Day Laborers Fine Sign in Fruitvale

Day Laborers are a fact of life around Oakland.

You sometime see men waiting at known street corners.

Local residents or business people in need of some help, drive up, negotiate a fixed or hourly rate, give them a ride to and from the work site. Workers are paid in cash.

"Oakland, like many other cities around the Bay Area, used to have a publicly funded  center that supported day laborers like Carlos—unemployed, mostly undocumented men seeking day-to-day work in everything from carpentry to landscaping. The former Oakland day labor center served as an indoor gathering place, serving  breakfast and offering health clinic services, where workers would wait for employers to either pass by or call and request their services. It also provided occupational safety equipment and eye care. “A doctor came every Wednesday”" 1

"But in 2010 the center closed, a victim of city budget cuts. For the past two years, Oakland has been one of the few Bay Area cities without a day labor center. Now the city has offered a $160,000 grant to help open a new center." 1  [Does anyone know the status of this funding?]

"Fruitvale-based clinic called the Street Level Health Project, is also applying. In an effort to fill the gap the city left in 2010, the Street Level Health group began its own day labor program last spring, called the Oakland Workers Collective." 1

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