Black-market day laborers face a stark situation

Like hungry birds, the men cluster in knots on the frigid parking lot and flock to the cars of prospective employers. Many wear knit caps over wind-burnt ears and layers of T-shirts against the cold.

Hollering in Spanish and raising their hands to be noticed, they crowd driver-side windows, desperate for a modest day's pay from a cost-cutting contractor or frugal homeowner.

At the Home Depot lot on Roosevelt Boulevard in Crescentville, these day laborers - most of them immigrants, many undocumented - are out every day from sunup through afternoon.

While "will work for food" is as old as time, the collapsing economy has turned the parking lots outside some home centers, paint shops, truck depots and like venues into ersatz job marts. This one took root with a handful of people three years ago when the home-building bubble burst. It grew exponentially, regulars say, to as many as 120 daily in the summer.

Partisans on the pro and anti sides of the immigration debate are almost always at odds, but on this they agree: The parking-lot supplicants are an increasingly visible part of a complex global equation.

It begins with subsistence employment in their home countries, draws them to America for economic opportunity via often illegal channels, undercuts local wages, and now has them toughing it out in a tightfisted, high-risk black market of untaxed transactions. They can earn $100 a day, or get stiffed at gunpoint.

"The 'shape-up' " - as the pick-and-choose routine is known - "is an enduring institution that different ethnic groups have passed through at different periods in American history," said Janice Fine, an assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University and an expert on low-wage workers. "A pretty steady bottom rung of the economy has been occupied by new immigrants."

But the stakes are different now, given the volatile mix of rising unemployment and ever-more-angry debate over immigration control.

The men in the parking lots are predominantly foreign-born Latinos, whose unemployment rate last year rose faster than that for white, black, Asian or U.S.-born Latino populations in America, according to a report last week by the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington.

By gathering so publicly in search of work, undocumented workers risk being targeted by federal immigration agents, said Chris Newman of the National Day Labor Organizing Network, an advocacy umbrella group. So far, federal raids have been rare. "More common," he said, "are efforts by cities to . . . crack down."

Fifteen states, including New Jersey but not Pennsylvania, have established "worker centers" as orderly junctions where immigrant day laborers and contractors can do business. Where the centers exist, police have clamped down on job-seekers who solicit anywhere else.

In Philadelphia, catch-as-catch-can rules.

Home Depot has a policy of "non-solicitation" inside stores and on parking lots, corporate spokeswoman Jen King said.

However, contractors and homeowners who hire the laborers often buy the needed supplies at the store. As a practical matter, the company seems to tolerate them outside many of its 1,971 outlets, provided they don't congregate at entrances.

"Some people swear by them" for strenuous outdoor jobs, said a Home Depot employee, speaking anonymously. But because the workers are strangers and often undocumented, he said, homeowners are less likely to use them indoors.

When the weather is warm, 80 percent of local Home Depot hopefuls get work, often in landscaping, the parking-lot regulars say. In the harshness of winter, fewer than 30 percent do.

One slushy day last week, a few dozen were on the lot, including Luis Illesca, 42, a blue-collar man from his plaster-dusted boots to paint-stained pants to callused hands.

Compact and muscular, with jet-black hair in a pony tail, Illesca came legally as a visitor to the United States from Argentina in 2001 and is now here illegally, having overstayed his visa. To sustain himself and send money home to his ex-wife and two children, 11 and 8, he has worked as a farmhand, house remodeler, car-wash attendant, assembly-line baker.

Now, with steady work scarce, the Home Depot lot is where he meets employers who take a chance on his labor. And he takes a chance on them.

Illesca considers himself lucky if he gets two days a week of do-anything work, paid in cash. The going rate is about $10 an hour, 30 percent less than he used to earn.

Last week on the lot, Illesca got a job installing a front door and storm door for a Cheltenham homeowner - two days, $350. He split the money with the 59-year-old worker who helped him. That man, born in Guatemala and now a naturalized U.S. citizen, said in an interview that he had worked for years as a valet parker but quit when the Chinatown garage that employed him was sold and his pay cut.

For a time, he painted houses. He applied for a steady job at a Coca-Cola plant and as a cleaner at Philadelphia International Airport but worried he might wait forever.

Four months ago, he started showing up at the parking lot and has gotten jobs doing demolition for a Center City condo renovation and other spot tasks. Because he doesn't pay taxes on the cash he earns, he spoke only on condition of anonymity.

Critics of undocumented immigrants' black-market labor say it depreciates wages for all legal workers.

"American readers are bombarded on a daily basis with the latest illegal-alien sob stories . . . while the most important part of the story is conspicuously absent. . . . Honest employers who hire Americans and legal immigrants have found themselves unable to compete," William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration, a political action committee in Raleigh, N.C., wrote in a commentary circulated last month on the Internet.

Labor unions, whose raison d'etre is to maintain their members' wages and benefits, generally oppose the undocumented workers as well.

Last summer, Illesca said, he and three colleagues were renovating a pizzeria in the Art Museum area when a union whose name he doesn't recall showed up, threw up a picket line, and threatened to call immigration officials.

"We ran away," said Illesca, who quietly returned to the job a few days later.

The threat of being reported is used to cheat them, too.

Owed money by an immigrant contractor, Illesca and another unpaid worker went to his house. "If I pay you guys," Illesca said the builder had told him, "my wife won't be able to eat."

Then the contractor said that if the two didn't leave immediately, he'd call police.

Illesca's monthly expenses include $50 for domestic and international phone calls, $275 for the room he rents inside another immigrant's North Philadelphia house, and $150 for his family in Argentina, when he can spare it. It's a tight budget for someone averaging $200 a week, but still better, he said, than his earning potential in Argentina.

Social-service providers who work with the day laborers say the largest number come from Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala, followed by the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Argentina.

In a survey of about 20 workers conducted six months ago by Juntos, a Latino advocacy group based in South Philadelphia, the most frequently offered jobs were construction, painting, cleaning and landscaping, and 93 percent of the respondents were trying to support three or more people on earnings of less than $100 on the days they got work.

"You can make the assumption that day laborers depress wages. I don't disagree," Juntos director Peter Bloom said. "But why is that happening? And whose interest is served" with cheap labor?

"Why scapegoat immigrants when there are issues we can work on? Does everybody deserve a decent wage for a day's work? I think they do," Bloom said. "It's hard to scam the system by standing out in the cold."