Rain is beating down on a tarp in front of a trailer that serves as the office for CASA Latina, Seattle's immigrant day labor program on Western Avenue. Under it, about 30 Hispanic workers listen a long time to the center's director speak. Then a small, middle-aged man in glasses steps up the trailer's stairs to take a turn.
His name is Julio Valverde and, for the past two years, he's been waging a battle against CASA Latina's management that has suddenly come to a head. All eyes forward, the men listen to the 52-year-old Peruvian storekeeper turned landscaper read a long list of demands. With an index finger pointed to the sky, he calls on CASA Latina to stop the intimidation and threats to workers made by three staff members whose resignation Valverde calls for by name.
Calls of "Hurrah!" and "Yes, We Can" come in Spanish as Valverde finishes his speech, which is followed by another worker who takes the stairs but is loudly shouted down. As he tries to carry on, center director Hilary Stern ducks her head under the tarp to scan CASA Latina's little strip of Western Ave. just north of the Pike Place Market. She has called the police, and about eight officers are now moving in to bring the impromptu meeting to a close.
The staff intimidation and threats, says Valverde and some of the 70 workers who have signed a petition calling for the resignations, have gone on for years over how CASA Latina chooses the workers it sends out on jobs and the favoritism many say they've seen. But the police were called on Feb. 25, and again on Feb. 26, over a new issue that Valverde and his companeros have been protesting by holding up signs in front of the center.
Since October, the 15-year-old center, which was founded in 1994 and helps immigrant workers get jobs and learn English, has been discussing starting a membership program that would charge the day laborers $50 a year and $5 for each job they're sent out on.
Stern indefinitely tabled that proposal on Tues., March 2. But she and CASA Latina organizer Araceli Hernandez, one of the people whose resignation the protesting workers are calling for, say it came from the workers, who were looking for a way to assure that the people the center dispatches have the skills a job calls for -- and, says Hernandez, to separate the bona fide workers from drug dealers who tend to congregate around the center.
Valverde and others say it has nothing to do with drugs and everything to do with jobs and who gets them. The proposal, he says, came from the staff through a small group of workers -- or insider "mafia," as he calls them -- who would be first in line to get whatever jobs there are at the expense of a majority who can't afford the fees.
"We don't have enough money to even live," says day laborer Jorge Flores. "How can we pay the money if we don't make $10 a day?"
"It's a nonprofit organization, so why should we pay $50?" asks Jose Jimenez.
To provide some quality control, says Juan Carlos, the man who was shouted down at CASA Latina on Feb. 25. There have been many problems, he says, with some workers' jobs having to be redone at the center's expense. As for intimidation, he says, Valverde's group is simply talking about the center's staff laying down the rules, which include no selling drugs and no buying or selling stolen property, which are both common problems on Western Ave.
The day after the meeting, on Feb. 26, Stern says she saw at least two drug deals take place among the men standing on the street to whom Valverde had given protest signs. A few of them were CASA workers, she says, but most were not. In exchange for getting the men to put down the signs, which stated the center intimidates workers, she says she brought Valverde into the office to negotiate.
He made three demands that she plans to decide on this week, she says, though the first -- firing the three staff members -- isn't likely. Valverde's other demands include forming a board of workers to have input in decision-making and creating a committee to oversee the morning raffle by which workers are chosen for jobs, which some workers say is tampered with.
But, as she and Valverde were talking Feb. 26, Stern says she saw the men on the street put up their protest signs again. She again phoned police. It was "a dialogue not to have a protest," Stern says. "That's what our offer was, and they decided not to take it."
Valverde says Stern isn't listening. For one thing, the workers consider calling the police intimidation when they are only trying to get injustices addressed. One year ago, he says, a CASA Latina dispatcher blocked his path to the office door while he was trying to deliver a letter of protest and has since told him he would send people to hurt him.
A year and a half ago, says another worker, Jose Caballero, he complained when he saw a raffle ticket for a job slip out of a sleeve one morning and the same dispatcher physically threatened him.
Stern says she will investigate any incidents for which Valverde produces proof or eyewitnesses. "But so far we haven't gotten any example of that," she says. Just because "they get a few people to sign a petition to fire the staff, we're not going to fire the staff."
The real problem, Stern says, isn't the staff or the raffle; it's the bad economy and lack of jobs. In December, she says, CASA Latina's job placements dropped 70 percent from a year earlier and were down 50 percent in January. While the two are traditionally slow months for construction and yard work, it's a trend that has left many laborers without work for weeks on end."We only get these complaints when there's not enough jobs." Stern says of the center, which plans to move to a new location this month that the city helped purchase in the Central District. "They're looking for reasons the raffle isn't working, why they're not getting picked."
"The fact is there are not many jobs," she says. "It's really too bad that people at the bottom are fighting each other."