How do day laborers work?

[Recursion]

34. I've been on both sides of the equation

There was a 7-11 near my apartment where a lot of people would get work, and one early morning I was just kind of chilling out in front of it near a bunch of guys. I was in a paint-stained hoodie and jeans, and could probably pass for a light-skinned Hispanic person, so when a guy in a truck said "we need one more, $10 an hour, you up?" I said "why not?", since I needed money that day. After that, I'd do it every few weekends. I'd thought the other laborers would dislike a white guy doing the work, but nobody ever seemed to mind.

The basic implied contract is manual labor at a negotiated rate (generally a round dollar figure per hour, generally above minimum wage), paid in cash at the end of the day -- hirers who deviate from that can wind up wishing they hadn't.

It's pretty much like taking a "Gig" posting for odd jobs on Craigslist, except that instead of Craigslist you use a parking lot. Over the months I did it (I was in school and this was pretty much my only source of money) I saw there were some "regulars" who would get crews for contract work (if I understood the Spanglish of my co-laborers right), but since I didn't do construction I never got hired by them (except for one who really needed low voltage electrical, which I can do, but that wasn't a construction site). Mostly it was just guys who, to give some examples:

* needed what they were about to buy at Home Depot loaded onto their truck and unloaded at their house (they always brought us back to the 7-11 after; most of the guys didn't have a car, and neither did I). They'd often get coffee and donuts, too.

* needed mulch spread on their garden and a trench dug in their back yard

* Bought a ton of Ikea furniture but couldn't figure out how to assemble it, and anyways didn't want to carry it upstairs.

etc.

$10 an hour was pretty common (this was in DC in 2005 or so); the impression I got was that the savings they could have gotten for paying less wasn't worth the hassle of keeping small bills around. Plus most of the individuals who got people would also tip, say another $10 on top of whatever the deal was. (With the caveat that I'm a white, native-English speaker who's good at talking with people, so that tip may just have been for that.) Personally, I reported the income, but only because I needed to have officially earned X in order to get the EITC; no idea how many others did. The guys in the crew I got to know were a mix of citizens, green cards, and undocumented (it wasn't something people talked about much, though).

On the other side, when I was moving the last time I went to the same 7-11, hired four guys at $15/hour, had them load my stuff into the big shipping container, and tipped them $20 each on top of their wage. It was blatantly illegal but convenient (the mover I hired backed out three days ahead).

I'd say it's a mixed bag: there's exploitation and there's perfectly good work opportunities, but the laborer is left trying to figure out which is which. It's usually pretty hard manual labor, but at least the stuff I did was also basically completely unskilled. I'm sure the pay is worse once you leave DC, but there honestly if you're a young single guy with no kids and are used to being poor, it's a pretty decent way to get cash when you need it. But the "large crew" side of things, which like I said I never did, I've heard is a lot worse, though: an individual homeowner probably isn't going to stiff the four twentysomething guys who know where he lives now, but the contractor might.