Day laborers press forward for their rights

Here on Long Island, Suffolk County has just approved anti-immigrant legislation that would penalize employers for hiring undocumented immigrants. Meanwhile, in nearby Nassau County, Latin@ day laborers and immigrant residents face reactionary opposition to their attempts to end raids by the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division.

In Freeport, a village of 45,000, over half the population is Latin@. In 2002, Carlos Canales of the Workplace Project, a Latin@ worker support center, organized residents and local day laborers to support a legal shape-up site where workers could gather in the mornings to meet prospective employers. Canales was arrested but the case forced Freeport Mayor Bill Glacken to establish a safe and legal site in a trailer.

However, the trailer was old and hidden. Most contractors and residents couldn’t find it. From the beginning, the workers have been asking that the site be made more accessible and visible.

Glacken decreed that the administration of the site be given not to the workers or the support group but to Catholic Charities, with funding from local foundations.

The local support group, Freeport Community Worklink Center (FCWC), and the United Day Laborers of Freeport (UDLF) received grants and applied to run the trailer. They won this battle in 2005, but within six months the mayor and his friends in the foundations decided that this arrangement threatened their plan to “clean up” Freeport, meaning to get rid of the undocumented.

The village and the foundations devised a plan to ticket and arrest workers who shaped up at places other than the trailer site. The mayor pressured the owners of a parking lot at the local Home Depot store to put up “No Trespassing” signs, giving police a green light to arrest workers there.  

The workers and the support committee told the mayor and the funders that they could not accept these terms. The funders included representatives of the Unitarian Church, Catholic Charities and the director of the Hagedorn Foundation. The late Horace Hagedorn—who once lived in Freeport—was the founder of Miracle-Gro, an agribusiness corporation with $2.5 billion in assets.

The mayor and the funders terminated their arrangement with the workers and the support committee. In addition, the workers in the trailer were denied the right to select their own coordinator. Catholic Charities hired a coordinator who discriminated against the elected representatives of the UDLF, denying anyone who agreed with them the right to work. The coordinator organized the workers against Canales, who was effectively barred from any meetings with the mayor or the funders.

This past August, ICE informed the mayor and the police chief that it would conduct sweeps against undocumented immigrants. Eight workers were arrested in two separate raids in Freeport.

The workers resisted. They were inspired by Mexican immigrant Elvira Arellano, who had just taken refuge in a Chicago church. Arellano was calling attention to the ICE raids, which have resulted in the deportation of 23,000 immigrants so far this year. (Delaware News Journal, Sept. 21) The FCWC and the leaders of United Day Laborers of Freeport discussed having a picket Sept. 25 at Freeport Village Hall, where they would declare Freeport a sanctuary for immigrants and protest conditions at the trailer.

When the mayor and the funders got wind of this, they threatened to stop all funding for Workplace Project, the major group on Long Island that defends the rights of unpaid workers, tenants against landlords, and Latin@ day laborers in Nassau and Suffolk counties. Like many other organizations, Workplace Project depends on funding from wealthy and reactionary foundations that masquerade as liberal service agencies.

Workplace Project had originally organized both the Freeport day laborers and the support committee. Not wanting to jeopardize the project or the trailer, both groups reluctantly suspended their protest at Village Hall and instead met at a local church. When they then tried to present their Petitions for Sanctuary to the Village Board meeting on Sept. 25, it was suddenly closed to public discussion.

Pablo Alvarado, director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) in California, told Workers World that Workplace Project was crucial for the struggles on Long Island, but that if the workers had exhausted all other avenues to improve the situation, they had to do what was necessary.

The workers have agreed to meet one more time with the mayor and the funders, but vowed to protest on El Día de La Raza, Oct. 12, if no meeting takes place by Oct. 6 to satisfy their demands. ν