Day Laborer Organizing

author : Jon Kempe topic : Oly IWW

by Jon Kempe

Day laborers in and around Olympia are finding it a little easier to get to work these days thanks to the Industrial Workers of the World. The Olympia IWW has launched a new organizing drive among day laborers centered around a beat up old red van. The van itself belongs to an old Olympia wobbly, the insurance has been paid by the local Unitarian Universalist church and the day-to-day expenses are paid for by donations from the workers getting transportation and from the Oly General Membership Branch of the IWW.

Day Laborers in every city and town make up the baseline of the workforce and are some of the most abused members of the working class. Transportation is often a major issue among day laborers, along with minimum pay, no work place health and safety, and companies that squeeze them for every dime. By providing transportation, the IWW can demonstrate that worker solidarity can be used to meet the needs of each worker. This helps working class organization grow from the bottom up.

Day laborers in Olympia, as elsewhere, have to be at the corporate hiring hall several miles outside of town early in the morning in order to get their job placements for the day. Pay starts when they get to the job site, providing their own transportation, and are paid the state minimum wage of $8.07 an hour, for which the company charges between $17 and $22 per worker hour.

Conditions for laborers are routinely deplorable. These workers, who often have nowhere else to turn for employment, are often disrespected and treated as dispensable persons with no recourse. For instance, Labor Ready in Olympia decided to close its bathroom and forces workers to go out back to relieve themselves.

Day laborers are unique in that so many of them are homeless. An estimated two-thirds of the workforce is without a house. Which means some must walk many miles at day break from their camps to the offices of the nearest labor shark.

The Oly IWW’s initiative to help organize the Day Labor workforce started with one man. Jesse Shultz came to Olympia to help organize poor and working people. Jesse has been a laborer since before many wobs ever entered the workforce. He was part of an organization drive in Maryland that won concessions from Labor Ready for not offering show-up pay to workers that were overbooked by competing Labor Ready offices. It was Jesse’s experience that brought the red van into being. Procuring the van is easily replicable; replicating the initiative of an organizer to start their day at 4:30 in the morning driving workers to hiring offices and job sites is not so simple.

Other branches may learn from the transportation organizing model. Day labor sharks, like Labor Ready, Labor Finders and Labor Works and others, employ millions of workers across North America in every community. They are some of the most likely people to get inside predatory industries and are often absorbed into the construction sector. It has always been the prerogative of the IWW to build working class organization from the bottom up; putting the red van in motion has been a great first step.