There are some Chicago day labor agencies that take pains to involve the community and the workers themselves in their organization. One such agency is the Centro de Trabajo de Albany Park, located at 4174 N. Elston Avenue. Agencies like this one, known as “community-approved,” are few and far between in Chicago, and inexplicably so: some of the city’s enormous Mexican and Latino population, second only to Los Angeles in the United States, do day labor to make ends meet.

These men and women rarely have any sort of wage control, have no benefits, no health insurance, no paid vacation and sometimes not even a place to sit as they wait for work on cold Chicago mornings.

For many of these day laborers, choosing a day labor agency is their best option for finding work. Often even if they are mistreated by these companies, they feel as though they have few resources at their disposal to combat their ill-treatment. One such dilemma struck many workers at Ron’s Staffing, a day labor agency that Ari Glazer, Director of the San Lucas Workers Center (2914 W. North Ave), says is a chronically abusive company.

Ron’s owner Ron Michelon could not comment on the San Lucas Workers Center’s allegations and pending legal action against the company, except to say that his company was in the process of responding to a letter of inquiry from the Department of Labor.

“The company agreed to move workers to a different agency and then terminate its contract with the abusive agency in November,” Glazer said. “In the process, three workers have been fired for speaking out for worker rights, and now the company is refusing to terminate the contract.”

Glazer said that a Ron’s day labor supervisor had threatened workers for attempting to organize to more successfully acquire rights. She detailed their working situation: “The workers were paid minimum wage and had to get to work around 4:30 a.m. or they weren’t offered work for that day. Sometimes they were paying for their own public transportation,” Glazer said.

“Day laborers have been organizing to convince companies to move them away from abusive day labor agencies to community approved agencies,” said Randy Smith, day laborer and president of the San Lucas Workers Center.

The matter came to a head when after the firings and the alleged mistreatment, Paper Source, a national stationary company with three Chicago locations, dismissed calls that they cease using Ron’s services.

“Workers have a choice of which agency they want to work at,” Paper Source president Jim York remarked to the media after a “Community Accountability Session” held at the San Lucas Church, also at 2914 W. North Ave, on May 17.

But according to advocates like Glazer, day laborers rarely have a wide breadth of choices, and most of Ron’s workers, with a few exceptions, have been too intimidated or too needy of their low-paying jobs to leave. Glazer says Paper Source has been oddly remiss in not attacking Ron’s, which she says is “in violation of the new [Illinois] Day Labor Services Act.”