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Whenever he can, Jose Marcelino sends money back to his family in Mexico. This holiday season, the 67-year-old day worker donated $100 of his earnings to support a week-long festival honoring a saint in his Mexican hometown.
Like many of his compatriots, Marcelino has found a foothold in the U.S. economy as a manual laborer. Sometimes he is a gardener, sometimes he is a digger and sometimes he helps people move things. The employment often is characterized by low pay and exploitative working conditions.
But that is not the case for Marcelino. He is afforded some protections through his association with the Day Worker Center of Mountain View, a non-profit organization that matches day laborers with employers, while also providing a host of other social, legal and medical services.
Since its inception in 1996, the Day Worker Center has matched thousands of day laborers and employers, with the idea of providing a fair and transparent exchange of services. As a collective, workers determine the hourly rate of their labor, and then relay this to employers, who hire them and pay directly in cash. There is no user fee for the workers.
“But it’s not just a job placement center, we’re a community,” said María Marroquín, executive director of the Day Worker Center. “We take care of each other.”
Every Monday morning, the workers come together to talk and make plans for the upcoming week, often staying past the meeting to hang out and help with tasks around the center. A list showed that 81 men and 27 women had expressed availability for jobs that day.
Jobs always take precedence, Marroquín said. But if workers are not employed for the day, then they are taking part in English language lessons, which are held four days per week, or participating in other kinds of training and leadership workshops.
For many day laborers, the center is a social hub, offering support and companionship outside of their working hours. A large number have been involved with the center for more than a decade, as in the case of Marcelino, who first joined in 2007.
“I learned English here,” Marcelino said in Spanish, adding that he particularly enjoyed playing Scrabble at the center with friends. The interactions also helped him learn American cultural norms, which made him a better worker too, he said.
While the center’s demographic tends to skew towards older men, women also are a part of the mix, with a lot of visibility in the kitchen. The center offers free breakfasts and lunches six days a week and is an opportunity for workers to practice their cooking skills.
Mountain View resident Evelyn Estrada first learned about the center from her husband, who came there looking for a job. When she got sick, the center helped her too, she said, prompting her to spend more time with the community. Since June, Estrada has been preparing meals for other workers. “The center is home. I feel supported by this work,” she said in Spanish.
The opportunities provided by the center have been invaluable for immigrants like Marcelino and Estrada. But there have been challenges for the center, particularly in recent years, as there increasingly are fewer jobs for manual laborers, Marroquín said. When employers are looking workers, they tend to pick the younger, stronger and more agile laborers, she added.
In response, the center has been offering training programs to help workers gain more skills and land better-paying jobs. The center collaborates with a number of community partners to provide these services. It also relies on funding to support the programs.
This includes donations from the Mountain View Voice Holiday Fund, an annual charitable giving drive that kicked off earlier this month and offers financial support to local nonprofits.
Every year, donations to the Holiday Fund are divided equally among a group of local nonprofits that serve people in need. The Voice and its Holiday Fund partner, the nonprofit Silicon Valley Community Foundation, absorb all administrative costs to run the fund, and all donations are tax-deductible.
For more information about the Holiday Fund, go to mv-voice.com.com/holidayfund. To give a donation online, go to embarcaderomediafoundation.org/holiday-fund/mountain-view. Checks can be made payable to Mountain View Voice Holiday Fund and sent to 450 Cambridge Ave., Palo Alto 94306. The Holiday Fund campaign will run through early January, with grants awarded in the spring.
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