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City Council Passes Bill to Establish Commission on Day Labor Centers


Jian Quo Shen left his native Shanghai, China, five years ago to come to work in America so his aging parents can have a better life in their final years. Often working as $75-a-day laborer, he slept on a bunk bed in a tiny room in Chinatown.

But on July 7, 2004 in a construction site in Elmhurst, Queens a concrete wall collapsed and crushed him. He was the 14th day laborer killed since 1999. This accident came just two weeks after the death of Angel Segovia, a native of Ecuador, who fell from a third-story balcony roof in Brooklyn.

In an effort to prevent more such tragedies, the City Council passed a bill to establish a commission to look into how more job centers could be developed across the city to serve its estimated 8,000 day laborers who struggle to find employment each day are often subjected to low pay, long hours, and hazardous working conditions.

The bill, Intro 592-A, was passed by a vote of 43 to 2. According to the bill, A recent survey of day laborers in New York City found that almost 85 percent of those surveyed have experienced some type of abuse in the industry: 50 percent experienced non-payment of wages, and 56 percent were paid less than the agreed upon wage.

The temporary commission will consist of 20 members, appointed by the Council Speaker and the Mayor. At least 12 of them will be immigrant day laborers or representatives of groups with experience working on issues affecting immigrant day laborers. Officials from the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, the Department of Small Business Services, and the Police Department will also be on the commission.

Councilmember Vincent Gentile from Bay Ridge, who helped draft the bill, said it was a "win-win" situation.

"Laborers are protected," said Gentile. "And for the community, laborers are not congregating on street corners."

Councilmember Helen Sears from Jackson Heights, who also contributed to the bill, admitted that undocumented immigrants pose another difficult issue.

"While there are many day laborers who are undocumented, there are many who are not," said Sears. "And those undocumented immigrants have been mistreated and abused. This bill will be able to prevent that."

But Councilmember Peter Vallone, Jr. from Astoria objected to language in the legislation that would grant 12 of the 20 seats on the commission to immigrant day laborers or representatives of groups working with laborers.

"This is giving the official sanction... to illegal aliens," said Vallone, Jr. "We are a body that makes the law. We should not be sanctioning breaking the law."

Similar issues have generated heated discussion in cities and suburbs across the country. While some cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, welcome immigrant workers, others do not. Residents in Danbury, Connecticut, and Farmingdale, Long Island, have long complained about day laborers on their street corners, saying that they have threatened the quality of life in their neighborhoods.

According to the bill, job centers are organized to connect day laborers with employers seeking work in settings that provide accountability and help prevent workplace exploitation. But different from the employment agencies, which are prevalent in many immigrant communities, those job centers do not charge day laborers for their services and are administered by the local government or community-based groups. Most job centers require employers to sign a contract attesting to the wages agreed upon by the employer and the day laborer.

In addition, those job centers will provide a secure space for day laborers to congregate and offer bathrooms and shelter from bad weather conditions. Some sites will also help to connect day laborers to additional services, including classes on vocational skills, labor and immigration laws, and literacy skills in both Spanish and English. Community organizations may also offer social services on sites, including health care services, legal services, food pantries and peer support groups.

A native of Taipei, Taiwan, Larry Tung is a frequent contributor to the Citizen.  

Campaign 2005: Real Estate Boom; Corporate Developments; Immigrant Entrepreneurs.


Bloomberg’s obsession with West Side Manhattan development and Brooklyn Councilwoman Letitia James’ objections to the proposed Nets Stadium (In PDF format) are both big-time community development issues.

But most such issues play out in individual neighborhoods. And with crime and the crack epidemic on the decline, the popular belief that the public schools are improving, and with white and middle class people actually throwing elbows to move into once forsaken neighborhoods, community development is increasingly seen for its added economic value to the middle class, and less for who it might be leaving behind or displacing.

Following are three of the issues on the minds of the electorate this political season.

New York’s Real Estate Boom (or “Help: I can no longer afford to live here”)

A woman I know, formerly of Fort Greene, is living the up side of what has become an all too common story in the Big Apple. Having bought what is generously called a two bedroom apartment looking out on Lafayette Avenue six years ago for $155,000 – a price she feared at the time was inflated - she recently sold it for $630,00 to a young woman with a healthy trust fund. “Personally, I don’t think it’s worth it,” my friend comments. “There’s too much noise on the street outside of the apartment. And yet now, I can’t even afford to live there myself.”

Speaking with the new real estate savvy she’s attained, she explains that the level of home seeker desperation has risen in areas like Fort Greene because “there’s just no inventory left”.

Affordable housing in New York is hard to find and at a premium. Community activists and vulnerable residents have been grumbling for years about the transformation of neighborhoods across the city in which rents and sale prices have gone through the roof and low-income people are finding themselves priced out of areas where they’ve lived for generations. What’s perhaps most striking is that neighborhoods all over the city which were once seen as unrecoverable pockets of poverty and blight, like Red Hook for instance, are now hungrily looked upon by developers and yuppie settlers alike.

A report by the Center for an Urban Future (In PDF Format) noted that the Mayor of New York has considerable power in controlling housing production and community development through his authority over zoning and land use, building code changes, appointments to the City Planning Commission, among other things.

But on the neighborhood level, where gentrification battles are most intensely fought and are as much about emotionally charged race- and class-based land claims as they are about residential or commercial change, most politicians are studiously agnostic on the question of what kind of development befits their neighborhood; when they offer their opinion on the subject there are too few “right” answers and simply too many opportunities to piss people off.

As a result, for better or worse, it’s far more difficult for voters to hold politicians accountable for their position on gentrification. Take Harlem, one of the most high profile community development battlegrounds in the city. With middle class and non African Americans pouring in, glossy commercial development pushing small businesses off of 125th Street, and Columbia University creeping around its borders, politicians have no choice but to acknowledge the tension between those who want Harlem to dismantle the legacy of poverty, and those who denounce the changing complexion of area residents and commercial corridors. But few will offer a clear vision of what Harlem should look like. Recently, city council candidates who vied for Harlem’s District 9 city council seat, in response to questions about proposed development projects, criticized the community review process undergone by recent community development projects and declared that as candidates they seek “responsible development” – arguably one of the most meaningless and non committal terms in civic discourse.

Large Scale Corporate Neighborhood Development (Or “But what if I don’t want a highway running through my backyard?”)

The question of whether to allow the proposed building of land grabbing sports stadiums and box stores has given rise to this year’s highest profile community referendums.

The Forest Ratner proposed development of 21 acres in Brooklyn, which includes the Nets stadium, housing and commercial development, became a rallying cry for opponents of eminent domain, which represents the government’s ability to seize property needed for the completion of a public project.

But more than anything else, outer borough projects like Ratner’s stadium plan and the Ikea store which is now destined to arrive in Red Hook, are important because they pit two distinct camps against each other: On one side you have those who champion job creation or who define economic progress as upscale development; on the other side you have residents and business people who will likely be displaced or who object to the inevitable traffic congestion and other environmental implications..

The Nets Stadium was originally cast as government teaming up with big commercial interests to literally bulldoze over small, defenseless residents and small businesses. But Ratner and Ikea were both able to win overwhelming support from local elected officials by offering huge buy-outs to residents and enticing folks with jobs, particularly the public housing populations of Fort Greene and Red Hook respectively. Both the Nets Stadium and Ikea battles took on racial and class dimensions as predominately white, middle class activists found themselves being shouted down by African American residents from the projects demanding jobs.

In the end, most city wide and local elected officials (with the exception of Tish James) opted to support Ikea and the Nets stadium rather than risk being perceived as obstacles to neighborhood economic progress. The Nets stadium first demonstrated its city-wide profile as Public Advocate contender Norman Siegal joined with residents to fight Ratner’s plans, but Virginia Fields and Gifford Miller, along with Bloomberg, were strongly in favor of Ratner’s economic development vision. Ferrer, the Democratic party nominee, has been wishy-washy on the issue, both praising the project and raising questions about who will be displaced by it.

The importance of job creation will continue to be a pivotal issue in deciding the political futures of large scale commercial development in New York, but this knife can cut both ways: Wal Mart was successfully thwarted from gaining a foothold in New York, because it is perceived as an exploitative employer and poor corporate citizen.

Immigrant Small Business Development (Or “I am yearning to breathe free, not to be a terrorist”)

The obstacles facing small business entrepreneurs in New York City are legion. Seen as representing the bottom of the economic food chain, immigrant entrepreneurs fight for respect wherever they set up shop. Most have limited access to conventional forms of working capital and many possess little or no formal business training that will help them grow and make a bigger contribution to the city’s economy.

Some areas, like the ethnically kaleidoscopic streets of Northwest Queens, have been reborn over the last few years, spurred on by the business activity of new arrivals. One would think that in a city where immigrant levels are at historically high levels -almost 3 million New Yorkers were born in a foreign county - the needs and contributions of immigrant small business people would be more fully appreciated. In fact, the term micro-entrepreneur has become popular over the last fifteen years largely as a way to categorize a culture of subsistence-level commercial activity honed in the developing world. Some research estimates that micro-entrepreneurs now make up 35 percent of the employment force in Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens.

The reality is politicians and policy makers, who rarely pay attention to constituencies they perceive as largely unorganized non-voters, are only now beginning to wake up to the importance of immigrant entrepreneurs. One possible indication that policy advocates are taking immigrant business development more seriously is the fact that the Center for an Urban Future is releasing a report on immigrant entrepreneurs and how the city can support them.

Perhaps in another sign of things to come, organizations like the East Harlem’s Esperanza del Barrio, Bushwick’s Latin American Workers Project and Urban Justice Center’s Street Vendor Project, have been putting pressure on the administration to improve conditions for street vendors in the city, including better treatment by the police, more public space to accommodate vending and an increase in the number of vending licenses the city provides.

The Bloomberg Administration asserts that it has reorganized the Department of Small Business Services to focus more on micro-entrepreneurs and has opened up Business Solution Centers in all boroughs to provide technical assistance to entrepreneurs. But beyond this gesture, immigrant constituencies and interest groups are sure to demand more from city officials. For instance there are efforts to gain support for immigrant entrepreneurs through measures as varied as public capitalization of loan funds, to the rezoning of areas to accommodate and incubate small businesses. Some of this advocacy goes beyond small business development issues and challenges the formal and informal status of immigrants in the city: Esperanza del Barrio is leading an immigrant rights campaign to allow undocumented entrepreneurs more freedom to pursue work opportunities.

Mark Winston Griffith, a founder of the non-profit Central Brooklyn Partnership and a fellow at the Drum Major Institute, has been in charge of the community development topic page since its inception in 2003.  

Mayoral Issue Grid: Civil Rights



Mayoral Issue Grid

CIVIL RIGHTS

-Use City Contracting Power for Civil Rights Issues?
-Gay Marriage?

For decades, the city government has its enormous financial power to move social agendas. In the 1980s, the city used its pensions to force corporations to divest from South Africa to protest Apartheid.

This year, the City Council passed an Equal Benefits Law, which requires contractors that offer benefits to spouses of their employees to extend the same package to domestic partners of workers. Mayor Michael Bloomberg vetoed the measure.

Gay marriage has also become a key civil rights issue in the campaign. While marriage is legally a state issue, in February, a Manhattan Supreme Court Justice ruled that the city should not discriminate against same-sex couples. She ordered the city clerk to begin issuing marriage licenses to gay couples. Mayor Michael Bloomberg appealed the ruling.

Fernando Ferrer

Fernando Ferrer supports the use of city contracts to advance social agendas. “Whether it’s… the extension of domestic partnership rights to those you do business with the city, or the rights of the transgendered - for me it fits into the same category,” Ferrer said at a forum earlier this year. “You cannot believe in some human rights and not all.”

Ferrer said he also supports gay marriage.

Michael Bloomberg

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has supported using the city’s contracting power to advance social agendas in certain cases, but he vetoed the City Council's Equal Benefits Law, which requires contractors that offer benefits to the spouses of their employees to extend the same package to the domestic partners of workers.

Bloomberg says that he while personally supports gay marriage, it is a state issue.

Last year, Bloomberg appealed the Manhattan Supreme Court ruling to begin issuing marriage licenses. He told the New York Times in February, “I do not want to see happen here what happened in California,” where gay marriages were authorized by Mayor Gavin Newsom and overturned by the state court.

RELATED ARTICLES:
- Civil Rights Issues Divide Bloomberg and Democratic Rivals
- Bully Busting
- Democratic Mayoral Candidate Forum: Gay and Lesbian Issues
- Lagging Behind In The Fight For Gay Rights
- Can Critical Mass Negotiate a Truce?

 



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