Dallas fills a void for day laborers but exposes larger problem

On any given day, in places like Vickery Meadow or Bachman Lake in Dallas, you will see dozens of day laborers desperately seeking to work. This manpower is usually hired for landscaping, painting or construction.

These workers and the contractors who hire them create informal networks that have been part of the Dallas economy for decades. However, day laborers are prone to wage theft and other forms of abuse. And employers don’t always find the skills they are looking for while neighborhoods often complain of loitering.

This is why a new $432,000 pilot program to help day laborers is filling an important void. The city, which has partnered with Workforce Solutions of Greater Dallas, will have two mobile units that will go to specific places where workers gather.

The city has been working to earn the laborers’ trust and will be collecting names, addresses and contact information, but also information about their skills. The mobile units will also provide free training by the Regional Hispanic Contractors Association and the Regional Black Contractors Association.

This centralized process will allow the city to put out information in English and Spanish about other resources like Occupational and Safety Health Administration rules or how to get a library card, city staff told us. The expectation is once the project gets going, more nonprofits will join and provide other services.

Workforce Solutions is acting more in an advising role and will be sharing learned lessons from experience with a labor center in Garland that closed in 2020. Dallas is also mirroring some of the success of the Day Labor Center in Plano.

These centers make sure there is trust between employers and workers. Those who do not get paid are directed to the Texas Workforce Commission to file a complaint, but most contractors who go through day labor centers want to follow the rules.

While it is a welcome sign that the city is looking for ways to protect day laborers to gather in safe environments and to make sure they are hired by contractors that actually pay them, they are also a symptom of our larger immigration problem.

In each of the three places the city selected, there can be up to 75 day laborers a day, and many are recent arrivals. These are some of the hundreds of thousands of people who arrive in the country each day. A strong economy and a labor shortage make sure that Dallas is a magnet for these migrants.

For laborers, the rules of supply and demand mean they can bring food to their families, but their unauthorized presence is a reminder of a broken system that has failed to provide a robust, and legal, guest worker program for the last decades that could help stem illegal migration.

The city has a “don’t ask, don’t tell policy” about migration status, but keeping these workers in the shadows is not ideal either. Unauthorized workers will always be subject to exploitation and for far too long this informal economy has become the status quo. This has to change.

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