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'This is Poverty Row'

Jostling for jobs on Vancouver's Cash Corner.

Tom Sandborn 28 Feb 2007TheTyee.ca

Tom Sandborn is a regular contributor to The Tyee with a focus on labour and health issues. To suggest a story, send an e-mail to [email protected].

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Rudy on day two. Photo: T. Sandborn.

Under a weeping grey sky, about a dozen men huddle in doorways or hunch beneath umbrellas or improvised shelter along the run-down industrial block between 2d and 3d Avenues on Ontario Street on Vancouver's East Side. Cars and trucks cruise by slowly in the morning chill, occasionally easing to a stop.

As the rain falls, the waiting men rush out and talk to each driver in hopes he is one of the employers who regularly hire from the pool of low-cost day labour available on this block. The men call this stretch of industrial wasteland Cash Corner, and it has functioned as an outdoor hiring hall linking desperate workers to potential employers for well over a decade now.

One corner veteran told the Tyee that he had been coming there looking for work for nearly 15 years. He thought the custom began when a federal day-labour employment office at the corner shut down and men looking for casual work continued to come to the site.

This informal meat market plays to mixed reviews, both from the men who go there looking for a day's wages and from observers in the city's labour movement.

'Money for food'

"You have to run out into the street right away," Rudy said during a morning spent at the corner. "I didn't get out there fast enough and the guy in the car took some other guys before I could get to him."

Rudy is a stocky aboriginal man in his 50s. This is his second day at the corner. The first time out he got four hours of work moving furniture, and he is hoping for more work today. An experienced truck driver with air brake and first aid training, Rudy is currently unemployed and waiting for his employment insurance claim to be processed, a wait he has been advised will take up most of a month. In the meantime, he is grateful that Cash Corner exists.

"At least I got some money for food," he says.

Lucas, a 19-year-old with a scanty beard and merry eyes, offers a visiting reporter a toke from his morning joint and then over coffee discusses the Cash Corner experience.

"This is just my second week," he says. "I've got four days' work out of 10 so far. I think this has more long-term potential than Labour Ready. They take half of what you make and leave you with around eight dollars an hour. No way I'll work hard for that much money. But here you keep what you make. I've been working on houses that are being renovated."

'Extremely difficult to organize'

Lucas was not the only person at Cash Corner who saw the wait outside in the rain as a preferable option to the city's many labour contracting agencies. The Cash Corner guys are reluctant to get their work through an agency that takes a cut off the top of the wages they earn. (Labour Ready is only one of the many employment agencies that fill six pages of the current city Yellow Pages. Mike, who answered the phone at the company's Vancouver offices, confirmed that the firm pays labourers it dispatches to jobs between $8.00 and $9.50 an hour. He refused, however, to say how large an additional slice Labour Ready takes from the hourly rate paid by employers who obtain their day labourers from his firm.)

Commercial employment agencies and their bite of day-labour wages represent one downside to the casual worker scene in Vancouver, but there are downsides to the informal system at Cash Corner as well. Bill Saunders is a trade union veteran and current president of the Vancouver and District Labour Council. He says that the scene at Cash Corner reminds him of the bad old days on North American docks.

"Anyone who wants to understand this issue should watch the old Marlon Brando movie On the Waterfront, he said. "The foreman came out to a gang of workers and said 'You work...you don't.' It was rife with corruption and favouritism. You don't want a system like this. You want a seniority system that protects workers. People are at this corner because they're desperate.

"This is capitalism at its worst," Saunders said, "like the labour contractor system that still prevails in agriculture. A place like Cash Corner is an anomaly, an open sore of exploitation. I think it must draw on workers at the fringe of the labour market -- immigrants, older workers, people with irregular identification and paperwork issues. It would, however, be extremely difficult to organize these workers. To organize, you need a fixed workplace."

'I'm getting old'

Efrain, a grizzled 54-year-old Guatemalan immigrant who was waiting in the rain for possible work, is vividly aware of some of the disadvantages of day work for cash.

"Really, I don't like to work cash," he said. "I'm getting old. For people getting old, it is better to work for wages so you can get a pension."

Mark Olsen, business manager for local 1611 of the Construction and Specialized Workers Union (Labourers) agrees that it would be very difficult for unions to organize the workers at Cash Corner. Nevertheless, he has grave concerns about the situation at the corner.

"This serves the employers," he told The Tyee, "but it provides little to no protection for workers. If hurt on the job, they probably won't qualify for worker's compensation payments. This is a huge concern. The work these guys do is dangerous. They should have protection, and they should have the kind of medical, dental and pension benefits a union worker gets."

Union dispatch booming

Olsen went on to say that his union office at 3542 Kingsway was regularly dispatching labourers to job sites, and he encouraged those looking for work to come to the office.

"We're sending folks out on a regular basis," he said. "In 2006 we recorded the highest number of hours worked by workers we dispatched ever."

Some workers seeking day labour will no doubt take up Olsen's invitation and make the trek out to Kingsway to the union dispatch office. Many, however, will continue to show up at Cash Corner and wait for the slow-cruising vehicles with their promise of no questions asked and cash at the end of the day, despite the disadvantages and dangers attached.

Greg is a 15-year veteran of the corner scene, who has, when travelling, found work at similar informal settings in Seattle and Calgary. He has reason to be aware of the disadvantages, but still values what Cash Corner offers him.

"I popped hernia working for someone from here about six years ago," he said, "and the employer didn't care. All they care about is getting the job done. But most of the guys I work for are decent, and I get a lot of work unloading containers, digging drainage and cleaning out commercial buildings. At the end of the day, I'm not getting anything for it, really.

"This is poverty row. If I fall on a job site, I get nothing. But I'm getting too old to get work on high-rise construction, and this is an honest living.

"We hold the fort pretty good down here. See those garbage cans. Those are for our coffee cups and garbage, and some guys come down with brooms to clean things up on Sundays.

"For a poor man, this is good. I'd rather do this than go to an agency that takes half my wages. That's pretty shady. At least down here we can negotiate our wages a little."

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