Workers Step In to Keep Labor Center Open
By WILLIAM HAGLE

The national economic slowdown is taking a toll on the Laguna day-worker hiring center.

When center coordinator Irma Ronses started coordinating workers about 10 years ago, 45 to 75 workers showed up each day looking for jobs. During the week then, as now, contractors hired the bulk of the workers. On Saturdays a different pattern prevails, as it still does now, with local homeowners doing most of the hiring.

The center asked a $5 donation from contractors and $1 from each worker to pay Ronses, whose presence, demeanor and organizing ability smoothes hiring of workers hungry to feed their families.

First thing each day, she composes a list of workers along with their skills. When potential employers arrive at the outdoor hiring hall on Laguna Canyon Road, Ronses matches their job requirements to the skills of available workers.

But now, fewer construction jobs are proving a more potent threat to the center's longevity than either litigation or its appeal as a protest site to opponents of illegal immigration. Judicial Watch, a non-profit organization that pursues alleged government corruption, filed suit against Laguna Beach in 2006 on behalf of local residents Eileen Garcia and George Riviere, who hoped to shut the center down. Last November, a Superior Court judge rejected the allegations that the center was a violation of federal law or a waste of taxpayer funds.

But with the current slowdown in construction, some days the center draws as few as 20 job seekers, Ronses said this week. Adding to diminishing funds for the center, each worker's dollar donation would be refunded if they didn't get a job, she said. Ronses recently wondered how she would make ends meet after some days when she might net only $10.

That's when the laborers took the initiative, and decided to double their fee to $2 to keep Ronses at the center, according to her and her boss, David Peck, of the Cross-Cultural Council. The council is partly funded by a city community assistance grant. "Sometimes I think if we got a good size grant, it would be better," said Ronses, a Laguna Beach resident, who has earned the respect of workers by making orderly what can be a frenzied daily marketplace for labor. She finishes her normal day by 1 p.m.

"We do what we need to do to keep this place going," said day laborer Cruz Osorno, among the workers who agreed to the doubling of the expected donation. He and others were voluntarily using shovels and brooms to spruce up the site.

Some day laborers travel from Anaheim, Santa Ana and Costa Mesa, beginning their workday riding in on the earliest buses in order to arrive by the 6 a.m. sign-in to attain a higher spot on Ronses' list.

Day worker Osorno, formerly of Tlaxcala, east of Mexico City, drives in with his own car. He studied English for two years and his wife now studies English in Costa Mesa. Their daughter, a kindergartner, contracted leukemia as a toddler. She was treated at Children's Hospital of Orange County.

"It is one of the best in the country," said Osorno, who researched hospitals on the internet before bringing her to the facility.