Day Laborers form Worker Cooperative
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
(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