This is life at the bottom of the American economy, a $25-a-day cycle of looking for work, eating, sleeping and looking for work again.
This is a labor pool, where you can trade hard work for another day’s survival, and where no work means desperation.
Take a look around the dim waiting rooms where unkempt men gather before dawn: There is an assortment of winos and drifters, decent guys hit by hard luck and hard guys trying to act decent, the homeless and the hopeful.
Bud Collier calls himself “a professional tramp.” He drifted into West Palm Beach from Denver a few weeks ago, hoping to find work. Now he’s discouraged, and he and Frank Villagomez are trying to earn enough money to get to California.
Richard Bighom would prefer to call himself a roofer, but he is out of work. He is buying time until he can get into a Fort Lauderdale program for homeless veterans.
Steven Miller does not call himself anything. He is just trying to scrape up enough money to get a place to stay. He spends a lot of time staring into space.
Lester and Charles are elated because they showed up at 5 a.m. and scored a coveted weeklong job, shoving material around at a construction site. They will be able to pool their money to get a cheap hotel room instead of crashing at an $8-a-night rescue mission.
Outside, Ed Horton and a half-dozen other guys are cramming into the back of a pickup truck to join a crew fixing a ship at Port Everglades. Ed says he probably will just end up buying crack cocaine with what he earns.
Villagomez is leaning against the wall, dejected. There is no work for him today.
All of them say they are trying to break out.
— Every day, hundreds, even thousands, of people go to the two dozen or so labor pools scattered through Broward and Palm Beach counties.
These are people dressed in dirty jeans and T-shirts, looking for a chance to do a day’s work for a day’s wage. Almost all of them are men. Almost all of them are broke.
The work is manual — ditch-digging, cleaning up construction sites, shovel- and-broom stuff. The wage is meager — $4 an hour is the maximum most workers get, though the pool will charge $7 to $10 an hour for each worker’s services.
Labor pools are a sort of blender of the underclass. Everybody who deals with the poor knows about them. So do the people who are broke and on the street.
“They learn very quickly,” says Pat Mantis, director of the Cooperative Feeding Program at First Lutheran Church in Fort Lauderdale. “They know which ones pay the most. They know which ones are fairest.”
— Ricky Jones laughs bitterly about some of the jobs he has gotten out of labor pools.
“They say, ‘We got an easy job for you — just cleaning up.’ Then you get there, and they hand you a shovel and say, ‘Clean me out a ditch right here,”‘ he says.
Labor pools specialize in providing unskilled workers.
“It’s the stuff nobody else wants to do,” Mantis says.
Labor halls are a bastion of unfettered capitalism — the pay for the workers, and charges to businesses that use them, are based entirely on what the market will bear. Pay and working conditions must meet the same labor laws that apply to all employers.
Companies that use labor pools get workers with no strings attached. The labor pool covers the cost of insurance, and the companies don’t need to worry about driving up their unemployment insurance rates by hiring, then laying off, temporary workers.
“Primarily, they serve to take up the slack of a fluctuating need for labor,” says Mark Davidson, personnel director of Stiles Corp.’s construction division. “You get down to the close of a project, you need six or eight guys, maybe to hand-grade the site or sweep the parking lot.”
Companies such as Stiles do not want to waste the time of a $10-an-hour carpenter on menial work, so they call day-labor agencies, he says.
All sorts of companies around South Florida use day labor — construction firms, lawn-and-garden services, moving companies, manufacturers. The News and Sun-Sentinel Company uses day laborers in its mailroom, on its loading docks and to help clean up after press runs, employment manager Suzanne Morton says.
Most companies treat the workers well, labor-pool operators say. Some even end up giving permanent jobs to guys who started as temporaries.
But the operators acknowledge that some companies treat labor-pool workers as disposable people.
“There are some places that look at day laborers as nothing more than legalized slave labor,” says Bonnie Lavoy, manager of Labor World’s Fort Lauderdale branch.
Sometimes a labor pool will dispatch workers for general labor only to find out later that they were doing hazardous work, such as handling asbestos, or that they had endured bad working conditions, such as sites without toilets or running water, Lavoy says.
Her assistant, Dave Neekin, cuts in: “Yeah. The classic line is, ‘It’s just cleanup!”‘
— The guys waiting in labor pools before the crack of dawn seldom worry about what they will be doing if they get work. They are worried about what they will be doing if they don’t.
Yet, financially, they often are only marginally better off after working than before.
“You can’t win for losing at labor pools,” says Anthony Barnes, who is living on the streets of Fort Lauderdale.
The mathematics is brutally simple:
“You work in a labor pool, you just have enough to sleep, eat and go back there the next day,” says Bighom, the homeless roofer. “By the time you work eight hours, you’re lucky if you come out with a good $20. The majority of the shelters around here are $8. Then you get a meal, $5.” Tack on a couple more bucks for laundry, or a snack, or a new pair of socks, or a six-pack of beer.
“Then you’re broke again.”
Bob Bozzone, director of the Comprehensive Alcoholic Rehabilitation Program in West Palm Beach, says he has seen a lot of people try to break the cycle. Not many succeed.
“Once you’re in that system, it’s very, very difficult to get out,” Bozzone says. “That’s the trap.”
Take Bighom, for example: He injured his back when he was hit by a car while riding his bicycle. He lost his job, then his apartment.
His injuries have healed. But he cannot find work because he is living on the streets.
“I can get a job. But people go on appearance,” Bighom says. “I need a shave. I’m dirty. I smell.
“If I had a place, I’d have a job.”
Eventually, some people just give up. “They all realize that they’ll never get ahead,” says Mantis, of the church feeding program. “After awhile, they just exist.”
Hence the number of alcoholics and drug abusers who frequent labor pools.
Worker Ed Horton says matter-of-factly that he works at a labor pool to get money to buy crack.
“I smoke cocaine. That’s where the vast majority of my money goes,” he says. Labor pools usually pay daily, by check. At the end of the day, Horton says, he will cash his check and find a crack dealer.
“I’ll get me a couple boulders and smoke it up.”
The labor-pool operations say they do not send out any workers who are visibly drunk or stoned. They also say they know many of their workers are drug users.
“You’ve got a few guys, frankly, who come in here to earn just enough money to buy their drugs or whatever,” says Duane LaTour, manager of the Fort Lauderdale office of Tracy Labor. “Those are the guys that give everybody a bad reputation.”
The dopers and winos don’t always make good workers, LaTour says. Sometimes they are hung over, or they arrive late. Eventually, they start missing jobs and drift away because other workers are around to take their place.
“The people that want to survive, to get out of it, are here every morning at 5:30, 6 o’clock,” LaTour says.
— Phil Andrews says it seems that every time he turns around, another labor pool is opening. Somebody will rent a storefront, get a telephone to make some sales calls, put the word out on the street to get workers, and they’re in business.
“It’s a very lucrative business,” says Andrews, who manages Lauderdale Labor of Fort Lauderdale.
“We do 30 to 50 guys a day. Even as small as we are, you’re talking about a billing of $10,000 to $15,000 a week, of which the profit is 30 to 35 percent.”
Those numbers often lure new pools into business. And as tough as it is to keep track of the pools, it is tougher still to count the workers. Even pool dispatchers say they can only guess.
Labor World’s Lavoy says labor pools in Broward County probably place between 1,200 and 1,500 men a day. Palm Beach County pools place about 800 a day, Al Lavender of Labor World’s West Palm Beach office says.
The money for the pools is in that $3- or $4-an-hour markup, the difference between what the worker gets paid and what the pool charges.
The workers know about the markup, and it causes considerable bitterness.
“The guy’s paying the labor pool $6, $7 for the man, and the man is getting $3.35,” says Bighom. “That ain’t right.”
But labor-pool operators say the markups are justified.
Labor World, for example, tries to run with a 40 percent markup, says Paul Burrell, chief financial officer for the company. Out of that, the company must cover the overhead of its offices, insurance for the workers and salaries of its permanent staff.
When those costs are deducted, Labor World corporate director Larry Schubert says, a well-run pool has a 15 percent profit margin.
Labor World, the second-largest pool in the country, had 1988 sales of $30.9 million and expects to hit $56 million this year. The company, based in Boca Racon, is aggressively expanding to try to catch the industry leader, Tracy Labor, which is based in Lighthouse Point.
Labor World tells potential franchisees that they can make good money if they can place a few dozen men a day, Burrell says.
“Seventy to 80 men a day can get you pretty close to a million dollars in sales” each year, Burrell says. That is enough to turn a net profit of nearly $150,000 a year, he says.
— Yet profits do not guarantee praise.
West Palm Beach, for example, enacted a tough zoning ordinance in December that limits labor pools to industrial-zoned areas — a restriction Fort Lauderdale has long had. West Palm Beach has even offered money to existing labor pools to move out.
“We had vagrants. We had increases in crime” near some labor pools, West Palm Beach Mayor Pat Pepper Schwab says. Residents and business owners in nearby neighborhoods complained about noise, disruptive behavior, panhandling. The pools, Schwab says, “were a proven blight on the area.”
The workers say they’re used to being looked down on. “These places are known as ‘rent-a-bum,”‘ laborer Ed Horton says.
Workers say they are tired and angry at the image. And labor-pool operators say their workers are some of the best of the poor.
“Why do you think a guy would get up at 4, 4:30 in the morning to be to us at 5 to make $3.50, $4.50 an hour? Can he be all bad?” Labor World’s Schubert asks. “They show tremendous initiative.”
Others put the choice more bluntly: If not labor pools, crime.
“If they can’t get it working out of a labor hall, they’re going to get it somehow,” West Palm Beach laborer Keith Kalins says.
Still, there are bad operators, Schubert says — labor pools that strand workers at job sites, that play games with wage and labor laws, that will take any assignment, no matter how risky.
“We can’t change the image of our industry. I wish we could,” he says. “We have some businessmen in this field that worry only about the dollar. They’re the ones that are killing our industry.”
His company, he says, tries to do things differently, to treat its workers right:
“We look at our temporaries as our inventory. Without them, we’re out of business,” Schubert says.
— It’s another morning, a cold one.
Ed Horton showed up, as usual, in Fort Lauderdale, and got work.
Lester and Charles have not been heard from since they worked a couple of days on the construction job. Everybody figures they will drift in again eventually, broke and looking for a job.
Frank Villagomez’s patience paid off in West Palm Beach. He got a day’s work unloading a boxcar. He and Collier will be a few bucks closer to California.
Nobody seems to know what has happened to Richard Bighom.
Everyone has his own problems to worry about. It is time to earn another day’s survival.
