They dug too deep

From the Daily News:

A seemingly idyllic backyard patio behind a landmark West Village townhouse was hiding a sinister secret before an eagle-eyed neighbor got the owner busted by the city’s Buildings Department, officials said.

Lush grassy carpeting, white patio furniture and landscaping rocks actually masked an illegal excavation that reached as deep as 7 feet in some areas, sources told the Daily News.

Inspectors responding to a complaint at 35 Perry St. on Monday were shocked to find the fake floor suspended canopy-style over the dangerous ditch at the base of the 1852 structure, sources said.

The covert crater not only undermined the underpinning of the four-story building but also compromised the foundation of a wall shared with 37 Perry St., city engineers found. The building owner didn’t have an excavation permit.

Inspectors cited the owner for various safety violations, including lack of guardrails. They also found day laborers hiding in the house and a moving truck rented from Enterprise used to smuggle out debris, sources said.

There's no place like home

From the Daily News:

I was 10 years old when I crossed over the border into Arizona with my parents in 2005.

We moved to Jackson Heights. My parents, Roberta and Salvador Alarcon, left my younger brother with my grandparents in Veracruz.

In New York, my mother worked at a Laundromat and my dad got a job in construction. He built and demolished houses in Manhattan and Queens. His boss exploited him. My father worked for 12 to 14 hours a day for $80. He had no idea you could sue for lost wages. He was always afraid of being deported.

In 2011, the family was forced to move from a two-bedroom apartment to a one-bedroom. At one point, my father injured his ankle. He was afraid to go to a hospital. In 2012, my grandmother passed away from cancer. My parents decided to go back.

My parents now have a small store in the town. My father is now working on farming and my mother is taking care of the store.

They are happy. But obviously, it’s not the same. Over here, they had cell phones and money to go to restaurants once a month. Now, they don’t have the money and have to work harder to get those things.

I don't understand how they had money for cell phones and restaurants with mom working off the books at a laundromat and dad raking in $80/day. Sounds like Mexico was a better option. And in fact, more Mexicans are returning than arriving these days.

New day laborer center to open in Queens

NY Times

From the Daily News:

The city will kick in half a million dollars to open and expand job centers for day laborers, City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said Monday.

The centers serve as hiring halls for mostly immigrant laborers who have traditionally gathered on street corners waiting for work, instead providing a safe spot where contractors can show up to hire people for construction, roofing, and other jobs.

The $500,000 grant will go towards expanding an existing center in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and opening new ones in Queens and Staten Island.

“Unfortunately day laborers often have to deal with harsh conditions and exploitive labor practices,” Mark-Viverito said. “A lot of times these workers are seen as dispensable. And they’re actually indispensable.”

They also help laborers negotiate a fair wage with bosses, in addition to connecting them with legal advice if they’re ripped off and offering training in skills like plumbing and electrical work.

Hurricane a windfall for day laborers

From the NY Times:

For a population accustomed to scraping by, Hurricane Sandy has been a boon, conjuring up demolition and construction work that has been mostly absent since the housing market’s collapse and providing a spike in remittances to families in Mexico, Central America and South America.

These mostly Hispanic workers, some of whom are in the country illegally, have suddenly become a ubiquitous and indispensable presence in seaside communities in New York and New Jersey, where residents who might once have spurned hiring them are racing to make their homes livable again as soon as possible. Despite the influx of volunteers — sometimes regarded as competitors by the day laborers — there is so much demand for their services that even women who have typically made a living as domestics are gathering on street corners and in front of hardware stores to help with the grueling work.

Standing on a corner of 69th Street in Woodside, Queens, dozens of men waited in the early morning cold for contractors’ trucks to pass by. Each time a car stopped, the men would sprint to the window. After a brief negotiation — $15 an hour was the going rate, though some agreed to work for less — a few would climb inside and speed off.

Because so much of the initial cleanup work was unskilled, day laborers sometimes had to compete against volunteers. But a day laborer at a gathering spot in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, who declined to give his full name and who worked for $10 an hour in the Rockaways and Red Hook, said, “Sometimes they need someone faster than volunteers.”

$85,000 in grant money for this?

From the NY Times:

Tania Bruguera has eaten dirt, hung a dead lamb from her neck and served trays of cocaine to a gallery audience, all in the name of art. She has shown her work at the Venice Biennale, been feted at the Pompidou Center in Paris and landed a Guggenheim fellowship.

But now she is sharing a tiny apartment in Corona, Queens, with five illegal immigrants and their six children, including a newborn, while scraping by on the minimum wage, without health insurance.

She has not fallen on hard times. Ms. Bruguera is performing a yearlong art piece meant to improve the image of immigrants and highlight their plight. And she is bringing her high-concept brand of provocation to a low-wattage precinct of taco stands and auto-body shops, where the neighbors have responded with varying degrees of curiosity, amusement and befuddlement.

I was going to just make fun of this, since it's a really stupid "art" project. But then I read this: Ms. Bruguera has turned the space, a former beauty supply store, into the headquarters for her new advocacy group-cum-art project, Immigrant Movement International, using about $85,000 from Creative Time, a nonprofit arts group, and the Queens Museum of Art.

She's getting grants from not-for-profits funded by our tax dollars, even though it says in the article that she's a woman of means who could have funded this experiment herself. How generous of us!

Her roommates, especially an out-of-work Ecuadorean laborer, do not know what to make of her. “I explained to them four times what I’m doing already,” she said. “They don’t get it. They’re not very excited.”

Looks like I have something in common with Ecuadorean day laborers in Corona...

Violent day laborers plague Hart Playground

From the Times Newsweekly:

The issue of day laborers at Edward Hart Playground has taken a turn for the violent, an area property owner told the 108th Precinct Community Council at its Mar. 29 meeting at Sunnyside Community Services.

The owner of an apartment complex located adjacent to the playground, at 69th Street and 37th Avenue in Woodside, brought the 108th Precinct’s attention to ongoing problems with day laborers congregating at the park.

The workers’ plight as been an ongoing issue in the area, as they often stay in the park to receive aid from a mobile kitchen supplied by St. John’s Bread and Life and aid from other nonprofit groups. Residents have complained that they make the playground unsafe for children.

According to the landlord, however, the situation has begun to deteriorate; he claimed to have been attacked by one of the laborers with a hammer two months ago, and other tenants have allegedly being harassed and even mugged.

The situation has become so bad, he stated, that he is unable to rent out units and was successfully sued by a tenant for failing to provide a safe environment.

“They constantly harass me from 6 o’clock in the morning, my tenants’ children can’t play in the park. It’s become a disaster,” he told Capt. Donald Powers, the precinct’s commander. “Lately, it’s escalating a lot.”

[Powers] told the property owner that the NYPD is not allowed to question a person on their immigration status, and that they have “the right to assemble peacefully” inside the park.

Another resident came forward to pin the blame on city government for failing to address the situation.

“We do know, for a fact, that your hands are tied,” she told Powers. “It is absolutely the mayor’s office.”

Photo from New York Globe

Is this the final straw for Huang?

From the Daily News:

The widow of a 26-year-old man killed Monday in a wall collapse at an Elmhurst construction site had some choice words Wednesday for her late husband's boss.

"I hope he rots," said Mireya Alvarado, 25, who is six months pregnant with Hedilberto Sanchez's third child.

Sanchez's boss was developer Tommy Huang - no stranger to controversy in Queens and infamous for trashing the landmarked RKO Keith's Theatre in Flushing.

The owner of the company left the scene of the accident when he realized the extent of the carnage caused by the collapse, according to Alvarado and Sanchez's three brothers, who were also working at the construction site Monday.

It was not immediately clear whether that man was Tommy Huang. Huang did not return calls yesterday seeking comment.

The city Buildings Department is investigating whether there was any wrongdoing that caused the collapse, sources said.

But Alvarado said she knows who to blame and she wants Huang to pay for what happened to Hedilburto.

"I want justice. He left me alone with my children," she said, clutching her stomach and choking back tears.

Alvarado said Huang forced Sanchez, an undocumented immigrant worker from Mexico, to work 10 hours a day, six days a week, regardless of the weather, for a paltry wage.

Acquittal in Brooklyn construction death

From the NY Times:

The owner of a Brooklyn construction site who was charged with manslaughter after a day laborer was killed at his site two years ago was acquitted on all counts on Wednesday.

The owner, William Lattarulo, was charged with several felony counts in June 2008 after the worker, Lauro Ortega, was crushed to death by dirt and debris as he was digging a trench at a site in East New York where Mr. Lattarulo was building a new coin laundry.

The death occurred as the city, in the midst of a construction boom, was still reeling from a series of high-profile crane collapses and construction-related deaths. Manslaughter charges in construction cases are hard to prove, but the Brooklyn district attorney’s office had hoped the charges against Mr. Lattarulo would send a message to other builders that slipshod construction could result in prosecution.

In addition to finding Mr. Lattarulo not guilty on the manslaughter charge, a State Supreme Court jury in Brooklyn acquitted him of criminally negligent homicide and two misdemeanor counts of reckless endangerment after an 11-day trial.

“This was the city’s test case,” said Mr. Lattarulo’s lawyer, Stephen Mahler. “They were going to make a poster boy out of my client for all the building collapses that happen in the city every year.” Mr. Mahler added that his client was “elated and very relieved.”

But Mr. Lattarulo still faces two civil lawsuits: one filed by the victim’s family, and another by a family that lived next door to the site in a house that eventually had to be knocked down, Mr. Mahler said.

Hart Playground issue still a hot one

From CBS 2:

The Lamo kids are all under 3 years old, and their mother says men wandering in and out of the playground, including the crowd of day laborers that gathers outside the gates, make her nervous. Many start showing up at 6 in the morning and wait until 7 at night hoping someone will stop and offer them work.

"I see so many guys, who are workers outside or who are drunkards. They sleep on the benches right there. They sleep and lie down there and I don't feel it's safe for the kids," Ugan Lamo said.

Joe Conley, with Community Board 2, said neighbors are fed-up with people using the bathroom and other areas of the playground as a home base.

"People using the restrooms, washing their clothes, showering, during the summertime … a lot of alcohol in the park, people passing out using the benches," Conley said.

So what's wrong with that? This is part of the vibrant diversity of Queens and therefore everyone should want this to happen at their local park. (If you don't, it means you are racist.)

From the Daily News:

Some neighbors aren't pleased about hundreds of day laborers hanging out around Hart Playground and using the bathrooms there. And they want the charities that feed them, such as St. John's Bread and Life, to go elsewhere.

City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer met with concerned locals and Bread and Life officials last week to discuss solutions. The Sunnyside Democrat is to meet with the charity again on Friday.

Butler said his group would be willing to find a new location, but only "if an appropriate site was given to us."

He added that the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs had originally found this site for the charity.

Why the hell did the Mayor's Office suggest a public playground for this activity? Playgrounds are meant for kids to play in, not for adults to congregate and loiter. They couldn't find any better spot? Or did they want to stick it to Woodside for some reason?

Van Bramer takes on Hart Playground problem

From the Times Ledger:

New City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer (D-Sunnyside) is about to wade into the dispute between neighbors, day laborers and a Catholic charity food pantry at Woodside’s Hart Playground.

The signs placed at the entrance to the city-owned park reiterating in several languages that adults without children are not allowed in the playground have not kept the workers out of the children’s area, neighbors complained last week at a public meeting held by Van Bramer at the Woodside Library.

A mobile soup kitchen run by the Brooklyn-based St. John’s Bread & Life stops at the park between 61st and 69th streets and 37th Avenue every Tuesday. The park is a magnet for immigrant workers because it is right next to an off-ramp from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that allows trucks to pick them up with ease.

Neighbors said their gripe was not that Bread & Life was feeding the men, just that they did not want the weekly practice to occur at the playground, which is preferred by the charity because of its restroom facilities.

“I’m Irish Catholic, I think it’s a wonderful thing to feed the poor, feed the hungry,” said Woodside resident Ken Cullen. “I’m also a social worker. I know how it’s done. It is not done in a playground in a residential neighborhood.”

He warned that he had seen between five and 10 men he had assessed as sex offenders while working as a forensic social worker in Manhattan congregating around the park.

Homeless shelters take in Illegals

From the Queens Courier:

Bearing the brunt of unstable earnings, every day is based on luck for the jornaleros, or day laborers, who, at the crack of dawn, wait along the sidewalks of Queens for the next passing van to stop – vans that carry the opportunity of employment.

But also each day they face the uncertainty about whether they’ll get work in the sectors that will have them – construction, gardening, cleaning or moving and with the downslide in the economy, this also means many have no place to call home.

The New York City Department of Homeless Services (DHS) does not have specific statistics available on the number of homeless day laborers, according to spokesperson Heather Janik. Janik said that DHS extends services to anyone experiencing homeless regardless of immigration status or country of origin.

DHS has begun “exploring strategies to clarify an individual’s immigration status, as well as helping them obtain ID and fee waivers for documentation,” said Janik.

The estimated day laborer population in New York City is 8,283, and almost a third is homeless, according to a 2006 report called “La Esquina (The Corner): Day laborers on the Margins of New York’s Formal Economy.”

The report states that most day laborers are Latino, but there are informal hiring sites that are predominantly Irish, Sikh, Haitian, and Chinese. Certain sites have a large concentration of women... who search for day jobs as housekeepers, babysitters, or janitors. Many report experiencing sexual harassment, and the most common abuse for all is nonpayment of wages.

Many day laborers suffer from overcrowding in homes, pooling their resources together to live in cramped apartments. However, an increasing number have turned to living in the streets because they cannot afford to pay for a single room. In January, a homeless day laborer was found dead in Staten Island, frozen in the cold.

So what happens when they are no longer "doing the jobs Americans won't do"? Lose your life or go into a homeless shelter that we pay for? It's great living a sanctuary city isn't it?

Imagine if we went to a foreign country to live without permission and then became a burden on society. Funny how you never hear about other countries that condone and welcome that.

A new approach to day laborer problem

From the Times Ledger:

Tensions between neighbors, day laborers and a mobile soup kitchen appear to be on the wane at Woodside’s Hart Playground, where the city has begun taking measures to gently discourage adults from using the playground area while leaving them use of the on-site restrooms.

The issue reached Community Board 2 in October 2009, when Chairman Joseph Conley told board members that the day laborers, who gather at the playground because it is next to the on-ramp to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, were using the restrooms to do their laundry and were in the playground area where adults are not allowed without children.

“We’re expecting there should be some improvement on that soon,” said Conley at a meeting Feb. 4.

The city Parks Department has agreed to close one of the gates at the playground, which also abuts a busy subway stop, and to put up new signs.

“At the request of the local precinct, some of the civic groups and the community, we all agreed we will close this gate,” said Queens Parks Commissioner Dorothy Lewandowski, referring to the entrance by the subway station. “All the public has to come in on one location. ... It gives [better] control of playground.”

The new signs list the same parks regulations as before in Spanish and Chinese as well as English, Lewandowski said.

Other new signs can be found inside the men’s restroom, telling patrons the facilities are for public use and adults cannot sit or loiter inside.

“We’re trying to be as considerate as possible and let the men outside, if they’re unfortunate enough to not have found work yet, still use the bathroom,” Lewandowski said.

Why are we spending money on this?

From the Times Ledger:

The city Department of Youth and Community Development has identified the recipients of three $200,000 stimulus grants designed to help Queens’ immigrant day laborers.

The department announced last week that the Make the Road New York organization will receive two of the grants and the MinKwon Center will receive one, which they must use to help first-generation immigrants hone their employment skills, become familiar with their rights and more.

Day laborers are some of the city’s lowest-paid, most neglected workers, and they often have little knowledge of their rights or the means to improve their employment situations.

“We definitely think the neighborhoods, Jackson Heights and Woodside, Queens, are a crisis center in the economic collapse,” said Saduf Syal, project coordinator for Make the Road New York’s community workforce project. “Day laborers congregate in these areas, often with no knowledge of their rights, the proper wages or safety precautions. So, yes, the need is definitely there.”

Make the Road New York will facilitate programs to offer services to these under-served workers in Jackson Heights and Woodside, while the MinKwon Center will focus its efforts on helping workers in the Flushing area.

The grants are three of six being disbursed throughout the city through the economic stimulus package — two are also being distributed to groups in Brooklyn and one will be awarded in Staten Island.

The MinKwon Center is a rare organization in that its work targeted low-wage immigrant workers most often ends up benefiting Asian Americans, unlike Make the Road’s, which often reaches mainly Hispanic populations.

Are we checking for green cards before spending tax money on this?

Illegal aliens sleeping in LI woods

HUNTINGTON STATION, N.Y. (AP) -- A dozen Latino day laborers living in the woods of a New York suburb can't stay in the local county's long-term emergency housing because they are undocumented.

Suffolk County officials said Friday that the legal status of the men living in tents in the woods of Huntington Station makes them ineligible for county housing.

Department of Social Services Deputy Commissioner Ed Hernandez says the state doesn't reimburse the county for housing undocumented immigrants.

In recent days, the temperatures have plummeted on Long Island. On Friday, the high was about 32 degrees.

Hernandez says he doesn't know where the men should live.

One of them, Nino Bonilla, says a tent in the woods is his only option.

Many day laborers are now homeless

From the NY Times:

Carlos Ruano was down to his last $50 when his landlord kicked him out in September because he could no longer pay rent. He sent the money to his wife and children in Guatemala and spent the night riding the E train, which has a nickname among his fellow day laborers in Woodside, Queens: “hotel ambulante,” Spanish for roving hotel.

Mr. Ruano, 38, who had drawn his living from 69th Street and Broadway for six years, has been on the streets since. He and other hard-luck day laborers have slept wherever they can: in the emergency room at Elmhurst Hospital Center, in unfinished buildings abandoned by bankrupt developers and under bridges along the freight railroad tracks that slice through western Queens, where dirty mattresses and work boots lay on the rocky ground one recent morning.

With their isolation and day-to-day existence, the laborers are perhaps the most invisible and hardest-to-reach victims of the recession, advocates and city officials say.

No one knows for sure how many have become homeless since the downturn brought construction projects to a virtual standstill and sapped them of jobs that once paid as much as $200 a day. Most of them are illegal immigrants who may be on the streets one day and off the next, depending on their work.

The rules of the shelter system do not suit them, they said. They might be placed too far from the job pickup site or miss curfew if a job runs too late or is too far from the shelter.

Afraid that their immigration status might be exposed — outreach workers might ask for identification, though the shelters are open to everyone — they say they would rather sleep outside.

I guess this was written in response to the outrage at the soup kitchen that's been set up at Hart Park. Your heart is supposed to bleed for them instead of being pissed off about how they've ruined our quality of life.

Federal stimulus money to help day laborers

From the Daily News:

Beginning next month, day laborers will be eligible for job training and social service programs in three Queens neighborhoods under a new $1.2 million initiative paid for with federal stimulus dollars.

But advocates say they won't be satisfied with anything less than full-fledged immigration centers.

"The city is doing a great job trying to create these kinds of services for our community," said Ligia Guallpa of the Latin American Workers Project, a Jackson Heights-based nonprofit. But, she added, "the city needs to consider creating real, sustainable job centers."

The new services will be available for low-wage immigrants in Jackson Heights, Woodside and Flushing starting on Jan. 4. The city Department of Youth and Community Development also will launch two similar programs in Brooklyn and one on Staten Island.

But Guallpa said she would rather see the city invest in permanent job centers that can educate and train workers and advocate on behalf of them. She is worried about what will happen to the initiative when the stimulus money runs out in September.

Day laborers routinely contend with intimidation from local residents, merchants and police, she said. And with the poor economy, there's less work for the immigrants, who often get stiffed on their pay, she added.

The lunatics are now officially running the asylum, folks. With unemployment for Americans being what it is, this misuse of federal stimulus money is simply astounding.

Photo from the NY Times

Woodside residents fed up with day laborers

To Queens Crapper:

We here in Woodside are having a really terrible time trying to oust St. John's Bread & Life program from handing out free food to day workers (non-residents) for hours in front of our kids' playground. Needless to say, they invade the playground & bathrooms; the good-for-nothing attendant does nothing. She's even been seen on the free food line with the derelicts. This is a disgrace for a decently paid city employee! The nun who manages the mobile soup kitchen (Sister Kathy Byrnes) refuses to move her location even a few blocks away from the playground so as to spare the children this creepy intrusion. We might as well take the kids to the Bowery Mission for their play dates. The St. John's program is run by a bunch of sanctimonious, smug assholes. They never consulted with Woodside residents about coming here and they don't give a crap about our children! Their intrusion into our neighborhood is unwanted and unneeded. None of the residents ever take food from them. The 108 precinct will remove these men if we bombard them with calls but will not station an officer at the playground. Not even a rookie or an auxiliary cop. The community board is completely weak and feckless when comes to this matter as they are in all things concerning Woodside. This "charity" has ruined the quality of life here by attracting hundreds of these guys. By their own count, they feed 350 men on a Tuesday morning (9:30 to 11:30). HELP!!! Fellow residents, please call TONY BUTLER at St. John's program at (718)574-0058 ext.118 and tell him this is an unwelcome intrusion into our neighborhood!

No way Jose is going away

From Interactive Journalism:

Jose arrived in the U.S. seven years ago from El Salvador. He walked from his home country to Mexico City, and then to the border, where he crossed by himself.

Jose is a day laborer. He works in construction whenever a contractor needs him, which means, in this economy, that he may stay without working for two weeks or more.

Currently he lives in a rented room in the Bronx, but there were times when he didn’t have money to pay any rent. During those days he slept in parks or shelters.

This is where the American Dream is possible, people said. Jose is skeptical about it. Nevertheless, going back to El Salvador is not an option. “Things are even worse over there.”

Day laborer news roundup

From the Indypendent:

In recent months some local residents have complained to the police of the day laborers presence around the Park. On several occasions police have removed the men, who use the park’s restrooms and benches during and after their meal, from the park.

In one incident on July 17th, 2009, the NYPD removed several men eating their Tuesday morning meals from the after receiving a 911 call claiming that men were urinating in public. Brynes responded in a statement saying, “since I have been coming to this park the last two years, I have never seen anyone urinate in the park”.

Hart Park has been a longtime flash point of between some local residents who complain that large number of men gather around the park, and the day laborers who who congregate in search for a job. 17 months into the economic downturn, Byrnes says that she has seen the number of meals she serves at her only Queens stop increase by 40-45%.

From the Queens Courier:

Two Latino workers claim that York Restoration Corporation, a construction company based in Long Island City, owes them back wages since 2008 for work performed on luxury high-rises in Manhattan. The undocumented workers, along with others seeking workers’ rights, have gathered twice – on May 22 and on Friday, November 6 – in front of the company’s building at 47-51 33rd Street to protest.

The two workers, Espinoza and Bustillo, said they worked without pay for two months before quitting and have also not received overtime pay. Each said they have proof they worked for York though they got paid in cash.

York’s attorney, Brian Goldberg, said he repeatedly asked for such proof, but has never obtained anything.

Goldberg called the protests aimed at York’s corporation “unfounded” because, as a general contractor, York has no employees on an hourly basis.

York considers this protest a “personal insult” to him.

“I am an honest man, and I have never fled from anyone,” he said, noting that he does not know Bustillo and Espinoza. He said he tried to call MRNY on several occasions, but never got through to anyone.

“It seems to me that this organization [MRNY] organizes these protests just for the press, photos, and publicity,” said York.

As for the DOL’s investigation into the company’s unfair labor practices, York and his attorney consider it closed.

Marie-Elena Fazio, DOL’s liaison in the division of labor standards in charge of investigating the complaint filed in March, spoke to York’s attorney Goldberg a few times in May, and told him that she would call back if there was an issue.

“She never called back,” said Goldberg, “so I’m assuming there is no issue.”

NYPD cracks down on day laborers loitering in park

From the Indypendent:

Nearly every day along Broadway and 69th Street in Jackson Heights, Queens, day laborers — mostly undocumented immigrants — line up and wait for someone to come by and offer them a job. On Tuesday mornings, jobs or no jobs, day laborers gather nearby in Hart Park to chow down on a free hot meal provided by St. John’s Bread and Life program.

But on Tuesday, Sept. 22, the day laborers got a different type of treat.

According to witnesses, their meal was interrupted when the New York Police Department arrived to sweep the more than 80 laborers out of the local public park.

Roberto Meneses, president of Day Laborers United, said the police kicked them out, claiming only adults with children were allowed inside. He believes the police were responding to complaints by local residents, concerned about the growing number of day laborers in and near the park.

New York City Department of Parks and Recreation signs posted on the fences read, “Playground Rules Prohibit: Adults Except in the Company of Children.”