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