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Industrial Temps

Day Laborer Killed in Building Collapse
by Ron Bigler

On the morning of November 23 in Brooklyn, New York, the third floor of a building under construction collapsed, burying 13 workers in an avalanche of wet concrete. One of the workers, Daniel Eduardo, was killed in the accident.

City officials on the scene said that the collapse occurred because the floor of the building was not properly braced for the weight of the concrete being poured. The contractor, Chaim Ostreicher, was issued a stop-work order following the catastrophe. By most accounts, the accident and the fatality could have been prevented.

It was also discovered that all of the workers—most of whom were immigrants from Mexico—were hired by the contractor as day laborers off of a Brooklyn street corner.

While the use of day laborers is nothing new, sending untrained workers to dangerous construction sites is a recipe for disaster.

In the wake of the recent incident in Brooklyn, advocates for immigrant laborers, elected officials and labor unions are calling for amnesty for undocumented workers. At a demonstration organized by the Mason Tenders District Council of New York, which is a divison of the Laborers, union members called for greater protections for day laborers, many of who are undocumented workers. The union said that it has been trying to organize workers in the high-hazard demolition and asbestos removal industries. But many of these workers are undocumented and they are afraid to organize out of fear that employers will retaliate.

Corner-cutting contractors are notorious for hiring undocumented workers and then using deportation as a threat to cheat them out of wages and intimidate them into not speaking out on unsafe working conditions.

"The bullies of the industry who exploit people like [Daniel Eduardo] are going to have to deal with a new, bigger kid on the block—organized labor," Mason Tenders Political Director Michael McGuire told the New York Daily News (12/01/99). The death of Daniel Eduardo painfully shows what can happen when labor laws and safety and health regulations are not enforced or are ignored by employers who rely on cheap day laborers to boost profits.

Temp Agencies Getting in on the Game

As LRA reported in May, tempoary labor staffing companies such as Labor Ready are now acting as middle-men by rounding up day laborers and offering employers in hazardous industries the convenience of getting cheap, expoitable labor with a simple phone call.

Labor Ready, a Tacoma, Washington-based company that was founded in 1989, is rapidly becoming the nation's largest supplier of light-industrial temporary labor. Billing itself as the "McDonald's" of temporary manual labor," Labor Ready says it can supply workers for a wide range of jobs, including hospital work, freight handling, demolition, janitorial services, waste management, construction, meat packing and many others. Labor Ready has grown from only 8 branches in 1991 to 683 branches operating in 46 states, Canada, Puerto Rico, and the United Kingdom today. In 1998, the company provided temporary jobs to some 533,000 workers.

When Labor Research Association called a Labor Ready office in Brooklyn last May to ask how soon they could send over workers to remove insulation from an old building, the woman taking the order said four workers could be ready the next morning. She also said they would not have to receive safey and health training.

Building scaffolding, ripping out insulation, cutting trees, demolishing buildings or removing waste materials may be unskilled work according to Labor Ready. But unlike tempoary white-collar work, light-industrial work exposes workers to hazards that cause serious injury or even death without proper training and supervision.

In many cases, there is no guarantee that employers who hire laborers from companies like Labor Ready are providing training or following safety and health regulations. Moreover, because employers who hire Labor Ready temps do not have to worry about paying higher workers' comp premiums if a worker gets injured, many of them will have even less of an incentive to provide a safe work place and training.

As Mike Potts, the business representative for the Los Angeles and Orange Counties Building and Construction Trades Council, told the Orange County Register (02/19/99), Labor Ready "should be outlawed ... as far as I can tell, they're simply trying to be cheap labor barons."

© Labor Research Association 1999

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