Temporary Salve for Temporary Workers

Almost a year ago the Morris County Organization for Hispanic Affairs opened a center for Carlos and some 50 other day laborers who gather on a street corner in downtown Dover looking for work. But Carlos and the others are still on the street.

The center was to be a model for communities across

New Jersey, from Freehold to Morristown, where undocumented workers gather early every weekday morning hoping to be picked up by landscapers, house painters or other small businessmen who need an extra pair of hands. The Dover center offered day laborers a sheltered place to wait for prospective employers, drink free coffee, use a bathroom and get easy access to various services offered by the Hispanic affairs organization.

The center also planned to help day laborers get their due from contractors. "Sometimes these guys are just not paid," says Paul McDougall, Dover town administrator.

The center was also seen as a way to quell complaints from downtown residents annoyed by the crowd of men gathering on the sidewalk in the early morning. The locals said the contractors' pickup trucks and vans spewed exhaust fumes into the apartments along Blackwell Avenue and blocked traffic along the town's main street as the bosses idled while negotiating with the workers.

The location of the center seemed to lend itself to success. Close to where day laborers had been congregating for the past few years, it was next door to the Morris County Organization for Hispanic Affairs, a place some of the laborers had already visited, and just a few doors down from Labor Ready, a successful privatesector company that places legally documented workers with part-time employers doing some of the same jobs for which the day laborers are often tapped.

Despite all this, the center failed.

"It lasted a month, maximum," says Carlos in Spanish, standing on the corner of Blackwell and Warren Street shortly after 7 a.m. on a recent August morning. Carlos, like many of the other men here, greets a request for his last name with a joke about immigration officials. He came to Dover 18 months ago from Mexico and waits for a chance at a job.

While the center sounded like a good idea, Carlos said it didn't work for him. Like many others, Carlos went to the center for a few days after it opened but quickly became disillusioned. "The bosses didn't know about it," Carlos says. "Only a few of them went there. And then, there was the list."

He explains. When a pickup truck pulls up, a group of men rush over, jostling for position to talk to the driver. That's the way Carlos-young, confident and nearly 6 feet tall in a crowd of shorter-than-average menlikes to do business.

"In the center they had a list," Carlos complains. The first person to arrive was the first person on the list. And the first person on the list was the first to get hired. The only way you could compete was to get there at 5:30 in the morning."

Hernan, wearing a sweatshirt from his native Peru bearing the slogan "Together we can make the elections clean," says simply, "The bosses didn't come. That's why it didn't work."

According to town Administrator McDougall, there were also funding and staffing problems. Both DiMaris Fuentes, the director of the Morris Country Organization of Hispanic Affairs, and Lester Kelem, a volunteer dedicated to helping the day laborers, declined to speak about the center's failure.

While there are several organizations aimed at helping undocumented workers and recently arrived legal immigrants from Latin America, none of them try to serve both workers and their employers, notes Nelson Carrasquillo, director of a member organization aimed at supporting migrant farm workers in and around Glassboro. The organization, known by its Spanish acronym CAPA, often mediates between workers and employers, but clearly as a representative of the workers. Carrasquillo says there are such organizations all over the country, the largest being The Workers' Center in El Paso, Texas. That center offers migrant workers a place to eat, shower and sleep while they are in town looking for work. "But it is not used as a hiring hall," notes Carrasquillo.

Meanwhile, Fuentes and Kelem continue to work on behalf of Dover's day laborers. Recently, in lieu of getting the workers to come to the center, they have decided to bring some services to the street corner. One of their recent successes has been getting St. Clare's Hospital to send a mobile medical unit to the comer of Blackwell and Warren Streets every Tuesday between 7 and 9 a.m.

And Kelem is there most mornings, clipboard in hand, listening to complaints and trying to resolve conflicts.