Day laborers not ‘just city problem’

Friday, April 15, 2005 | 9:57 a.m.

The day laborers hanging out on street corners, vacant lots and parking lots around the Las Vegas Valley are not an immigration problem, but an economic one, a UCLA associate professor said Thursday night.

Abel Valenzuela, head of UCLA's Center for the Study of Urban Poverty, has studied day laborers for a decade and offered preliminary data at UNLV's Boyd School of Law from a survey of 2,667 such workers nationwide, including some in Las Vegas.

"If any of you think Las Vegas is unique, you're wrong," Valenzuela said, although there are some slight differences in Southern Nevada day workers and those in other cities.

Day laborers in Las Vegas are slightly more educated than workers elsewhere, completing six to eight years of education in their native lands, yet authorities tend to harass them more, Valenzuela's survey found.

Las Vegas police force 25 percent of local day laborers to move from their pickup spots, compared with 10 percent nationwide, Valenzuela said.

"Clearly your police in Las Vegas are harder on day laborers than in the rest of the country," Valenzuela said.

The Clark County Commission recently considered an ordinance that was aimed at preventing day laborers from congregating on sidewalks. Action on that proposal was postponed to await results of a Metro Police study that is to assess whether drivers stopping to pick up the workers pose a traffic danger in the Eastern Avenue at Pebble Road area where many of the laborers wait for job offers each day. Meanwhile, Las Vegas City Councilman Lawrence Weekly has said he wants the city to take action regarding day laborers as well.

Kelly Benavidez, a liaison for the Las Vegas City Council, said day laborers gather at sites throughout the city, even on the outskirts of Summerlin.

"It's not just a city problem, a county problem or a Henderson problem," Benavidez said.

Valenzuela said Thursday night that he still does not know how many day laborers there are, but the trend is growing across the nation.

A third of day laborers who volunteered to answer Valenzuela's survey had no documentation to land a legitimate job and a fifth can't speak English.

Day laborers are not all illegal immigrants and are not all from Mexico or Latin America, especially in Las Vegas, Valenzuela said. From interviews with day laborers, he discovered that in Las Vegas roughly 9 percent are black or non-Hispanic whites, while the national average for the same sub-groups is 4.7 percent.

Day laborers in general are not homeless, preferring to live with other immigrants, Valenzuela said. He found 5 to 10 percent of those surveyed considered themselves homeless.

Day laborers in Southern Nevada work on landscaping jobs and construction more often than housekeeping or other service work.

"They're trying to get work," Valenzuela said. "They are very industrious and very hard-working."

When asked what was the worst aspect of working in Las Vegas, day laborers said that the pay was too low compared with regular jobs.

From his research Valenzuela said that workers in Los Angeles earn $7 an hour, nearly $2 above the minimum wage, while workers in New York City earned an average of $100 a day. The downside is the work is not reliable; laborers work an average of three full days a week.

There's a solution to day laborers staking their futures on street corners and parking lots all over town, attorney Tom Saenz, vice president of Litigation, Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund of Los Angeles, said.

A task force or working group that includes city and county officials, police officers, residents and day laborers can work together as part of the community, Saenz said.

Some cities, such as Phoenix, have created a center where day laborers and contractors can go and find each other. It is important to give day laborers a voice in such an operation, Saenz said.

Clark County is looking at that possibility and all other options regarding day laborers in its jurisdiction, said Bianca Vazquez, a county community liaison.

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