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The Central Texas Immigrant Workers' Rights Center (CTIWoRC) - a project of the Equal Justice Center - has been working with day laborers throughout Austin to help them secure safe and orderly spaces to seek jobs with willing employers. This has been a special challenge for day laborers who seek work in the area adjacent to the Home Depot store at North I-35 and St. John's Avenue. Day laborers are inevitably drawn to this location, because this is the store Home Depot has set up specially to attract and cater to construction contractors in the Austin area, with specialized staff and services for contractors. In contrast to erroneous stereotypes, the day laborers who come here are hard working people seeking jobs to support themselves and their families. These day laborers, with the support of organizers from the Workers' Center, are self-organizing and are setting rules for themselves that respect the concerns of Home Depot, its customers, and its neighbors. They are calling on Home Depot to demonstrate good corporate citizenship by cooperating with the workers to set up a safe, well-regulated, and dignified space to seek work. The workers are also going door to door, reaching out to other residents of the neighborhood and gaining their support for the workers' campaign to persuade Home Depot to take a constructive and cooperative approach rather than an adversarial approach. Currently workers are meeting mainly with intermittent harassment from City police, acting at the behest of Home Depot, and a rigidly hostile policy from Home Depot corporate offices that fails to accept responsibility for finding constructive solutions. As this New York Times article shows, this is a pattern being played at Home Depot stores across the nation.
October 10, 2005 Front Line in Day Laborer Battle Runs Right Outside Home Depot AUSTIN, Tex. - The Home Depot became the nation's largest home improvement chain by figuring out how to make hardware friendly to consumers and how to put everything from plumbing fixtures to petunias under one roof. But the company is facing a knotty problem figuring out where to put one important part of the home-improvement business: the dozens of day laborers who gather outside its stores here and across the nation. ... Here, in Austin, an immigrants' rights group is pressing Home Depot to stop threatening day laborers with fines and arrest and to allow a grassy lot behind one store to be used as a place for them to congregate. ... Julien Ross, coordinator of the Central Texas Immigrant Workers' Rights Center, said Home Depot should "create a safe and dignified space adjacent to its store" at St. John's Avenue. "This will not eliminate all the problems, but it will go far to minimize them," Mr. Ross said.
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