LA City Council in Action- Home Depot Shelters for Day Laborers

Day laborers swarm a vehicle outside a Home Depot in Washington DC
(Washington Post 6-17-07)


It's fun to follow the activities of the LA City Council-if you have a sick, cynical sense of humor. I qualify, so I enjoy exposing their antics. While a proposed measure supporting Jamiel's Law sits bottled up in committee, don't think that the City Council is doing nothing. Far from it. Now Council Member Bernard Parks (formerly LAPD Chief)is trying (again) to pass a measure that would force the city's Home Depots to build enclosed shelters for day laborers. Such shelters would include a covering, bathrooms and chairs.

Perhaps for those of you in Northeastern Maine, a little background is in order. In California, many Home Depot outlets, part of a large chain of big-box home repair stores, have day-laborers gathered outside in the parking lot soliciting work from customers as they exit. (Most day laborers are illegal aliens from Mexico and Central America.) This has led to numerous complaints from customers and neighbors who complain of harassment from many of the workers. In other words, they pose a nuisance.

Parks' measure would require any Home Depot in Los Angeles to submit a "day laborer operating plan" and to build an enclosed shelter for day laborers if their store has been the subject of complaints. The additions would be at the store's expense-even if the store has done nothing to encourage their presence, which could be a subject of debate for individual stores.

In 2006 the city of Burbank ordered that town's new Home Depot to build such a shelter which cost the store $94,000. Other Home Depots, such as the one in Signal Hill near Long Beach, have had such shelters for years.

The basic question is why businesses are being ordered to provide accommodations to people who were not invited onto the business premise to begin with, and who almost invariably, are in the country illegally. To protect the neighborhood and customers from a public nuisance? Why not use the law to remove the nuisance rather than accommodate the nuisance?

I propose a different solution. The police could treat the day laborers as a nuisance and order them to move on. Better yet, the Federal Government could effectively secure our border. Call me a radical, but it would simply entail enforcing the law.

As for Jamiel's Law? Can you say, "backburner"?