Labor pools required men to sign up for work each day as early as five o'clock in the morning. A dispatcher, usually separated from workers by a partition with an opening or a window, controlled the assignment of work. If assigned a job for the day, workers were employees of the labor pool, not the client company, and were paid by the labor pool at the end of each day. These men were hired to do, among other tasks, cleaning, loading, and setting up and breaking down at construction sites, hotels, and restaurants. They generally worked for client companies and subcontractors; seldom did they work for private homeowners. Men used this type of day labor employment for several reasons: they avoided the pushing and shoving associated with street corner pickup sites; they were covered by workers' compensation insurance if they were injured at a job site; their pay could increase if they used power tools or performed skilled work; their employment was "on the books" and fully legal in terms of tax and social security deductions; and barring unusual circumstances, they did not get "stiffed" for their daily labor.
Day laborer Danny Solomon recalls what it was like getting work at Atlanta's labor pools:
There might be a large project going up and a construction company they may call a labor pool and say, 'I need thirty men.' And they'll come up with a price and, you know, the labor pool will say, okay, you need thirty men, and we'll charge you fourteen dollars an hour for each man, okay. And that's normally what it is — twelve, thirteen, fourteen dollars an hour per man, but the man himself only gets whatever the minimum wage is.
If you didn't have a full-time job, that was your only means of supporting yourself or getting any kind of money. You know, I worked on jobs all day long on construction sites, and digging ditches, and stuff like that, and just being dirty and smelly, and garbage and stuff like that, and work eight hours and come back and get paid twenty-five to thirty dollars. But the labor pool might have made one hundred and some dollars off me that day.
Day laborers is just exactly what it is, day labor, labor, meaning slave work man, hauling trash, sweeping, mopping, construction clean up, the hard work, I mean the hard work that has to be done, lifting heavy boxes, which there's no skill involved in that. I've been on construction clean up jobs where I've just pushed a broom all day. All day long eight hours just pushin' a broom. Physically exhausting, emotionally exhausting.
Most of it is construction [work]. But there's a lot of warehouse, also. Unload a truck, load a truck, organize shelves and things like that, anything that's manual labor, sweep, mop, clean the bathrooms, anything that's unskilled and just requires a body. Not too much on the [manufacturing] line, and if it was, you wasn't doin' nothin' but just movin' somethin' from point A to point B, or catching at the end and putting it in boxes. A lot of labor pools send people to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, when the big bundles of papers come down and stack them in the truck, which doesn't require a rocket scientist to do that. Anything that is manual labor that requires strength.18
|
Day laborer Danny Solomon talks about working at labor pools, (4:58 min.)
Audio interview with Terry Easton, April 19 and 22, 2005, Atlanta, Georgia. RealMedia | Windows Media | QuickTime |
Grim working conditions have generally characterized Atlanta's labor pools. In Hard Labor: A Report on Day Labor Pools and Temporary Employment, Randall Williams demonstrated that take-out fees for safety equipment, lunch, and transportation fees often brought day laborers' wages below the federal minimum. Labor pool workers generally earned minimum wage or just above, so additional take-out fees meant that they rarely went home with enough money to support themselves with ample food, clothes, and shelter. "All these charges," Williams wrote in 1988, "are deducted from a check or cash payment that is continually shrinking . . . After deductions, typical take-home pay for an eight-hour job—and many labor pool jobs are less than eight hours—is [twenty to twenty-five dollars]."19 After eight hours of work and three to four hours of travel time across a large metropolitan region, labor pool workers' days frequently averaged ten to fourteen hours. For many of these men the American Dream of a steady job, employment satisfaction, a home and a car was endlessly deferred. Labor pools provided an opportunity to make money, but also the likelihood of working extremely hard for abysmally low pay. Emmanuel Killen, an African American man who worked at numerous Atlanta labor pools since the early 1980s spoke with vitriol about them: "They are part of the discrimination against lower income or no income or homeless people. I feel like they are nothing but a trap."20
|
Labor pool reform advocate Ed Loring talks about labor pool workers, (1:52 min.)
Audio interview with Terry Easton, February 19, 2006, Atlanta, Georgia. RealMedia | Windows Media | QuickTime |
|
| Ed Loring talks about labor pool dispatchers, (2:17 min.)
Audio interview with Terry Easton, February 19, 2006, Atlanta, Georgia. RealMedia | Windows Media | QuickTime |
By the mid-1990s, as evidenced in Atlanta's Hardest Working People: A Report on Day Labor Pools in Metro Atlanta, working conditions for labor pool workers had improved little, if at all, since the publication of Hard Labor in 1988.21 This report reveals not only how labor pool workers experienced blacklisting, arbitrary hiring, and discrimination, but also how practices such as illegal charges for transportation and safety equipment continued to bring day laborers' paychecks below federal minimum wage standards. Nearly a decade later, in Workplace Safety in Atlanta’s Construction Industry: Institutional Failure in Temporary Staffing Arrangements, Chirag Mehta found that labor pool workers in Atlanta's construction industry labored in substandard safety conditions and reported a high prevalence of inadequate job training and insufficient safety equipment.22 Workers stated that the most common hazards were laboring at unsafe heights without proper equipment and breathing high levels of dust at jobsites. Twelve percent of the workers in this study reported that temporary agencies never provided safety equipment. Nearly a quarter of the workers surveyed had experienced a serious injury within the previous year and yet most did not receive treatment or workers' compensation for their injuries.23
