborers a clean, safe place to wait for work, instead of in the Dunkin Donuts parking lot on Sunrise. Two, it eliminates potential traffic hazards outside Dunkin Donuts, as contractors many times zip in and out of the lot when they come to pick up or drop off laborers.
The center "is a far more dignified place for the workers to find a day's work," said Stepp.
Last year, New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer declared such hiring centers legal. The Worklink Center becomes the third on Long Island -- following sites in Glen Cove and Huntington Station -- and roughly the 30th across the nation, according to Catholic Charities.
Refuting Sachem Quality of Life charges, day laborers said they're mostly legal immigrants, with the Immigration and Naturalization Service papers to prove it. They aren't trying to cheat the government out of tax dollars. They're trying to earn a living and support their families.
Doing so as a day laborer is hard, however. Most struggle to get by, often eating only once a day and living in tiny, illegal apartments or in nearby, state-owned woodlands in Freeport and Merrick.
On the Friday that Mendoza spoke with the Herald in Spanish, he hadn't worked all week. When he does find a job, he's usually paid $80 per day, working eight to 14 hours. He performs numerous tasks, but mostly ripping up roofs, laying concrete and landscaping.
He supports four children, ages 11, 9, 8 and 2. His three oldest live with their grandmother in El Salvador, where Mendoza emigrated from four years ago. Mendoza now lives with his wife and baby in one room of a house in Roosevelt.
He sends money to El Salvador for his three children there. When he doesn't work for long stretches, he can't wire money, and his children don't eat.
Mendoza said he came to the United States to find a job. In El Salvador, there isn't work to be had, he said.
"America is good," Mendoza said in broken English.
Mendoza's story is repeated with numbing regularity among the day laborers. Rosendo Hernandez, 33, emigrated from Honduras. He has five children, only two of whom are in the United States with him and his wife. He sends money every other week for his three other children, who live with family in Honduras. On the recent Friday that Hernandez was interviewed, he hadn't worked for two weeks.
Hernandez said that, as far as he knows, he pays taxes when he performs a job, and that the contractor or landscaper is responsible for ensuring that taxes are deducted from his pay.
"The contractor is the one who decides how you will get paid, if it's by check" or in cash, said Hernandez in Spanish.
Carlos Canales is a labor and community organizer with The Workplace Project of Hempstead, a non-profit, social-service agency that assists low-income workers throughout Nassau County. The agency worked closely with Catholic Charities and the Village of Freeport in setting up the Worklink Center.
Canales said that not only do day laborers pay taxes, but they also contribute to the overall U.S. economy by accepting the types of grunt work that many Americans would not.
Speaking on behalf of day laborers, Canales said, "We're here to say to the community that we are here legally to work. We produce cheap. We are giving out to the country more than we receive."
Canales added that the day laborer's plight has become increasingly difficult in the wake of Sept. 11. After the terrorist attacks, people at all rungs of society lost their jobs, displacing many Americans from office to lower-paying, factory work, leaving fewer steady jobs for immigrant laborers.
Many immigrants, Canales said, have been forced into day labor because they cannot find regular work, particularly with poor English skills. That's only increased competition among day laborers, who are seeing the workload in construction and landscaping shrink, as people spend less on their homes in an economy that only continues to spiral downward.
Sachem and
the other side
A group of Farmingville residents founded Sachem Quality of Life in 1998 to oppose a day-laborer hiring center that Catholic Charities had proposed in their community.
Sachem members contend that illegal immigrants use day-laborer hiring centers, making the centers themselves unlawful. Thus, they say, the Worklink center should be shut down.
Sachem argued its case successfully in Farmingville. The Suffolk County Legislature had passed a measure allowing for a hiring center there, only to have it shot down by County Executive Robert Gaffney under mounting pressure by Sachem, among other groups, said Stepp, the Catholic Charities spokesperson.
Sachem member Joann Russo, of Farmingdale, said of hiring centers during the recent Freeport protest: "The sites don't work. They don't get the men off the street."
Russo said that contractors know day laborers at hiring sites expect a prevailing wage, so they will seek out workers who hang out on street corners and are willing to accept lower pay to find work.
During the week of its opening, the Freeport center attracted up to 20 laborers per day, Catholic Charities reported. Many workers continued to return to the Dunkin Donuts. Catholic Charities, however, was reaching out to them, passing out fliers alerting laborers that the center had opened, said Stepp.
Sachem member Fred Reindl, of Deer Park, opposes day labor in general, because construction contractors and landscapers often pay their workers in cash, giving no benefits and paying no taxes and Social Security to the government. The practice, he said, is illegal and gives the dishonest contractor or landscaper a huge competitive advantage over honest employers.
Reindl, who owns a woodworking factory in Great Neck that employs nine people, most of whom are immigrants, said numerous business owners could hire only day laborers, but do not, and pay benefits and taxes on their workers. "Should I, as an employer, fire all my employees who have been working for me for years" and replace them with day laborers? said Reindl. "I ask anyone with a conscience, what should I do?"
Catholic Charities' mission
Stepp said Catholic Charities set up the Worklink Center to help immigrant workers with few marketable skills and little hope of surviving in America. Catholic Charities sees the site as part of its mission to aid people in need.
Catholic Charities does not ask whether the day laborers are legal immigrants or not, Stepp said. "We are neither the INS nor the IRS," he said. "Are some of the workers undocumented? We don't know. It's not our job to ask really. What we do ask [the day laborers] is: Are you OK? Is your family OK? Do you need food? Do your kids need food? The trailer is a way for the workers to access other Catholic Charities services."
Through the Worklink Center, day laborers can get food for their families through pantries at Catholic churches across Long Island. They can also connect with Catholic Charities' Immigrant Services Department in Amityville, which offers legal counseling and citizenship-preparation classes.
Freeport Mayor Glacken could not be reached to comment about this story. Patricia Murphy, the village spokesperson, faxed over a statement about the center, which both Catholic Charities and the village issued.
It reads in part: "We hope this center will be a model for the kind of equitable, tangible public-private collaboration that is necessary for the success of such sites....
"The center will operate according to clear rules of conduct and a system for assigning labor that the workers will develop themselves. A Catholic Charities employee will serve as the center's full-time coordinator, working with a Community Advisory Board" that is being formed.
Meanwhile, Marvin Mendoza and many other day laborers like him hope for steady jobs, he said in Spanish. Day labor, Mendoza said, "is difficult. It's not enough to live, but we have no choice."
