Day Laborers

Day laborers are immigrant men who seek daily employment on street corners, often next to home improvement stores and other venues trafficked by contractors and do-it-yourselfers. The combination of a strong construction market and rising undocumented immigration powered the growth of day labor through the 1990s. Although part of the underground economy, day laborers were some of the most visible immigrant workers, standing on the corners in affluent communities to find jobs. Over the next decade, they became the target of legal backlash, with more than forty cities in the greater L.A. area passing anti-solicitation ordinances making it a crime for day laborers to solicit work from the street corner. This chapter examines the coordinated legal and organizing campaign to challenge these ordinances led by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). The campaign challenged local jurisdictions in the greater L.A. area that actively enforced anti-solicitation ordinances. The strategy developed by MALDEF and NDLON focused on organizing day laborers at enforcement hotspots into committees that served as plaintiffs in federal court lawsuits claiming that ordinances violated laborers’ First Amendment right to seek work. The campaign thus adopted a libertarian, rather than an anti-discrimination, legal frame. This frame was used to build precedent toward the end goal of invalidating the most aggressive ordinances: those modeled after Redondo Beach’s pioneering 1987 law banning solicitation in any public right-of-way, including sidewalks. The chapter charts the trajectory of this test-case strategy, which culminated in a seminal 2011 federal appellate court decision striking down Redondo Beach’s ordinance and thereby clearing the way for day laborer solicitation in public space regionwide.