As asylum seekers navigate the day labor sector, labor organizations are stepping in to help them advocate for their rights.
By Erika Perez
Adriana Valencia, left, and Marielis Yepez, right, look for temporary work outside a Home Depot in New City on April 23, 2024. (Talia Sprague/for City Bureau)
On a cold, snowy morning in mid-March, Marielis Yepez, 30, and Adriana Valencia, 32, search for one particular contractor in a sea of customers loading their cars at a Southwest Side Home Depot. The pair are the only women among a group of more than two dozen men hoping to find a day’s work near the parking lot’s western entrance.
The contractor had promised the women $200 each, approximately $5 per hour, for a week’s worth of construction work, they said. But now, the contractor is gone, leaving the two Venezuelan mothers out of luck and without pay.
“I adapt to the system. That’s what I’ve been taught,” Yepez said. “And you come here to work on whatever is available. That is the reality for many of us.”
Aside from being robbed of their wages, the women and other migrant workers at the Home Depot say security is unlawfully interfering with their rights to seek work. They are only able to look for work within a 20-foot-radius area within the parking lot, they said..
Any day laborer seen outside that area is intimidated by security, the workers say, making it impossible for Yepez and Valencia to search more broadly for the contractor who owes them their wages.
City Bureau spoke with more than a dozen migrant day laborers who said wage theft, sub-minimum wage rates and clashes with Home Depot security personnel — including off-duty Chicago Police Department officers — have made it precarious for them to look for work.
For decades, Chicago immigrants have turned to informal gigs, often solicited on street corners or in Home Depot parking lots, in hopes of earning money to survive.
“Day laborers are crucial to the functioning of the building and the beauty of our city,” said Miguel Alvelo Rivera, executive director of Latino Union of Chicago, a community-based worker center that organizes day laborers and household workers.
“A lot of what makes Chicago the city it is has been done by day laborers, who have to seek work at corner hiring sites where they expose themselves to 100-degree-plus weather, negative-20-degree weather, rain storms [and] snow, because we currently do not have a system to ensure that work can be guaranteed as a right,” he said.
Unlike publicly funded hiring halls in California and Texas, where day laborers can safely connect with contractors and negotiate pay rates, Chicago’s day labor industry is rife with wage theft, unsafe working conditions, physical violence and exploitation, City Bureau found.
People entering the day labor sector don’t always know about minimum wage laws. Some get paid far less than they were promised at the start of the day, while others might finish a full day of work and end up with no pay at all, organizers and workers said.
“One of the ways to really prevent and reduce these abuses in these situations is if you regulate and formalize day labor work,” Alvelo Rivera said. “And if you connect people and create spaces for them to safely seek jobs.”
Recent national data on day labor work is hard to come by; a rare national study on the topic took place in 2006 and surveyed 2,660 day laborers. The study found that nearly half of all day laborers had experienced wage theft in the two months prior to being surveyed. Nearly half, 48%, had experienced underpayment by employers during the same time period, according to the study.
A 2021 survey of 411 day laborers in Denver found that 62% of those workers had experienced wage theft.
Adriana Valencia, left, and Marielis Yepez, are some of the only women looking for work as day laborers outside a Home Depot in New City. (Talia Sprague/for City Bureau)
‘we don’t feel safe when we go out to work’
Yepez and Valencia began working as day laborers as soon as they arrived in Chicago last year.
Yepez left her 10-year-old daughter and two sons, ages 13 and 4, behind in Venezuela. Valencia came to the United States with her daughters, ages 1 and 11.
Yepez and Valencia don't qualify for Temporary Protected Status, a federal immigration program that allows people to stay in the United States and get work permits when it's unsafe for them to return to their home countries. For Venezuelans to qualify, they must have arrived in the United States on or before July 31, 2023.
Neither woman has a work permit, which takes an average of six months to receive when applying for Temporary Protected Status, according to guidance from the Department of Homeland Security.
With no legal work authorization, they seek out day labor jobs to get by.
“Work here is tough,” Valencia said. “We don’t feel safe when we go out to work. You have to be alert all the time.”
Yepez and Valencia have seen contractors who arrive early and only take women with them, they said. They are afraid of being trafficked.
They also worry about being injured doing construction work, with which they have little experience.
Both women have done plumbing, electrical work, drywall installation and roofing — all requiring new skills they've learned on the job, they said. This type of work usually pays them around $80 per day. Much of the work is supposed to be restricted to workers who are licensed in their respective fields after documented training and certification, according to Illinois law.
“When we do roofing, they do not give us any safety measures,” Yepez said. “We are not protected. We need to go up to the roofs, and we do not have harnesses.”
While they are aware of the dangers, their need to make a living outweighs the risks, they said. Recently, both did demolition work on a house where they had to unload 50 bags of concrete.
“We feel helpless. But what can you do?” Valencia said. “We need to keep coming because I have two daughters, and I need to provide for them.”
On top of the strain and uncertainty, Yepez is apart from her children for the first time. They are living with her mother in Venezuela, and she sends money home every week, she said.
“Being without them has been too hard, too hard,” Yepez said. She stays in touch over video calls, but “my heart breaks listening to them tell me that they miss me,” she said.
Adriana Valencia, center, attempts to flag down a passing driver for work. (Talia Sprague/for City Bureau)
Rough conditions
Eduardo Cisneros, a senior attorney at Legal Aid Chicago, said contractors take advantage of workers slowly, using tactics such as force and coercion.
“For the first week … everything's fine. They're being paid,” Cisneros said. “They keep going back. They're being asked to work more. And then they get the end of the week — maybe they worked overtime, or just 40 hours — but then they don't get paid.”
The contractor keeps promising them they will get paid, so the workers keep going back.
Jeison Rendón, 24, has firsthand experience losing out on promised pay.
He came to Chicago in November 2023, and quickly began picking up day work from the Home Depot parking lot, he said.
Wage theft happens frequently, Rendón said. There have been days when he works at least eight hours and ends up getting paid the equivalent of $5 an hour — well below the state’s $14 minimum hourly wage. (Beginning Jan. 1, the state minimum wage will go up to $15 per hour.)
“There are bad people that hire you, but they don’t tell you how much you will get paid,” Rendón said. “You trust they will pay you $120 to $140, but they only give you $40 or $50.”
Evelyn Vargas, former organizing director at Latino Union of Chicago, said “it is very, very uncommon for folks to fight” wage theft. Vargas’ work for the union included educating migrants about labor rights.
“There is fear of physical and bodily harm that occurs,” Vargas said. “There is also a feeling of ‘I don’t know how,’ and, ‘I don't know where to begin.’ It is too overwhelming.”
Along with labor exploitation, elements of fraud, force or coercion escalate the situation into cases of human trafficking, Cisneros said. Threats of physical or legal harm also play a role.
“Usually the threat of deportation is what keeps them in that situation to keep working,” Cisneros said.
Marielis Yepez, center-left, and Adriana Valencia, center-right, walk away from the Home Depot’s entrance after securing a temporary job for the day. (Talia Sprague/for City Bureau)
Options for Workers
There are three avenues for day laborers to file complaints against employers: Through the Chicago Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection, the Illinois Department of Labor, or the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Department officials have tried to make it easier for day laborers and migrant workers to file complaints about wage theft and other abuses, said Jason Keller, assistant director at the state labor department. That includes not requiring people to disclose their immigration status; providing worker rights resources in several languages; conducting worker outreach; and reaching out to advocacy organizations to assist in complaint filing, Keller said.
Officials also have partnered with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights to create education and outreach programs specifically for migrants. Topics in these workshops included child labor and worker protection laws.
Despite that, the number of complaints filed by day laborers is not rising, Keller said. Between 3-4% of the complaints received by the department were regarding the Day and Temporary Labor Services Act, Keller said.
“Day laborers can be afraid to file a complaint and, as is the case with many of our laws, workers don’t want confrontation,” Keller said. “Many of the workers are in vulnerable positions due to immigration status or desperately needing their jobs.”
Jane Flanagan, director of the Illinois Department of Labor, recommends day laborers record basic information about their gigs to ward off potential abuses such as wage theft and make reporting any violations easier. For example, workers could log information like the name of the contractor who hired the worker, the location of the job and the license plate of the contractor’s vehicle, she said.
If a worker does have a wage claim from that work, the Department of Labor can use that information to track down contractors who break the law, Flanagan said.
Organizations such as Latino Union of Chicago and Raise the Floor Alliance routinely connect with migrant workers to give them resources about their rights.
Latino Union of Chicago organizers have been going out to Home Depots throughout the city to share information about labor rights to asylum-seekers working as day laborers. With options such as a group chat for migrants to share job leads and contractors to avoid, the organization seeks to build pathways for communication between workers.
Rendón is part of the Latino Union group chat and said it helps him feel safer, and as if others have his back.
Rendón has also made friends at Home Depot. Together, they inform newcomers about labor laws and keep each other alert about contractors who pay less than the minimum.
“After a couple of bad experiences, now we first ask how much we will get paid,” Rendon said.
After a year of day labor, Yepez said she remains optimistic.
“I thank God, because, despite everything, I’ve learned a lot of things,” Yepez said. “I know someone will come and will give us work the way it should be.”
As for Rendón, he isn’t planning to stay if the outlook doesn’t improve, he said.
“I am here with my wife and two kids, but I will stay here only until year’s end,“ he said. “If nothing happens, then I will go to Colombia.”
Find more coverage on migrant labor by City Bureau’s Civic Reporting fellows here, including a Know Your Rights guide, published in collaboration with Latino Union of Chicago. Support City Bureau’s Civic Reporting fellowship by becoming a recurring donor.