July 12, 2005

My Day as an Itinerant Laborer

By Daniel Porras
Special to the Neighborhood Newswire

Standing patiently on Cesar Chavez Street, a group of four Latino men survey the oncoming stream of morning traffic. A small white Toyota pick-up with utility racks approaches and the men wave guardedly, as if hailing a taxi on the sly. But the pick-up keeps going and the men, in jeans and well-worn leather boots, keep waiting. Along five blocks of the busy street there are at least 40 men standing in small groups, and they’re all waiting for the same thing: trabajo.

What kind of work? “Everything, man,” says Fernando, a young man with a black goatee and a round, brown face. Fernando tells me that many of the men looking for work are in the U.S. illegally, but he emphasizes that he himself is a U.S. citizen, one who recently got kicked out of Mission High School for starting a fight with a teacher. He also says that among the men – who hail from all over Latin America but are mostly from Mexico – there are professional painters, carpenters, plumbers, electricians and landscapers that earn as much as $50 per hour. “If you want to learn about this street,” he says, “you have to spend a lot of time here.”

I take Fernando’s advice. At 10 a.m. the next day I arrive on the corner of York and Cesar Chavez streets to begin waiting for work. I’m joining a massive nation-wide populace of “unofficial” workers who toil in what economists call the ‘informal economy’. In California, informal workers plant and pick our vegetables, clean our homes and offices, assemble our shoes and clothes, help raise our children and manicure our yards.

I wait on the street corner for an informal job. A big U-Haul truck approaches and the men raise their hands slightly. I do the same, but the U-Haul doesn’t stop. Across York to my left there are nine men waiting for work, and down the sidewalk to my right there are another five. A man on a bike comes by selling discount bus transfers. Two men each buy one.

At 10:40 a.m. I decide to squat against the wall. Another U-Haul; more low-key hailing. Concrete, gravel, mail and utility trucks, moving vans, and big 18-wheelers: everyone’s passing, nobody’s stopping to offer us work.

Suddenly, the men to my left are running, chasing a silver BMW sport utility vehicle driven by an Asian man. The BMW turns right onto York and stops. I run to the car, which is surrounded by eight men. The Asian fellow picks four workers and drives off. I return to my corner to watch the traffic on Cesar Chavez, a street named after the fiery Mexican migrant who started the National Farm Workers Association more than 40 years ago.

I share the street corner with a big man in a green t-shirt and a black Oakland Raiders hat. “Hace mucho calor,” he says.
“Sí,” I respond, it is getting hot. It’s 11:13 a.m. and the sun is blazing. “It is my first time waiting here for work,” I tell him in Spanish. “Is this the best place to wait?”
“Mas o menos”, he says: more or less.

His name is Jose and he stays with his sister in Potrero Hill. He’s 28 and his eyes smile more than his mouth. He hails from just outside Mexico City, and has been in the U.S. for less than one month. He’s waited on this corner for the last four days and has gotten a total of two hours of work moving boxes.

Around 11:30 a.m. a red Mercedes turns onto York and stops abruptly. A large Latino man gets out of the back screaming obscenities in broken English at the Asian woman in the driver seat. “I will call police!” the Asian woman shouts back. Furious, the Latino man storms off. The rest of us get back to waiting.

Ten minutes later the red Mercedes returns. I lock eyes with the young, long-haired Asian man in the passenger seat and raise my hand slightly. He nods at me. I walk toward the car as at least seven other men swarm around it. “Hi,” I say in English, “do you guys have any work?” Of all the men surrounding the red Mercedes, I’m the only one speaking to those inside the car.
“Yes, are you strong?”
“Yes, very strong.” I lift my arms away from my body to give the impression that I’m big (I’m not).
“How much?”
“Whatever you want to pay,” I say, instantly regretting it.
“Ten dollars?”
“Sure.”
“OK, let’s go.”
“But my buddy, too,” I say, pointing to Jose, “he’s very strong; a good worker.”
“Who him? OK, let’s go”
Jose and I are surprised. We get in and drive off.

The thin Asian woman in the driver seat tells me her name is Hannah. “First time standing there?”
“Yes,” I say.
“I know, I always get workers from there,” she says, “each time I get a new shipment.” Hannah tells me that we’re going to unload a shipment from China, but first we need another worker. I translate this for Jose. We pull up to a U-Haul lot on Third Street, and several Latino men surround our car. Aaron points to one, and I put a baby’s car seat in my lap and scoot to the middle so the man can get in beside me. His name is Juan and he’s from Palenque, a tourist town in Southern Mexico.

Two hours from the start of my day as an itinerant laborer, Aaron, Hannah, Jose, Juan and I enter the back of a warehouse on Illinois Street. We walk down a long corridor filled with hundreds of king- and queen-size mattresses into a sprawling showroom filled with fashionable Chinese kitchen and bath fixtures. The facility is dusty and cluttered with boxes, trash, broken bits of furniture, scrap metal and drywall. We’re to move a giant pile of boxes and scraps from one corner so we can put two dozen or so mattresses there.

It feels good to be working - better than waiting. The king-size mattresses are heavy and we’re told not to drag them. After the mattresses we turn to a giant blue shipping container with Chinese symbols printed on the side and in big white letters: ‘Sinotrans’. It’s packed full of boxes containing granite and marble sink basins, toilets, cabinets, and various furniture assembly kits. We’re lifting, loading, walking, rolling, stacking. Unloading a Chinese shipping container in South San Francisco with two Mexican laborers, I’m an improbable cog in the global economy. I am drenched with sweat.

After two hours another Chinese woman, Vickie, arrives with lunch. Juan, Jose and I sit on a futon and devour our food while gulping down glass after glass of water. Then, still chewing, we get back to work. There’s an old stereo upstairs and I see a dusty Mozart CD. Classical music bounces off the cement walls for nearly three hours as we roll boxes on carts through the long warehouse and carry them up the stairs.

By 4:30 p.m. we’ve hardly put a dent in the enormous shipping container. The granite sinks are heavy, but not as heavy as the bigger marble sinks. Then we get to the marble counter tops. Those are really heavy, and wrapped in Styrofoam, cardboard, and wooden slats. Aaron helps us with the countertops. Lifting, loading, walking, ‘de-slating’, stacking, sweating. My legs are like noodles, but the time quickly passes. We help each other without speaking. Juan builds an ingenious bridge of wood scraps to span the small gap between the shipping container and the dock so that we can get the carts inside the container.

At 7:30 p.m. Aaron says we’re done, though the container is not yet empty. He pays the three of us 75 dollars each for seven-and-a-half hours of grueling physical work. We all agree that Jose and Juan will return the following day at 10:00 a.m., and I write down for them which bus to take and the stop to get off. Then Vickie drives us back to Cesar Chavez.

If there’s any irony in being dropped off after a long day of back-breaking work onto a street named after the man credited with the passage of the California Labor Relations Act of 1975, it’s lost on Jose. After a day of hard labor my time in the informal sector has ended, but for Jose, who can see only one day of work in his future, it’s just beginning.