Day laborers are the newest immigrant workers to start grassroots union organizing efforts in Los Angeles. Starting with committees on each street corner that set ground rules for seeking jobs, the Day Laborers Union harks back to union's traditional role as a social movement. PNS associate editor David Bacon writes widely on labor and immigration issues.

LOS ANGELES -- Los Angeles' newest union doesn't bargain and has no signed contracts. Its membership is fluid, and it seems more concerned with culture and sports than with Roberts Rules of Order. But it has succeeded in doing what no union has been able to do for decades -- organize the floating workers of the street corners.

A century ago, the radical Industrial Workers of the World prided itself on being a union for the "western floating workers" -- someone who rode the rails from job to job. The "Wobblies," as they were known, were the hoboes' union.

Today, it is the worker on the street corner, begging jobs from passing contractors, who is stereotyped for urinating on the sidewalk and harassing passersby. Almost everywhere day laborers -- street corner workers -- are immigrants, especially in Los Angeles. They are outsiders many times over -- insecure, marginalized, poor, often speaking little English.

Their vulnerability makes them an easy target for neighbors angry over the visibility of the poor, local businesses who accuse them of driving away customers, police who see them as a source of crime and complaints, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, who think they should just go back across the border.

On some corner labor sites on LA's suburban outskirts, that opposition gets pretty extreme. Last year in May and June, workers on a corner in Agoura Hills were chased up a hill, away from the street by deputies yelling racist insults. On a number of occasions, helicopters were used to chase workers.

"The force of the helicopters lifted them off the ground, causing them to lose their balance and fall down the side of the hill," according to Victor Narrow, attorney for the Coalition of Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles (CHIRLA).

Starting in 1989, nine southland cities and LA County itself passed ordinances prohibiting workers from getting jobs on the street.

In self defense, laborers began forming committees block by block, setting ground rules for a particular corner. With help from CHIRLA and other day laborer committees, they negotiate with local law enforcement to delineate a stretch of sidewalk where local contractors and employers can pull up in their vehicles and hire them. They agree on a minimum wage rate to avoid undercutting each other. They ban drinking and drugs.

Some Los Angeles corners have become so well organized that the city has funded vacant lots where workers can set up tables, hold classes, and start small gardens.

Antoli Garcia, a committee member from the corner of Pomona and Atlantic Avenues, notes that before his group began last spring, "we used to have a lot of trouble from the sheriffs, mostly because people were drinking while waiting for jobs. We also needed fairer pay and distribution of jobs. Contractors sometimes wouldn't hire me because of my age." Garcia is 57.

The committees have given streetcorner workers a new sense of dignity. "Looking for work was dehumanizing -- having to run after the contractor's truck to get a job," Pablo Alvarado remembers. "The employers would get out of their pickups, and come over and touch me to see if I was strong. Each time I got hired, I felt I was taking a job from someone else."

Building on the common culture of Mexican and Central American immigrants, the Day Laborers Union started a band, Los Jornaleros del Norte. Its theater group, which dramatizes the struggle to survive on the corner, performs on the corner. "One of the first steps we take is to set up a soccer team," says Alvardo, who now works with CHIRLA to organize more corner committees. Soccer teams help reinforce the value of cooperation in a very competitive environment."

The Day Laborers' Union is the most recent organizing effort among Los Angeles' immigrant workers. In 1992, workers who put up drywall in new homes struck, closing down most housing construction in Southern California for a year. The drywallers strike was an autonomous movement which involved closing down job sites and resisting immigration raids. When the Highway Patrol and INS cooperated in raiding caravans of strikers on the freeways, workers stopped rush hour traffic until the harassment ceased.

Drywallers allied themselves with the Carpenters Union, and won the first contracts achieved through grassroots organizing in the building trades since the 1930s. In 1995, the Carpenters and another group of immigrant construction workers mounted a similar strike, winning further contracts covering framers.

These efforts were followed by organizing drives among truck drivers in Los Angeles harbor, and gardeners throughout the LA basin. Both efforts were organized by associations of immigrant workers which, as independent contractors, were excluded from U.S. labor law protection. Both eventually sought union support.

Similar movements among immigrant workers have emerged in New York. On both coasts, these efforts are revitalizing unions -- including janitors, carpenters, machinists and laborers. The Day Labor Union is part of the same tradition, Alvarado says.