It
’s been more than a year since the St. Catherine’s Dayworker
Committee decided to establish a hiring hall for the workers who
line East Main and Depot Avenues daily in hopes of temporary jobs.
The workers are still there.
It’s been more than a year since the St. Catherine’s Dayworker Committee decided to establish a hiring hall for the workers who line East Main and Depot Avenues daily in hopes of temporary jobs. The workers are still there.
However, some progress has been made.
The committee’s Julian Mancias said they need a place for the workers to get out of the weather and the money to make a formal hiring center happen. At the new year the money was mostly secured and the committee was edging closer to a temporary home. A more permanent fixture is in the works but will take time.
The Isaacson Grain Company building at 17500 Depot Ave. near the corner gathering point, has been on the market and empty for some time.
“Bob Isaacson has kindly allowed the committee to use the building on a temporary basis,” Councilwoman Hedy Chang said recently. “Right now the lease (agreement) is being discussed by the Diocese’s lawyer and the Isaacson’s lawyer,” she said.
“If the lease works out, then we go inside temporarily,” Chang said. “It’s a very, very temporary situation.
There are bathrooms and a solid roof over the large central room, Chang said, that would keep the rain off the workers as they wait to be hired by residents and contractors needing day laborers.
The room is flanked by barn doors opening to picturesque views of the hills to the east and El Toro to the west. It is, however, also ankle deep in bird feathers and bird droppings.
“It will be cleaned up,” Chang said. “We will make it work.”
The committee might need outside help with the initial shoveling since, according to Brad Darbro, battalion chief with the Santa Clara County Fire Department, large quantities of dried bird guano presents something of a health hazard.
It is not a hazardous material as a chemical would be, he said, but “respiratory protection would be required for workers doing the shoveling.” The guano, when collected, must be hauled to an authorized dump, Darbro said.
Mancias said Monday that there were still some minor issues – fire sprinklers and emergency exit doors – that the committee is working out with the city. He does expect all wrinkles to be ironed out in time to begin operations sometime in January.
“We are prepared to get the men in there to clean up,” he said. Mancias also said he had planned to provide respiratory masks for the workers shoveling out the building but had not known the refuse would need to go to a special dump.
Furniture donated by the city is in storage, waiting for a clean and empty room.
Volunteer labor has never been in short supply surrounding the dayworker issue. The committee cleared $35,000 from a Mexican fiesta in October. The City of Morgan Hill has reserved $5,000 and another $25,000 was secured from a grant.
On Tuesday the committee will meet to design a marketing plan and plan the future. Chang said the committee originally hoped to open by Jan. 15 but now is looking toward the end of the month.
“Within two weeks of the lawyers agreeing,” she said.
A permanent center
Architects Charles Weston and Lesley Miles have said they would welcome a permanent Dayworkers’ Center on the Isaacson property, which they are attempting to buy. Their firm has outgrown its current space above the House of Bagels on Monterey Road and East Third Street. If they are successful with the purchase, they would remodel the building into offices and re-locate the Dayworkers’ Center into portables on the south end of the site.
Miles has located two portable buildings donated at no cost by a nearby school district that would serve the committee’s needs. Weston is donating site plan work, Graniterock the foundation and Dick Oliver of Dividend Development Corp. has offered assistance. Because the building is considered to be temporary, the city planning department has granted (temporary) waivers for curbs, gutters, landscaping and some paving.
“We are waiting for the city to say yes or no,” Weston said Monday.
He said that, after one and a half years the center will have to seek approval from the Architectural Review Board and regularize the situation.
The cost to the Dayworker Committee to put the portables in place, hook them up to the city utility systems and possibly pave a parking lot is estimated by Weston and the committee to be $50,000. An outside eating area for the men, a storage unit, remodeling and adding bathrooms and windows would be an extra $35,000 to $50,000.
Weston said he would like to see landscaping installed “to put a better face to the neighborhood.”
In-kind donations of labor and materials are needed and expected from community groups and businesses so that, if Weston and Miles are able to purchase the property and allow the center, work should proceed fairly quickly, Weston said.
He hopes for some word by the beginning of February.
The center’s structure
At the moment the hiring situation has no formal structure, according to Mancias, the instigator behind the Dayworker Committee and the need for a formal center.
Men, he said, arrive earlier and earlier to stake out the most favorable spots, hoping to be noticed by residents who come by. In a proper center like one operated by St. Vincent de Paul in San Jose there is a lottery and everyone has the same chance at a job.
The San Jose center offers lessons in phone answering and some direction to appropriate social services.
“Then we will put out the call for volunteers to help us fix it up.”
Once the center is opened, Mancias said, dayworkers will be offered lessons in English and help with citizenship.
“This will benefit them and it will benefit us by making them more employable.” Mancias said hiring practices would be more practical and efficient.
“The gentlemen would sign up on a list and be given a number. The list would note any special skills that workers have to make it easier for employers to find somebody who can do their job. We (the center) would negotiate wages, hours and conditions of the job.” The center would ease the language barrier often cited by workers and their employers.
There are three types of organizational structures for these centers, according to Mancias. There is self-organization on the street, which is the current situation. There is self-organization in a building and there is the center which is run by a third party, which is what the St. Catherine’s committee intends to do.
“We would hire somebody to be there on a daily basis, say from 6 a.m. to noon,” he said, “to coordinate hiring and check documentation. This would protect the employer as well as the employee and provides a degree of safety for everybody.”
In the meantime the workers are out in the rain and the money gathers interest in the bank.
“It’s in God’s lawyers hands,” Chang said.
The St. Catherine’s Day Worker Committee welcomes volunteer labor, money and donations. Call Julian Mancias, 778-8686 to help.
