A Day in the Life of an SF Day Laborer: Waiting for Work, Struggling to Get Paid
A jack of many trades sleeps under Highway 101 and keeps falling through the cracks of what appears to be a heated market for construction.
On the first Saturday of March, Jorge Florencio Sierra Mendoza’s paycheck bounced. He’s owed $3,780 for roughly four weeks of construction work that he did for a contractor based in Millbrae, south of San Francisco’s airport. The following Monday, when he and an advocate from Dolores Street Community Services went to get a new check at the contractor’s house, no one answered the door.
“It’s been two, three months, and he still isn’t paying,” Sierra Mendoza says in Spanish.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a startling labor shortage. Many white- and blue-collar workers with in-demand skills have benefited, but day laborers like Sierra Mendoza are a stark exception.
Before the pandemic, Sierra Mendoza could count on a steady stream of construction gigs, as well as painting, moving, or gardening work. But those jobs are rarer now, and some employers are cutting corners to save costs.
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Nearly $4,000 in missing wages can pinch anyone. But the situation is particularly acute for Sierra Mendoza, who recently became homeless and is living under a freeway in San Francisco. Other than a Clipper card, he has nothing in his wallet.
There are at least 500 day laborers like him on any given day in SF, waiting outside of home improvement stores, gas stations, and on street corners, says Francisco Herrera, co-director of the Day Labor Program at Dolores Street Community Services.
Herrera is currently working on behalf of Sierra Mendoza and three others who say they’ve had wages stolen. It’s just one of the many challenges Herrera tackles as an organizer for the predominantly Latinx men and women who work without formal employment agreements. Many are struggling with housing insecurity, and since the start of the pandemic, twelve workers affiliated with the Day Labor Program have died of COVID-19 or drug overdoses.
Herrera concedes that problems like wage theft and housing insecurity are nothing new: “It’s always been bad.”
Market frothy, work spotty
Sierra Mendoza typically stands with a few others in the corner of a gas station at César Chávez and South Van Ness streets. He is stout, and his work boots and no-nonsense jeans give away his profession. Today he’s dipping his fingers into a take-out container filled with beans and tortillas. Next to him, another man sits and smokes a joint drawn from a plastic tube.
Everyone banters in Spanish while alert, waiting for a pickup truck to slow down. The moment that happens, they exchange eye contact, and one person elects to rush to the driver’s window for a quick conversation. If it’s a good one-person job, the worker jumps into the vehicle. Other times, that person will negotiate with the driver, bring other workers to help, or walk away if the wage is too low.
Walking away is less of an option these days. Herrera has no legal authority to bargain on workers’ behalf, but he still tries to encourage employers to pay $25 per hour. According to day laborers interviewed by The Frisc who wait at the gas station and along other street corners on 26th Street, the rate is really $20 an hour. Some admit that they will take $18 now that there are so few jobs.
The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred many families to move into more spacious homes or remodel, but the construction frenzy seems to translate into more jobs for some workers more than others. In the Mission, day laborers are left out.
Nationally, residential construction workers have seen a 7 percent pay increase over the past year. That includes plumbers, electricians, masons, and carpenters, said David Logan, a senior economist with the National Association of Home Builders. In California, the prevailing wage for a mason is $41 per hour, an increase of nearly $4 an hour since 2019.
Sierra Mendoza has been laying concrete foundations for more than 18 years, but he’s probably not seeing a wage increase because of something called “cost-push inflation,” Logan explained. Companies on a budget and dealing with inflation — like the soaring cost of lumber — might have fewer dollars left over for wages. Unionized and highly specialized workers who can demand higher earnings get paid out first, leaving an even smaller pot of money for day laborers. Logan said that day laborers should also be seeing an uptick in wages when they do get work, but on the ground in San Francisco, that couldn’t be corroborated.
“There’s less work,” says Herrera of Dolores Street Community Services. As a result, he explains, contractors can see how many day laborers are waiting on street corners and then negotiate wages down.
‘On July 25, my dad will be 100 years old, and my mom is on dialysis.’ — Jorge Florencio Sierra Mendoza, explaining that the wages he hasn’t received from his work would help pay his parents’ rent and bills.
Sierra Mendoza generally likes the work, but says he is tired of chasing down his pay. In July, he started working for an intermediary who would set him up with different gigs at mansions across the Bay Area. He laid foundations, set up fences, and built decks in Hercules, Millbrae, Palo Alto, and San Bruno. But as the jobs moved from five to six days a week, Sierra Mendoza noticed that his pay wasn’t adding up. By the time he quit on Christmas, he realized he was missing four weeks of pay. (The Frisc attempted to contact the intermediary about Sierra Mendoza’s claims, but the person could not be reached.)
Bringing it back home
When the pandemic stay-at-home order was first put in place in March 2020 and work dried up, Sierra Mendoza’s partner supported him. For nine years, they had been living together on Harrison Street in the Mission. When they separated last summer, he became homeless.
As many as a third of day laborers affiliated with Dolores Street’s Day Labor Program are experiencing homelessness, according to Herrera, who says it’s become more complicated to help steer them toward shelter. In some cases, he has referred workers to the authorized tent site on 26th Street and South Van Ness.
Sierra Mendoza spent some time in a shelter at 14th Street and South Van Ness, but he found the lack of flexibility frustrating: “I didn’t like it. If you want to leave for a little bit, you have to sign. If you want to leave again, you have to sign again.”
For the past few months, he’s been living in a small encampment underneath a bridge by the 101 freeway. He has a table, a makeshift stove, a pan to cook, and a bag of rice. His table is covered with salvaged items from the street, like blue surgical face masks and a travel-size can of deodorant. Across the street is a playground where he likes to sit on the benches and use the public bathrooms.
“It makes me embarrassed to say it,” he remarks about his new living situation. His parents in Hayward would be upset if they found out, but he says that he would rather live in San Francisco than in the East Bay because the employers he meets in SF pay more. He has started to invest in his living space too, picking up trash nearby and installing tarps to protect his shelter from the wind.
A pair of SF supervisors have crafted legislation to clamp down on wage theft in construction, but it’s early in the process and would only apply to building projects in SF proper. In other words, it won’t be able to recoup Sierra Mendoza’s pay.
That money was supposed to support his parents, Sierra Mendoza tells The Frisc: “On July 25, my dad will be 100 years old, and my mom is on dialysis.” They pay $2,300 on rent, and Sierra Mendoza is committed to help. A few months ago, he also sent money back to his son in Oaxaca, but none of that is possible now. His wallet is empty. Herrera had planned to cash the check and then pay Sierra Mendoza, who lacks a bank account.
It all comes down to money: money he is owed, money he needs to send to others, and money he isn’t making. But that’s only a means to his own freedom. “I’d like to be able to go wherever I want” — he pauses for a deep breath — “to Napa, or to go crabbing in Half Moon Bay.”
It’s been four years since he’s been down the coast, but if work picks up and he can get his unpaid wages, he’d like to go back soon.
Adam Echelman is a San Francisco-based writer and nonprofit consultant.
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