Day Laborers form Worker Cooperative

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Day Laborers form Worker Cooperative(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)“You see a contractor managing a job one day and you think ‘Why not me?’” said Carlos Diaz. The day laborer was one of several dozen people gathered at Don Juan’s restaurant in Mount Pleasant on a weekend evening in April, to form a worker-owned cooperative, seeking to break away from the risk and uncertainty typical of their jobs on local construction sites. “I don’t like being dependent (for my job) on a mediator or a subcontractor,” explained Carlos Castillo, who emigrated from Peru two years ago when university strikes interrupted his studies in mechatronics. Castillo and others said they don’t like waiting around in a parking lot for a job. After he was paid only a week’s wages for a two-week job, an instance of wage theft that is common among day laborers, Castillo got in touch with Arturo Griffiths, an organizer with DC Jobs with Justice, which runs the day laborer group Union de Trabajadores. It was out of Griffiths’ experience with this group that he decided to help workers form a cooperative, which offers the advantages of looking for work as a group, signing contracts with contractors directly, and finding work instead of waiting for it to find the workers. The biggest battle for the workers may be overcoming their own lack of confidence, says Ajowa Ifateyo, a founding board member of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives. Too many assume that “You’ve got to have somebody ‘smart’ to be the manager, or boss,” she says. But, she says, “We’ve all had jobs where the workers knew how to do the work better than their bosses, right?” Diaz, for one, would agree with that. Most of the contractors he’s worked with “just arrange the work and collect the money,” he said. “I’ve known contractors who don’t know how to cut different colors of paint correctly,” pointing to a colored stripe running along the wall of his own living room as an example. The budding cooperative has a long way to go, but the workers seem ready and JWJ’s Griffiths is ready to push ahead. “You have to build as you go,” he says. “You can’t wait til it’s perfect.” His long-term vision includes a network of small worker co-ops which help incubate other groups as more people learn the benefits of working for themselves. And the workers organizing the coop see themselves as playing an important role in their wider community. “There are a lot of people who are capable of being many things, but sometimes they just need the support, or an example,” said Diaz. “Sometimes they just need a hand.” - report by Karina Stenquist, an editor of DC MicCheck, Occupy DC’s publication; photo of DC JwJ supporters of the Union de Trabajadores at Supreme Court rally against SB1070 on April 25, 2012 by Julia Kann

 

Powered by Orchid Suites
Orchid ver. 4.7.6.