Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Service to day laborers




Labor Ready in Sioux Falls, SD

"Everyone Only Wants Temps"
By Gabriel Thompson
Mother Jones July 16, 2012


Labor Ready had other trends on its side as well. Welstad credited welfare reform with dumping more cheap workers at his door: Depending on the state, somewhere between 15 and 40 percent of former welfare recipients found work as temps. It certainly didn't hurt that people who'd gotten tangled up in the drug war were finding regular employment was hard to come by.



The work of Bruce Jensen provides guidance for libraries to assist these workers:
Bruce Jensen, Service to day laborers: a job libraries have left undone
Reference & User Services Quarterly
 41 (Spring 2002) p. 228-33.
They present an increasingly prominent public face all around the country, and yet they are flatly ignored by most libraries. It's hard to imagine a more information-impoverished constituency than immigrant day laborers. For a number of economic, linguistic, legal, and cultural reasons, the jornaleros who gather on sidewalks and the parking lots of hardware stores each morning to scramble for job offers are effectively shut out from essential services and information sources that most of us take for granted.


See also Jensen's 
Library Service to Day Laborers: Biblio/webliography





DAY LABOR WORK

Annual Review of Sociology

Vol. 29: 307-333 (Volume publication date August 2003)
First Published online as a Review in Advance on June 4, 2003
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.soc.29.010202.100044



Archive website for North American Alliance for Fair Employment.