The New York Times, February 4, 2007, Sunday

This Hammer for Hire The New York Times February 4, 2007 Sunday Correction Appended

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
February 4, 2007 Sunday
Correction Appended
Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section 14; Column 1; The City Weekly Desk; Pg. 1


HEADLINE: This Hammer for Hire

BYLINE: By JOHNNY DWYER

BODY:


ON a bitterly cold Thursday morning last month, a construction worker opened a steel gate and entered the windowless storefront of an apartment building in Morrisania in the Bronx.

It was 5:58 a.m. The moon still hung like a lone light bulb over Bill Rainey Park across the street, illuminating a wreath of flowers marking the spot where a man had been stabbed to death on Christmas Eve. As the worker opened the gate, its clatter shook the cool silence along Dawson Street.

Within minutes, more people converged on the building. Some had just awakened from naps in their idling cars. Others emerged out of the darkness, also headed toward the block's only lighted doorway. Inside the building was the headquarters of United Hispanic Construction Workers, where its members gather in hope of finding a job for a day, a week or a month.

United Hispanic is what is known as a coalition, one of the dozens of minority organizations that try to shoulder their way into the construction trade. Forged during the idealism of the 1960s, and later exploited in many quarters by opportunists who have tainted much of the field, the coalitions were born to help disenfranchised laborers get a piece of the pie.

With New York enjoying an unprecedented building boom, the pie is particularly big these days. According to figures from the New York Building Congress, a consortium of contractors, developers, architects and others in the industry, there are 123,000 jobs in construction in the city -- almost 15 percent more than in 2004 -- and the members of United Hispanic Construction Workers are determined to land some of them.

As the group's members assembled inside the hall, two of the coalition's vans pulled up to the curb. Daryl Mackey, a husky 34-year-old who works as a field representative for the coalition, hopped out of one of them. His boss, David Rodriguez, the field director for United Hispanic, hollered out to him: ''Yo! D! You ready to work?''

As Mr. Mackey, grumbling, made his way inside, Mr. Rodriguez added, ''Early bird gets the early worm.''

The coalition concept was born in Harlem in the '60s. While its general goal was to secure construction jobs for minority workers, its particular focus was on job sites in workers' own neighborhoods.

What is seen as important is not so much the type of job as the size of the paycheck. For many workers with only a high school degree, the pay can be transformative. Union laborers, the least skilled among the construction trades, make $47.42 an hour. Those who join the union also receive benefits and credits toward retirement. Even the nonunion laborers with United Hispanic, Mr. Mackey said, will not work for less than $10 an hour and often command much more. These levels of compensation are a far cry from the world of the minimum wage, even if the state minimum did rise to $7.15 an hour on Jan. 1.

This year, $21 billion will be spent on construction in New York, an increase of nearly 30 percent over four years ago. But in sharp contrast to this robust figure is the magnitude of unemployment in the city's minority areas compared with the city as a whole. In 2005, for example, when the city's unemployment rate was 5.9 percent, blacks and Hispanics were enduring ''recession level'' unemployment rates of 8.7 and 7.0 percent, according to the Community Service Society of New York, a nonprofit group concerned with issues affecting low-income people.

At the same time that construction jobs are abundant, the shadow of corruption continues to darken the coalition world. Last September, the Manhattan district attorney, Robert Morgenthau, filed charges of racketeering and extortion against four leaders of two Brooklyn-based minority coalitions. These are the latest in a series of indictments by Mr. Morgenthau's office involving coalitions over the past 20 years.

But there are still jobs to be had, and the members of United Hispanic are setting out to find some. Pursuing a Paycheck

Each weekday United Hispanic workers ''shape'' -- search for work -- by driving throughout Manhattan and the Bronx and visiting job sites.

''We the only ones that come out this early,'' Mr. Mackey said. ''We meet contractors when they're just getting to the job.''

With the vans still parked in front of the coalition office, Mr. Mackey climbed into the driver's seat of one of them and addressed the 13 workers crunched inside.

''Hey, fellas! Listen up!'' he said. ''We all got to stay together when we get out in the field. We don't want to split up. We try to keep everything tight in case somebody tries to attack us.''

On the floor of the van behind the driver's seat sat an olive duffel bag. Inside were a dozen pick handles, rods of maple slightly larger than an axe handle.

''We carry these because we recognize that we're in the ghettos and we recognize that there are people out there who don't like us,'' Mr. Rodriguez had said earlier when he carried the bag out of the coalition office. ''So we need these to defend ourselves.''

For coalitions, labor violence is a real threat. This coalition has been involved in three significant brawls with rival coalitions at Manhattan job sites in the last 15 years; one ended with a United Hispanic member shooting two members of a Brooklyn group.

Shortly after sunrise, Mr. Mackey guided his van underneath the Bruckner Expressway toward Manhattan. On a curb at a gas station near 148th Street, a group of more than a dozen laborers waited in the cold.

When a rider suggested that the workers were probably illegal immigrants willing to take lower wages, Mr. Mackey replied: ''We ain't knocking them. Everybody got to eat.''

The day's mission was spelled out in a handwritten list of 15 job sites stretching from 156th Street in the Bronx south to ground zero. The list was United Hispanic's market analysis, culled from the collective intelligence of its leaders as they move from job site to job site.

As he drove, Mr. Mackey pointed to a fence that had sprung up at 138th Street and Bruckner Boulevard, a sign of impending construction. He jotted down a note on a folded piece of paper.

The city has grown thick with such signs recently. Each concrete mixer blocking traffic, each crane looming over the horizon, means a potential paycheck for United Hispanic members.

At his first stop, a warehouse at 47th Street and 11th Avenue in Manhattan, Mr. Mackey and a colleague strode past the disapproving glare of three union members manning a large inflatable rat, a sign of a nonunion work site.

Mr. Mackey climbed a dusty interior stairwell searching for the foreman. A carpenter guided them to a utility elevator, and on the fifth floor they found a worker in a wood-paneled room outfitted with three folding chairs and a space heater.

Mr. Mackey greeted the worker with a smile, and soon the United Hispanic field representative was on the phone with the foreman. Mr. Mackey learned that the few workers on site were prepping the building for demolition -- the sort of work that is ideal for his members.

''He said just give me a week and he'll do something,'' Mr. Mackey said. ''As big as this building is ...'' he added hopefully, implying there would be a lot of jobs.

As the shape van wound down to ground zero and back to the Bronx, a picture of construction employment in the city emerged: the sites with a majority of nonwhite workers were nonunion jobs, and the mostly white sites were union locations. But every visit followed the same script: a handshake, a smile, and a handing over of United Hispanic's card.

By the time Mr. Mackey returned to the shape hall shortly after noon, several members were snoozing in the back of the van. No members got work that morning, but that was not the shape's sole purpose.

''I could have sat in the office and got the boss on the phone,'' Mr. Mackey said. ''We got to always come out to see what's going on.'' In this industry, familiarity breeds opportunity.Idealism, Indictments

Jim Haughton is the last of the city's original coalition leaders. A wiry man with combed-back silver hair, Mr. Haughton, 77, helped to found a group called Harlem Fight Back in 1964, shortly after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The group sought to use the energy of the civil rights movement to open the historically white construction unions.

Mr. Haughton set up in a storefront at Fifth Avenue and 125th Street, where he and the other founders of Harlem Fight Back began organizing demonstrations, going to court and ''shaping'' black workers. ''Thousands of them began to knock on the doors and say, 'We want construction jobs, we got skills that are required already,' '' Mr. Haughton said.

The effort succeeded. ''Black men increased their share in the construction labor market the most during the period from 1970 to 1980,'' said Francine Moccio, director of the Cornell University Institute for Women and Work. ''The 1970s was a time of very strong activism and direct action on the part of black organizations.''

Beginning in the mid-'70s, however, some corrupt coalitions arose. In Dr. Moccio's words, ''They would bust up the construction sites at night, and then they'd call the contractor the next morning and offer them protection.''

The corruption allowed critics to dismiss the movement's principal argument: that coalition members wanted jobs. Moreover, Dr. Moccio said, the criminal activity ''weakened the foothold that blacks had made in the industry.''

Louis Coletti, president and chief executive of the Building Trades Employers Association, a contractors' group, expresses a view of the coalitions that is widely shared in the industry. ''They're extortionists in most cases,'' he said. ''In most cases, they do not serve the people they purport to.''

Labor work is a rough-and-tumble world. Mr. Rodriguez -- himself a former gang member who spent four years in prison on a 1998 conviction for tax fraud related to a security company he runs -- was included in a sweeping set of 31 coalition indictments in 1993. He was acquitted.

In any event, Mr. Haughton said, United Hispanic is a solid organization. ''They're a very consistent group,'' he said, ''well organized and very effective at getting their members work. They're really doing a great job.''Under the El, a Job

When a coalition succeeds, it serves people who are often scrambling for a foothold in life.

One such person is Lateef Legree, a muscular 26-year-old from Brownsville, Brooklyn. Mr. Legree returned to the neighborhood in 2000 after serving two and a half years in prison for attempted robbery, and as an ex-felon without a high school diploma, he faced seemingly insurmountable challenges in finding a job.

Mr. Legree visited the office of a coalition in Brooklyn, in a building on Livonia Avenue under the el, and put his name on its roster. It was a good move. The coalition, he said, ''got me a job pretty quick.''

''I was making $8 an hour,'' he said. ''He had me working with Chinese people. Fixing buildings, renovating buildings.''

Matters improved still more. Mr. Legree moved to a job at Public School 150, just across the street from his apartment at Brownsville Houses. It was at that job that he received his ''book'' -- became a member of a laborers' union.

But the work did not last. Mr. Legree was laid off, and he returned to his coalition and asked for help in appealing the dismissal to his foreman.

According to Mr. Legree, the coalition leader ''came the next day and spoke to them and said: 'There's no way in the world you laying him off. Look at all these white guys. The guy lives across the street.' ''

Mr. Legree continued: ''So they hired me back.''

The intervention was critical because of what the coalitions claim is the ''first fired, last hired'' phenomenon. As Mr. Rodriguez explained, ''If they join the union, it doesn't mean that the union is going to go out and hustle for them, try to get them a job as hard as we do.'' For that reason, it was essential that Mr. Legree's coalition seek to reinstate him. Barbells and Timberlands

On an afternoon two days before the van trip, Mr. Rodriguez got a call from a contractor seeking six laborers for a job the next morning in nearby Parkchester. He instructed Mr. Mackey and another field representative to gather members from the hall.

Five men shuffled into his windowless office. ''All right, everybody here got their Social Security and ID?'' Mr. Rodriguez asked. Each man filled out a slip of paper called a referral card, then signed his name in a green binder.

Ricardo Bullock, a 46-year-old laborer nicknamed Big Rick, meandered into the office.

''Hey, you don't want to work?'' Mr. Rodriguez asked. ''Twenty-six dollars an hour.''

A smile spread across Mr. Bullock's face.

''Aw, hell, yeah, I want to work,'' he said as he stepped up to sign the book.

On the day of the shape, after the vans returned, about 50 workers convened in the shape hall. One corner there serves as a graveyard for a handful of exercise bikes; in another, barbells line the floor beneath weight benches. A man hawking pornographic DVDs approached some workers playing dominoes. Along the wall, a few coalition members sipped Courvoisier from plastic cups.

The audience was largely black and Latino men, and five women, ranging in age from late teens to early 50s. Most wore the construction worker uniform of Timberland boots, dusty jeans, plaid flannel shirts and pumpkin-colored Carhartt jackets. Some wore Yankee caps; others had Muslim skullcaps or Rastafarian tams.

''Yo! Yo!'' someone shouted. The meeting began.

Mr. Rodriguez began to address the crowd with a mixture of corner slang and activist lingo.

Members are not required to attend this meeting, which coincides with the Thursday payday for most city construction workers. It is an opportunity to relax, talk business and pay dues.

For Mr. Rodriguez, it is a chance to address pressing issues. This week, the topic was the work ethic.

''There's no such thing as a $10-an-hour pace and a $33-an-hour pace,'' Mr. Rodriguez said. ''Nobody's giving money away. You accept the card. You go to work.'' He flexed his arms to punctuate his words. ''And then five, six, seven years, you making top dollar like some of our members have done. It can take you 10 years to get in the union, and you work on $10-an-hour jobs, $12-an-hour jobs, $15-an-hour jobs.''

Mr. Rodriguez added: ''It's not going to happen in one day, one month, one year. Eventually, you will get to where you want to be.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com

CORRECTION-DATE: February 18, 2007

CORRECTION:


An article on Feb. 4 about efforts by minority workers to find jobs in construction referred incorrectly to the educational background of Lateef Legree, who was looking for work. Mr. Legree earned his G.E.D. while in prison; he is not an ex-felon without a high school diploma.

GRAPHIC: Photos: MAN WITH A VAN -- Fifteen job sites were listed on the workers' handwritten itinerary for the day, from 156th Street in the Bronx south to ground zero.
DAWN SHIFT -- Workers gathered one day last month at their Bronx headquarters before trolling for construction jobs. (Photographs by Robert Stolarik for The New York Times)(pg. 1)
NO GO -- The United Hispanic workers got bad news -- no jobs -- at a site on East 189th Street in the Bronx, left, and then relaxed, above, after returning to their headquarters.
FACE TIME -- ''We got to always come out to see what's going on,'' said Daryl Mackey, near left, with the foreman on a demolition job at 11th Avenue and 47th Street. (Photographs by Robert Stolarik for The New York Times)(pg. 8)