Day Labor drama in the OC
Recently the ACLU announced the settlement of a dispute involving day laborers in the Orange County, California community of Lake Forest. That community had attempted, with the assistance of county law enforcement, to drastically to limit the ability of day laborers to solicit work on public sidewalks. Day laborers there are right to be encouraged by the settlement of their lawsuit, but celebration may be premature. While the settlement affirms laborer’s 1st Amendment right to solicit work from sidewalks, it also leaves county defendants with full authority to enforce laws regulating conduct, including those prohibiting jaywalking, double parking, and littering.
It remains to be seen whether Lake Forest will attempt to find another way to exclude day laborers, such as by simply lengthening the list of laws “regulating conduct.” This has been a favorite tactic of other U.S. communities who are hostile to street side solicitation by day workers. The City of Orange earlier this year made it illegal to solicit for work from sidewalks next to streets without parking lanes, medians or driveways on a public right of way. Marietta, Georgia, an Atlanta suburb, put the squeeze on day labor employers, changing the traffic rules to prohibit stopping a vehicle where day laborers congregate. These tactics are of questionable legality. They are certainly bad policy.
Day laborers should have a place on the sidewalk and street side to solicit work. Using the sidewalk as a labor market is nothing new. In the early 20th century, many day laborers were known as hobos. When they weren’t riding the rails to remote areas to harvest crops or cut down trees, hobos returned to town to look for their next job. Jobs were to be found in the “Main Stem,” a neighborhood near the train station where there could be found a number of private employment agencies. They had space indoors, but all the action was outside. Hobos would promenade up and down the sidewalk, reading job postings in storefront windows. Employment agents could not afford to wait inside; they too spilled out on the sidewalk to recruit hobos for casual labor and negotiate terms.
Though the phenomenon of the outdoor labor market declined after WWII, it never completely went away. The Main Stem was transformed from a home base for casual laborers to a home of last resort for the mostly unemployed: Skid Row. But some casual labor was needed for work in the city, and private employment agencies found themselves competing with the employers themselves, who sought to cut out the middleman and deal directly with day laborers at street corner labor markets in Skid Row and elsewhere in the city.
This history is not meant to suggest that outdoor labor markets were without controversy. Some communities responded by enacting and enforcing statutes against vagrancy. But over time, many communities developed an attitude of tolerance—so long as laborers limited their solicitation of work to streets in Skid Row and certain other areas of town. At the beginning of the 20th century, at a peak in activity in outdoor casual labor markets, arrests for vagrancy dropped substantially. Those seeking work as day laborers had street corners and sidewalks to call their own.
Today demand for day laborers has soared once again. They are employed by increasingly busy households living in larger homes that require ever more upkeep. Day laborers are also employed by construction contractors, whose business boomed over the past decade. Though it has declined dramatically in recent months, construction promises to rebound again soon, due to continued immigration and movement of the echo boomers into their prime housing participation years. Accustomed to the fast food drive-through window visible from the street, these prospective employers don’t want to have to leave their car to hunt for a framer or handyman.
Of course, allowing day labor to hustle work from passing automobiles contributes in some measure to traffic congestion. But in this era of “new urbanism,” calls that streets be made faster compete with demands that streets be made livelier as well. Long privileged among other uses of public space, automobile circulation is now being called on to share, if not give up entirely, certain spaces. Rather than speeding traffic circulation, steps are being taken in some places to slow it. Speed bumps, rotaries and other devices aim to slow drivers and make the adjacent sidewalks more attractive to pedestrians and other users. Like the National Forests, which are managed to accommodate a variety of competing and complementary uses, streets and sidewalks are likewise becoming the “Land Of Many Uses.”
It remains to be seen how Lake Forest day laborers will fare in the settlement’s wake. But day laborers and their employers should be given a share of the street.