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Monday, May 09, 2005

Illegal immigrants clean homes in Williamsburg

Women waiting for off-the-books cleaning jobs line up at corner of Division St. and Marcy Ave. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

On street corners all over the nation, men - many illegal immigrants - wait for construction, landscaping and factory work. But there are far fewer places where women wait, hoping for a day's pay.
Two of those places are in New York.

Outside the delis and newsstands at Eighth Ave. and 37th St. in Manhattan, Latinas wait to be hired for work in Fashion District factories or New Jersey warehouses. And at the corner of Marcy Ave. and Division St. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Hasidic housewives hire Hispanic and Polish women to clean.

"There aren't many permanent jobs left around here, so here we are," said one Ecuadoran woman waiting on 37th St. on a recent chilly morning. She, like others who stood nearby with their arms crossed, wore low-heeled shoes and dangling gold earrings.

There are 60 such "shapeups" for men in New York City and at least a dozen on Long Island, said Nadia Marin-Molina of the Workplace Project in Hempstead, L.I.

Women traditionally have found work through other means, such as agencies or newspaper ads. But about five years ago, labor organizers said, women started waiting for daywork.

In some ways, the shapeups are an American rite for new immigrants, who seek menial labor that doesn't pay well - but still eclipses what they would earn back home.

At the same time, they have become tacit components of the underbelly of the U.S. economy, which depends on undocumented cheap labor.

"African-American women used to stand on the corner in the Bronx waiting for housecleaning work. And Irish men used to stand on streetcorners waiting for work as day laborers," Marin-Molina said. "It's traditionally been immigrants."

Today's women laborers take the same leap of faith others before them have: At some point, they go off with strangers, not knowing what they will want them to do or if they'll be paid for their work.

Advocates say day laborers face many problems, including below-minimum-wage pay, pressure to work faster, and dirty or unsafe conditions. They often cobble together work hours, earning $5 to $10 an hour but with no insurance, vacations or job security.

Beyond that, some women day laborers have been sexually harassed and even raped, said Oscar Paredes of the Latin American Workers Project.

"These women are always afraid, afraid of losing their jobs, afraid of the police, afraid of anti-immigrant sentiment and laws," Paredes said.

In Farmingville, L.I., and other parts of the country, male day laborers have come under fire by residents who say their presence lowers the safety and property values of their communities. In Williamsburg, residents hire the women, but they've objected to building an official work center for them.

The female day laborers are hired for what jobs the Fashion District has left, mostly sewing and ironing. Others are shuttled by van to warehouses to pack CDs and DVDs.

In Williamsburg, they clean homes and tidy neighborhood stores. Margarita, a Mexican woman, said it's important to negotiate pay and hours in advance and to warn others if the employer doesn't pay.

"That way, they know they can't get away with that," she said. "Out here, you're your own boss."

A grueling 7 hours of scrubbing - for $42

I was climbing down from Mrs. G's fire escape when she thrust a small plastic cup of lemonade at me.

"Here lady," she said.

After more than four hours of cleaning her windows, walls and floors, Mrs. G still hadn't asked my name.

At 7 a.m. each day, women gather alongside the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to find cleaning work.

Recently I worked one of those jobs, waiting with women from Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Poland as Hasidic housewives and daughters contracted us to do the intense pre-Passover cleaning their Orthodox tradition requires.

I asked Margarita, a thin-eyebrowed Mexican woman sitting against one of the concrete barriers, how things worked, explaining that I was new to the spot.

I should start with two key questions, she said: How much do you pay, and how many hours are you looking for? The pay is usually $8 or $9 an hour, but with the holiday looming, there was enough work to be choosy. No one was working for less than $10 an hour, Margarita explained.

And, she warned me in Spanish, they are very strict about cleaning. "Everything has to be done just so."

Ten minutes into my wait, I had several offers.

One young girl offered me $10 an hour for a few hours. She gave me a slip of paper with her address on it.

When I showed Dionisia, a tall Dominican woman, she clucked her tongue and said, "Oh no, don't go there. She doesn't pay. It's a good thing you showed me that."

About 10 a.m., a woman approached me as I stood slightly apart from the group.

"You want to clean? You want a job?" she asked.

Yes, I said, and I followed her home. Inside her nearby apartment on Hooper St., she handed me a bucket, a rag and bleach and told me to bring a 6-foot metal ladder from her formal dining room into her kitchen.

For seven hours I washed her dishes, cleaned her windows and blinds and scrubbed her walls. I scoured the insides of her cabinets and wiped out greasy dust bunnies from the top of her refrigerator. I washed the back and sides of her dishwasher.

As I worked, she sat at her kitchen table, talking in Yiddish on the phone and to her sons, who passed through the kitchen for snacks without so much as a look in my direction.

She scrutinized my work, pointed to spots she said I'd missed, then instructed me to redo most of it. I plunged my hands into the cold water and bleach again to clean the same things two or three times.

After hours of climbing up and down the ladder, I mopped her kitchen floor on my hands and knees. I tried not to talk much, except to say, "Okay" in a manufactured Hispanic accent when I'd finished something or gotten a new task.

At 5:30 p.m., with no end in sight, my back and knees were weak and my hands were peeling. Exhausted, I made up an excuse about needing to pick up a child I don't have.

Mrs. G asked if I could work every Friday, then gave me a piece of paper with her name and address. She also gave me a chilled apple and stuck $42 in my hand and sent me off.

As I bit into my apple, I realized I had been a nameless, $6-an-hour bargain for Mrs. G - and no doubt a joke to the other women leaving their cleaning jobs. But I was thankful that the only house I have to clean is my own.

Note: The $42 was donated to the New York Women's Foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps low-income women and girls in the city achieve economic security.

Comments:
Here is another article:

HOOPER AND LEE, WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN<

Wordlessly, the negotiation has already begun. The Jewish woman, a member of the ultra-orthodox Satmar sect, looks tentatively at the Polish woman, approaches her uncertainly. The Polish woman ignores her, but monitors her advance out of the corner of her eye. The Polish woman has mouths to feed in her country. The Satmar woman needs her house cleaned. They come to do business on Williamsburg's south side, on the corner of Hooper and Lee.

"You busy, busy? You want to work?" asks the Satmar woman, looking a bit forlorn in her housedress, slippers, and wig.

The question begets a question: "How many hours?" asks Teresa, the Polish woman.

"Four, maybe five."

"How much you pay?"

"Seven."

"No, I charge eight."

"I pay seven, my regular woman is sick today."

"Bye," says Teresa, turning her back.

The Satmar woman works her way through the crowd of Polish women, but other potential employers are arriving: housewives, husbands in long black coats, even young girls—children, really—proffering scraps of paper with their grandmother's address. Demand is high today—the Sabbath begins at sundown; the local housewives have shopping to do, dinner to cook, numerous young children to care for, and a house that needs to be cleaned. Those who wait too long will have to settle for one of the brown-skinned women who stand near the light pole, speaking Spanish, or even Marie, the Haitian woman who sits by herself on a milk crate and is always the last one chosen.

The Jewish woman works her way back to Teresa, "OK. Eight," she says. "I pay eight." "No, I change my mind," says Teresa, and turns her back again, leaving the woman staring at her platinum-blond dye job, a stunned look on her face. Loud enough for the Satmar woman to hear, Teresa says, "She tell me four to five hours, that means three and a half. And she's a liar; I see it. I finish and she pays me seven, then we fight. You like the Jewish people? I hate them. When I see them on the street, I feel nauseous. She like a witch."

Teresa's attitude is not unique. Resentment is high between the Satmar Jews of Williamsburg and a hundred or so Polish day laborers who clean for them. A half-century after the war, the slaughter of their brethren burns the Jews like a live wire. Ask nearly any Satmar to define the neighborhood and he or she will tell you, "We're a community of Holocaust survivors." They're keenly aware that Poland's large Jewish population was annihilated during the war. Ask the Polish women how they like their work, and many ignore the question: "The Jews blame us for the death camps in Poland," they say. Echoing the Polish government's longtime position, they add, "It was the Nazis that killed the Jews. Not the Polish people."

"We want to be respected," the Polish women say, fairly seething as they talk about standing on the corner like prostitutes, about scrubbing someone else's floor, about the good jobs they had in Poland before the end of Communism. ("How can they say they are so religious? God doesn't want you to be so cheap about money," says one disgruntled woman.) Now the Poles are on the street corner, asking the Jews for a job, Jews with numbers tattooed on their arms, Jews for whom the names of Polish towns—Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor—are etched in memory. The irony is lost on no one.

Many of the cleaning women are divorced or widowed. They come to New York on tourist visas and so do not have green cards. The corner supplies work, friendship, and referrals—where to find an apartment, a doctor, or a cheap meal—and it keeps them off the government's radar screen. Most are of a certain age; some, like Kaya, are elderly. Her hair is thin and her teeth are bad. "I wouldn't be here if the Communists were still in power—everybody worked, we had free health care," she says, speaking through a translator. She first came to New York two years ago on a tourist visa. "The work was so hard, and I missed my family. I cried every night. I lost 20 pounds. They give everyone a false view of how life is in America," she says. A nervous breakdown sent her back to Poland.

She arrived home to find her children unemployed, her grandchildren unable to afford college. She remembers thinking, "My life is over, but my family still has their life ahead of them." She returned to Williamsburg, where she lives in a single room with three other women. Her share of the rent is $130. She makes about $1200 a month, never eats out. Worn-out dresses hang off her bony frame. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 2:30, she waits with the alcoholics and the infirm at the Williamsburg Christian Church for the free lunch. Every available dollar is sent home.

Her grandchildren are back in college. She pays for their education with 60 hours a week, scrubbing and dusting and wiping. She cleans the refrigerator gaskets with a matchstick, as she is asked, but won't scrub the floors on her hands and knees with a shmatte (rag), as the Jews request. She insists on using a mop. This costs her work and is a major source of tension between the Poles and the Jews. The Polish women speak almost no English. On a recent morning, a street corner argument went like this:

"No shmatte—mopo, yes," says the Polish woman.

"Yes shmatte, shmatte, no mopo," replies the Jewish woman.

"Yes, mopo, yes mopo. No shmatte," The Polish woman makes a face and points to her knees.

The Jewish woman makes a circular wiping motion. One last "Yes, shmatte," and the Polish woman folds, following her new boss sullenly down Lee Avenue.

The Satmars seem genuinely bewildered, even wounded by the Polish women's complaints. "We clean our own floors on our hands and knees; it's cleaner that way," says Sarah Stern, a local resident who has used Polish cleaning women for years. As for the wages: "They get off the boat and the next day they are making more than minimum wage. We usually pay them seven dollars an hour. We are poor people; the average family here has 12 children; many of the husbands make less than they're paying the cleaning woman. How can we pay them more?" A prominent local rabbi asks simply, "If they can make more elsewhere, why are they here working for us?"

They can't make more. In Greenpoint, home to New York's Polish community, "Everyone says, 'Don't go to Williamsburg. You'll make the least money there, you'll get stuck there, you'll never learn English,' " explains Tomasz Lubas, a social worker at the Polish & Slavic Center. House cleaning is the standard route into the economy for Polish women—they are scrubbing homes all over New York City. The younger women—and those who speak some English—work through agencies or word of mouth. They make $10 to $12 an hour cleaning homes on the Upper East Side or in Park Slope. Hooper and Lee is the corner of last resort.

All through the day the Polish women come and go from the corner, finishing one job and returning to find another. An hour before sunset, the sidewalks are filled with men in black coats, and the Sabbath warning siren blows, sounding out across the rooftops. The Polish women work more quickly now, finishing the last of their cleaning. If the sun has already set, and the Jews are proscribed from touching switches or machinery, they ask the cleaning women to turn on the lights and stove before they leave. The Polish women oblige, and then, with throbbing hands, pocket their money and head back to rented rooms.

 

to mindy:
I'm not saying its right, but in most places the cleaning services are more organized and professional, and there is more of a rapport between the customers and the cleaning staff.

This is not an isolated incident (as the article says about 37 St/8 Av, which I have witnessed myself). Freehold, NJ is very similar except it is mostly men looking for landscaping or construction jobs..they wait on the highway for a truck to pull over.

 

last time i checked 6 or 7 &8 dollers were more then the minimum
wage in the usa .paid in cash and
i dont think to much tax is paid with that money . so stop complaining there not exactly doing brain sugery.

 

HOW ABOUT ALL THE JEWELERY & SILVER THAT THATS MISSING FROM THE HOUSES HOW MANY TIMES WAS SHOMRIM CALLED & FOUND JEWELERY IN THERE POCKET AND THAY ARE STILL COMPLAINING.

 

Click here

 

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