Director of Chicago's Latino Union gains respect of day laborers, groups formed to help them

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-sat-day-laborers-apr26,0,5185637.story

Jessica Aranda tries to help workers, many of them increasingly younger, find jobs in struggling economy

By Stephen Franklin | Tribune Reporter
April 26, 2008

As they go around the table, the bad news piles up.

Every day more workers, including some as young as 16, show up on Chicago's street corners looking for work, but there are fewer and fewer day jobs for them.

After listening to the stories, Jessica Aranda shifted the talk at the weekly meeting at the Albany Park worker's center. How, she wondered aloud, can they help the day workers?

What about teaching them English, computer or construction skills, she suggested. "We have to improve their skills to make them more marketable."

It wasn't easy launching the Latino Union, which works on behalf of day laborers. And it hasn't gotten any easier four years after the agency opened a small storefront at 3416 W. Bryn Mawr Ave. in the Albany Park neighborhood so the workers do not have to stand on street corners to get hired. Chicago also has four main hiring corners for day laborers.

Yet the problem faced by Aranda, executive director of the Latino Union, pales in comparison to other places across the U.S. where a groundswell of anti-immigrant sentiment has led to demonstrations, counterdemonstrations, legal battles and the closing of some centers.


FULL 2 page story at link.