Second Day Laboring

This Is NO WAY To Make A Living…


I was out of the condo and back on the Torrez Causeway again early yesterday morning, but not quite as early as my first morning as a “Day Laborer.” You see, all of us “Day Laborers” lucky enough to get a “return ticket” enjoy the luxury of avoiding the 5:30 AM rush at the front door of the office, and this morning I’m one of those employees.

With a large cup of McDonald’s coffee in one hand and my lunch bag in the other, I walked in the door of the Day Labor office about 6:00 AM. My immediate reaction was one of panic, because none of the other three members of my previous day’s crew was present, even though we were all given the opportunity to return to the same Sea Island jobsite this morning.

By six fifteen, I find myself still sitting alone in the sea of other potential employees. I really was beginning to think that I had arrived late and the other three men had already been dispatched without me.

Oh my God, was I facing a day working in large seafood stained tanks?

Finally I saw a familiar face as one of my co-workers arrived, sleepy-eyed, at about twenty after six. One down—two to go, but at least I was going back to work for the cabinet company and not digging ditches or removing fish scales from some unidentified apparatus.

The previous day’s work had been tedious, but also extremely simple and not that physically demanding, so I was looking forward to mindlessly spending my time wandering from point to point to point while our supervisor struggled to keep us busy.

Due to the day’s high employment demand, there weren’t enough people to go around, but by 7:35 I was headed out the door with my three man group’s ticket one hand and my car keys in the other. I had been assigned only one new replacement employee instead of two, but in one day I had already graduated to group leader and driver. Then, at the last minute, as we were walking out the door, our fourth guy from the previous day arrived, so I got him added back to our ticket and we waited briefly while he received his hardhat and safety glasses.

The subsequent “four grown men in a Ford Mustang” trip back across the causeway was uneventful, as was the fifteen minute bus ride to the job site. We checked in with our employer by 7:15 AM, and by 9:30 I found myself having walked nearly a mile and having carried hundreds of pounds of material around the building.

What a difference a single day makes in the “Day Labor” business. It would seem that our supervisor, realizing that he had a good crew the previous day, had done a little planning on our behalf—with the idea of making up for the light work loading of the previous day.

All I can say is...I WORKED MY ASS OFF YESTERDAY.

From the third floor Presidential Suite to the basement wine cellar, we dismantled and relocated scaffolding, delivered giant wooden cabinets to the installing craftsmen, and generally huffed and puffed, grunted and groaned, and earned EVERY DAMN PENNY of the luxurious minimum wage we were being paid.

Perhaps the most fun part of the day was when, at about the two thirds point of loading an open 20’ trailer with surplus wood molding, our supervisors’ supervisor came out and had a “shit fit” when he discovered that a previous group of “day laborers” had intermixed needed materials with the surplus materials in the exercise of moving said materials outside the building.

Being cheep and assumed to be stupid, we were forced to partially unload the trailer as the Union professional spun around like a tornado in the middle of our neatly staked piles. Our previously neatly organized lumber looked like the makings of a good bonfire stack when he was finished, but at $5.75 per hour they apparently didn’t mind paying us to reorganize and reload everything once the suspect items were removed.

Being a middle aged former “office boy” and part time construction worker, needless to say that by noon I was tired, and by 3:00 PM I was ready to admit defeat and ask to be allowed to go home early.

But I didn’t, and my determination was rewarded when we were allowed to leave early, at 4:00 PM, with a two hour bonus on each of our paychecks. Whoop de doo--an extra eight bucks or something like that. This is a hard reality to swallow for a guy used to billing myself out to clients for $75 per hour in the "good old days."

When I finally managed to stumble back into the Day Labor office about 4:45, I couldn’t care less what I was paid, or even if I was paid, as long as I could be on the road back home by 5:00.

I walked in the door here at our condo at 5:30 with a check for an ENTIRE Forty Nine Dollars and fifty four cents in my hand--a magnificent ten hours pay for twelve total hours expended.

My feet hurt, my legs were tired, my shoulders ached, and I had two skinned knuckles and a bruised hand. I had also partially turned one ankle tripping over stone scraps discarded by a Mexican mason crew outside our back door.

My summary of my self-imposed, excellent Day labor adventure is as follows.

This is MOST DEFINITELY no way to make a living, BUT...I think that every high school Freshman should have to spend a couple of days doing what I've done the past two days.

I belive that, given the experience, that 99% of the kids would stay in high school, and many might graduate from collage Summa Cum Laude as a result.

Speaking from experience, Day Labor can also be quite dangerous. Besides being physically demanding, the jobsite conditions I witnessed are fraught with hazards, not by design, but by the shear numbers of employees and disciplines of work that are occurring concurrently.

While the Day Labor administrators attempt to apply lip service to safety, as in all avocations the key to safety is up to the individual, and many if not most of the people employed in the Day Labor pool don’t have a clue.

When I first went in to fill out an application package a couple of weeks ago in anticipation of writing this story, I filled out six or eight pages of forms including medical and employment history, and then was asked to sign off on an infinite number of disclaimers and waivers—one indicating that I had received a Safety Manual.

As of today I’ve still never seen anything resembling a Safety Manual.

I never said a word, but I was horrified at the conditions in the ballroom on both days, with people working obliviously on the floor on projects while at the same time FOUR different scissors lifts motored around in our midst, holding workers forty feet in the air while they painted the ceiling of the room.

On the industrial jobsites that I’ve run in the past, I’m used to cordoning off the work area and FORBIDDING pedestrian traffic and work to be done on the ground under and adjacent to the overhead work.

Imagine the lift operators making a mistake, running into a chandelier or bumping into something on the floor, and causing the entire lift to overturn. Anyone on the ground in the path of the falling lift would be seriously injured or killed. Any items accidentally spilled or dropped from the lift could also cause injury, in spite of the hardhats and safety glasses worn by all employees.

Yesterday I almost had the fingers on my left hand broken (if not cut off) in the unorganized spastic haste of my supervisor and one of my co-workers while moving a mechanical materials-lift from an outside courtyard into the building. It was actually my own idea how to get it back in the building, but once I tendered the plan I then lost all control in the normal stampede and dust storm of activity typical of “day laborer” operations. A savings of five minutes nearly cost me my fingers, and what was even more hideous was that since I didn’t say anything, no one else even noticed.

What really killed me about working day labor wasn’t the low pay, but rather it was the assumption of stupidity and untrustworthiness (probably well deserved and earned by other less enthusiastic and capable workers other than myself) that I had to endure.

I’m used to being assigned a task in my work life, and then planning and executing the intricate details. In spite of knowing that I had signed up for the program, I found being directed from point to point, from task to task, by someone well intended, but yet quite my intellectual inferior, to be quite frustrating.

We were forced to redo fully 25% of the tasks we accomplished, simply because of poor planning, augmented by the low cost of our employment efforts.

Although I had previously managed half-million dollar construction contracts and dozens of employees and subcontractors, I personally had never resorted to hiring anyone from a day labor pool and as a result I had no idea what to expect from either side of the bargain.

Regarding the start of the second day, it was clear that virtually everyone had spent nearly every single penny they had earned the day before partying. One of my coworkers didn’t bother to show up at all, and the two that did show up admitted that they were both broke when they got there. One guy brought a home made lunch, while the other would have gone hungry if I hadn’t loaned him two dollars. His promise of paying me back at the end of the day turned into stalling tactics because he said that he couldn’t get his check cashed because he had left his ID at home.

I think that that's OK, however.

I know now that I’ve done my good deed for the week--feeding the hungry, sorta like Jesus did.