What day laborers are hired to do: the dangerous, the gross, the sometimes illegal
LOS ANGELES — They were not what you’d call the usual day laborer gigs.
No yard work. No installing doors. No laying down roof tiles on a hot summer day.
There was the person who paid several workers to stand in line for concert tickets. The one who wanted to hire a few men to just sit around with him, drink and watch some porn. And then there was the company that contracted day laborers to clean a former brothel, complete with a stripper pole, used needles and the scent of dead body.
These stories, recounted by laborers and organizers in Los Angeles County in recent days, don’t come close to the experience of four workers recently hired to dump trash bags picked up in Tarzana. First they were told the bags contained rocks. Then Halloween decorations. They quickly realized the heavy, squishy bags were filled with dismembered body parts.
As long as men and women in difficult straits have waited for work on street corners and outside home improvement stores, some have inevitably been hired to perform questionable, exploitative or just plain weird tasks.
“We know that all of us run the same risk,” said Cesar Beiza, 59, who has worked as a day laborer for seven years. “When we go out to work we don’t know what we’re exposing ourselves to.”
On a recent weekday morning, as the sun began to tinge the sky blue, about a dozen day laborers gathered at the Pasadena Community Job Center.
The men — in blue jeans and paint-spattered work boots — sipped Winchell’s coffee as they waited for the raffle that would determine the order in which they’d be offered jobs.
“Rifa, rifa,” Juan Dominguez called out at 6:15 a.m., shaking a can with yellow tickets bearing each worker’s name. Each pull determined the order of the 12 workers there so far.
When a job came into the center, which is run by the National Day Laborer Organizing
Network, the first person on the list would get dibs. Around these months though, work slows down and the jornaleros could wait hours for nothing.
After securing his No. 7 spot, Daniel Alfaro grabbed two cookies and coffee from the center’s kitchen. In his 15 years as a day laborer, he’s gotten most of his jobs through centers such as this one.
Here, like at day labor centers across the country, staff document the names of employers, their contact information and the jobs workers are being hired to do. Some of the most common include yard work, painting, moving and construction.
“It’s always better to be at a center than on the street,” 68-year-old Alfaro said. “Because here, we’re more protected.”
But strange jobs have sometimes come anyway.
Beiza recalled a time several years ago when he and two others were contracted by a demolition and cleaning company to clear out and clean a house in the San Fernando Valley.
The house smelled so strongly of a dead body that “a lot of people might have refused to go inside,” Beiza said. But they needed the $150 they would each make for the day.
“We live from day to day,” Beiza said. “If we work today we will probably not work tomorrow. We have to take advantage of the opportunity, but sometimes we put our lives and our health at risk.”
Once inside the house, Beiza said, it quickly became clear that it was a “casa de citas,” a brothel. There were condoms, pornographic DVDs and syringes strewn around the two-bedroom home. But most worrisome was a room that locked from the outside.
Inside were clothes, shoes and toys that apparently belonged to a little girl.
When they asked the owner what had happened inside the house, Beiza said, she told them she didn’t know and that she had only been renting it out. As Beiza and another worker, Jose Sevilla, moved a sofa outside, a syringe that was inside nearly pierced Sevilla in the neck.
That story ran through Beiza’s mind, after a staff member from the center shared a link to the Tarzana story with workers and warned them to be careful.
On Nov. 7, Samuel Haskell allegedly hired four day laborers to take away several black plastic trash bags, which weighed about 50 pounds each, from his home in Tarzana, according to authorities. In an interview with NBC4, one of the men said Haskell had tried to pay them $500 to haul away bags he first said were full of rocks, then later said contained Halloween decorations. But the day laborers told NBC4 the contents felt soft and soggy, like meat.
“When we picked up the bags, we could tell they weren’t rocks,” one of the workers said in Spanish.
After initially taking the bags, the men stopped their truck a block away, checked inside and saw dismembered body parts, including a belly button. The men returned the bags and the money and reported it to the police.
That same day, Haskell was allegedly observed and photographed a short distance from his home dumping a large trash bag into a dumpster. The next day, someone looking through that dumpster found a torso in a trash bag and called 911.
Haskell has since been charged with three counts of murder in connection with the disappearance of his wife and in-laws.
Pablo Alvarado, co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said his group is trying to track down the Tarzana workers in hopes of arranging — if needed — for them to get U Visas, which give immigrant victims of certain crimes the chance to live and work legally in the U.S. if they cooperate with authorities.
“It’s terrible what happened to them,” he said. “Day laborers are subjected to these types of things. Not murder, but very weird job assignments.”
Alvarado recalled serving as an expert witness in a case more than a decade ago, involving workers who were taken from a day laborer corner to care for a marijuana plantation.
They were blindfolded so they wouldn’t know where it was. They remained on the plantation for a long time, until they were caught taking care of the marijuana plants and accused of being the people running the operation, he recalled.