Female Day Laborers Gather in Brooklyn
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NEW YORK, NY More than a dozen Latina women, some blue with cold as they hopped from one foot to the other, stood huddled at the intersection of Marcy and Division avenues yesterday morning, at a triangle of Williamsburg sidewalk overlooking the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. Down the block, divided by an unspoken line, idled a slightly larger group of Polish women, a full spectrum from teenagers to senior citizens. Every so often, both groups stirred, drawn to a chasidic housewife entering the throng to negotiate a price and a time for her home to be cleaned. Snow, sleet, or rain, what is said to be the city's only female day laborer site often attracts more than a hundred women - almost always more cleaners than there will be jobs available. And it doesn't look like the women will be finding shelter anytime soon. Legislation introduced at City Hall to study the feasibility of creating job centers for the city's day laborers, who are estimated to number as many as 15,000, has been stalled for more than a year, and a local effort to relocate them to a neighboring church failed two years ago. "Before we could work 10 hours daily. Now 5 hours daily is good," Kasia, a slim and polished immigrant from Poland, said after three hours of waiting on a frigid early-winter morning. At 25 and almost fluent in English, she was one of the youngest and most educated women on the block. Still, like almost all of the cleaning ladies, Kasia was working illegally in this country and for that reason asked her last name not be used. "They should build a building for us," she said. "Standing here is the worst thing." Kasia and other women said that what sometimes made the job miserable was scrubbing the floor on their knees rather than using a mop, but that is the custom in households of the Satmar community. "Sometimes, we have a feeling like a slave," she said. One Latin waiting for work recalled her shock upon learning she would have to clean the floor with her hands. "I am sorry, I can't," she said she told the employer. "I felt humiliated, I had never cleaned like that. It had always been with a mop." But when she returned to the women at the site, she said, she "learned all of the women clean this way." One of the employers, Malka Weiss, 25, who stopped by the site yesterday with a toddler daughter in tow and pushing an infant in a stroller, scoffed at such criticism. To her, that type of scrubbing is simply the most effective. "The floor is much cleaner that way," Mrs. Weiss, who goes to the corner about once a week to hire someone, said. "I clean my floor that way." Like many other Satmars, a community of chasidim in Williamsburg who strive to live the way their ancestors did in Eastern Europe, Mrs. Weiss also shrugged off any suggestions that they have a responsibility to provide better working conditions for the women. "We don't ask them to be here," she said. " If they're there, they want to be there. Nothing keeps them back from standing inside." Day laborers began to congregate in front of a local Jewish women's placement agency more than a decade ago after they realized they could find work directly there, rather than through a third party. African-American and Irish immigrant women who undertook domestic work at the turn of the 20th century found work the same way, according to the director of the Center for the Study of Urban Poverty at the University of California at Los Angeles, Abel Valenzuela, but currently it is not practiced anywhere else in the country. "It's the first job when you come here. You can work every day from morning until afternoon and then you can look for work in the afternoon. Everybody knows about the place," Kasia said, citing the crumbling economy in Poland as her impetus to move to America. "The dollar is good, we like it, but the work is very hard." For the Latinas on the other side of the block, it's more frequently a job of last resort. Many are mothers supporting children either here or in hometowns in Ecuador, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. The economic downturn after the September 11 attacks left many without a job, particularly those working in the city's industrial sector. At 9:30 a.m. yesterday, a Queens resident, Doris Guzman, stood bundled in a red fleece jacket across the street from the rest of the women. She lost her job at a factory a few months ago, and it was then that Ms. Guzman, 25, who is supporting five children in Cuenca, Ecuador, began trying her luck on the corner. Last week she was hired, and this week the woman said for her to be there at 10 a.m. to work again. Despite her complaints about the cold and about cleaning on her knees, the pay of $8 an hour was more than the $5 she made sewing and cleaning clothes. Even with permanent legal status, she said, with no English skills there are no better jobs to be had. Ms. Guzman also realized she was lucky to get a job here, with the Satmar women preferring to hire Polish women. "Polish are the best, they're the most energetic," Mrs. Weiss said, to which a friend, pushing another baby carriage, nodded in agreement. Then she added, "Mexicans would settle for less when it comes to prices." Three years ago, Satmar leaders decided the women, then at a prime shopping location on Hooper Street and Lee Avenue, were a negative influence on the community and should be moved. Their manner of dress, such as pants and tube tops in summer, offended the Satmar sensibilities, and some thought it was inappropriate for the chasidim to be hiring women off the street. "The community was concerned because they were standing in the heart of the community and it was offending the people," Rabbi Yitzchok Glick, of the Central Rabbinical Congress, said. In 2002, after a communal meeting, Rabbi Glick told Newsday he supported the idea of moving the workers to a neighboring church. But that effort failed, and Rabbi Glick said he has not been involved and it is up to the workers to find a site. An organization that has been seeking to organize the laborers, the Latin American Workers Project, and the director of the Southside Community Mission, John Mulhern, led the effort to have them relocated to Mr. Mulhern's church, the Transfiguration Roman Catholic Church. "Some people said they would accept it, but then the workers were told they won't be picked up there," Mr. Mulhern said. "There's got to be something during this inclement weather when it's bitterly cold and rainy, some accommodation should be made for them to be in some place, whether it's a chasidic school or a community center." The beautiful Williamsburg library, recently reopened after a two-year renovation, could shift the dynamic. It may bring more Satmar traffic to the spot. It may also provide the cleaning ladies with a refuge in particularly bad weather. The branch librarian, Stephanie Brueckel, hasn't noticed any of the women coming in yet but said that she would encourage them to use the facility and that the library was considering purchasing Polish books. "Anybody can come into the library at any time as long as you're a member," she said. "We don't worry about whether you're documented or not." In the meantime, more women than jobs continue to wait on the corner. Kasia was gone yesterday, perhaps back in Poland or back at her waitress job - or just taking a day off on a day when the temperature dropped and most women went home without work. Whatever the reason, a new supply of women was there to take her place.
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