Southside Day Labor Center

91 minutes. 0-0. 25 day laborers and 3 students. The US scores the winning goal against Algeria in the first round of the World Cup allowing them to advance in to the next round. The room explodes in to noise.

Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, AZ houses the Southside Day Labor Center. Its mission is:

“To provide a safe place for workers and employers to negotiate employment while maintaining a healthy relationship with the surrounding neighborhood. Employers in need of workers with a variety of skills are able to come to the center where a volunteer is available to help negotiate the hiring of a worker.”

At six in the morning every day Monday to Saturday, twenty to thirty men ranging in age from 16 to 60 congregate outside the church located at the corner of West 22nd and S. 10th Avenue. They toss their Center issued ID cards in to a pile and drop their raffle ticket in to a bucket. They wait for their number to be called. They hope they will be one of the first numbers drawn. Anybody past the ninth or tenth person on the list probably won’t get work that day. I haven’t seen more than eight men get picked up each day. The last two days only two men have gone to work. The state of the economy is being felt here too.

The men sign a contract when they join the program. They agree to not accept less than eight dollars an hour for work. Really, though, any amount is better than nothing. I talked to a father of three today. He said with 50 dollars a week he can feed his three daughters at home in Mexico. But he won’t find work if no one is hiring. And no one has been hiring. As the laborers wait, they sit inside the church or out in the parking lot. Patiently, hopefully, these days, watching the World Cup, cheering for the US.

The men come from all walks of life. Many of them have lived in the US for a majority of their lives and have families here. Others have recently arrived. Some are here on tourist visas, others are residents, others citizens, others are without “legal” documentation. We don’t really know. We aren’t allowed to ask. And it doesn’t matter. Many have held permanent jobs for extended periods of time in the US. Others haven’t. Some speak perfect English. Others are learning. Some don’t plan on leaving Tucson. Others are willing to hop on the next bus to anywhere if there is work there. All they want is to work and unfortunately, there just isn’t much work around.

So, to fill the hours of waiting between 6:30 when the raffle starts and 11 am when the center shuts down, two other volunteers and I are trying to give them something to do. For now, this mostly entails watching the World Cup from 7 to 9. After the morning game ends, we have provided English classes and computer classes. In the next few weeks, we hope to continue these classes as well as to do Know Your Rights sessions, health workshops, a soccer tournament, and workshops on SB1070. While doing so, I hope we can listen to these men and learn from their stories.