It Worker Day Laborer Funny Week
For Day Laborers, Used to Scraping By, Hurricane Creates a Wealth of Work
The day after the storm, Manuel Sinchi, like some other New Yorkers, gathered a few friends, hopped on his bicycle and headed down to badly stricken Coney Island to volunteer his services.
The next day, however, he started offering his services at his usual rate of $15 an hour.
A day laborer for whom making a living in recent years has meant often pointless idling on street corners for increasingly hard-to-get construction work, Mr. Sinchi said that owners of houses ravaged by Hurricane Sandy were now searching him out seven days a week. In the first weeks after the storm, he performed work that required muscle and a strong back, hauling waterlogged sofas and broken refrigerators out of flooded basements, stripping mold-infested walls and sweeping away mounds of sand from front yards. But, as homeowners turned to rebuilding, he has performed more skilled jobs, installing new wallboard, wood floors and bathroom tiles.
There has been so much demand that he was able to buy his two sons in Ecuador a computer, bicycles and new shoes.
"While we have lots of sorrow for those who lost everything, at the same time Sandy has done us a favor by creating jobs that were not there," Mr. Sinchi said, speaking in Spanish.
His tale of finding fortune along the streets of ruined homes and upended lives is similar to those of hundreds of day laborers in New York City and its coastal suburbs. 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.
"Day laborers are like first responders to this crisis," said Ligia M. Guallpa, director of the Workers Justice Project, which operates a shack alongside a shopping plaza in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where day laborers gather and contractors and homeowners come to hire them. Before the storm, fewer than 15 workers a week were sent out on jobs. Now that number has grown to 45.
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In the first week after the storm hit, homeowners were desperate for help getting their lives back to something approaching normal. Some day laborers like Carmelo Hernandez, 46, a Mexican immigrant and tile installer, even bought headlamps so they could work at night, so great was the demand.
More recently, some workers said that jobs had slowed as cleaning up shifted to rebuilding, which had prompted homeowners to turn to licensed professionals for skilled tasks like plumbing, carpentry and electrical work. But other laborers said they expected the volume of work to pick up when homeowners received money from their insurance companies or from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
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.
One of them, Pedro Cabrera, 28, who is from Mexico, had worked 10 straight days in the Rockaways. Even though one homeowner vanished without paying him, he had made enough to buy new gloves to work in the wet and freezing buildings. Some owners told him to take anything he found, since it was all headed for the trash anyway — even a ring that he was able to pawn for $200 at a jewelry store. Still, it was painful, he said, being watched by a family whose hard-earned belongings he was throwing into the garbage.
"They were in shock because they lost all the stuff they probably saved for all their lives," Mr. Cabrera said. "I felt the same thing. I didn't lose anything, but I felt like I was in their shoes."
Resourcefulness has been rewarded. After hearing on the news of the storm's damage on Staten Island, a 35-year-old Mexican migrant who declined to give his full name because he is in the United States illegally rode the No. 51 bus from his home in Port Richmond to Midland Beach, where 13 feet of water had flooded many houses and killed eight residents. He and three friends bought a pump at a Home Depot and offered to drain water out of basements and first floors for $150, which they split among themselves. They worked the area for three weeks, also hauling away stoves, chairs and moldy wooden doors.
"It's much easier to find work," he said through an interpreter. "But I feel weird because even though it helped me a lot, a lot of people are suffering."
Even a few women who usually baby-sit or clean apartments have joined the bandwagon. Reyna Vega, 32, a Mexican immigrant, proudly flashes a smartphone photograph of herself with a white mask across her face removing wallboard from a Coney Island home.
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"The guys take me on a job with them," she said. "I'm having them teach me how to do it."
In Sea Gate, a private community at the western tip of Coney Island, laborers have been able to pass through the security gates without checking in.
Joseph Steinberger hired day laborers to remove mattresses, kitchen appliances and other furnishings from the flooded basement in his three-family brick house. Another homeowner, Luda Braude, said she would not consider hiring day laborers. Yet when she needed a large vehicle to deliver a hot water heater from a local Home Depot, she hailed an Ecuadorean day laborer with a van and paid $40 for the delivery.
Gonzalo Mercado, executive director of El Centro del Inmigrante in Port Richmond, said that because of the urgency of restoring flood-ravaged homes, workers had been getting more for their labor — $120 a day rather than the usual $60 or $80. "It's a question of supply and demand," Mr. Mercado said.
When his agency gets involved, it tries to assure workers a set wage depending on the skill and some recourse if they are underpaid or injured. Another aim is to teach workers to protect themselves against the hazards of mold and contaminated water.
Pablo Martinez, 42, described pulling out wet insulation from a flooded house on Long Island: "It's very hard, it's cold and you can't stand there too long."
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."
Some volunteers have realized the workers could also use help.
The other day, Nelson Hernandez, 31, and three other laborers, all wearing face masks, were hauling away the soggy furnishings of a tumbledown bungalow in Midland Beach where John Paterno, a man with cerebral palsy, had drowned in his house. Mr. Hernandez said the bungalow's landlord was paying them each $120 a day, much of which Mr. Hernandez sends home to his three children in Mexico.
"That's why I'm here," he said. "I need to work."
A volunteer, Ruth Sebag, drove by and asked if Mr. Hernandez and his colleagues needed new work gloves. A box of bright yellow ones had been sent to her by the owner of a karate school in Arizona. Mr. Hernandez, having worn out his previous pair emptying the bungalow, was glad to have the new ones.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/nyregion/day-laborers-find-steady-work-after-hurricane-sandy.html
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