The committees have given streetcorner workers a new sense of dignity. The employers would get out of their pickups, and come over and touch me to see if I was strong. Each time I got hired, I felt I was taking a job from someone else. Building on the common culture of Mexican and Central American immigrants, the Day Laborers Union started a band, Los Jornaleros del Norte. Its theater group, which dramatizes the struggle to survive on the corner, performs on the corner.
Soccer teams help reinforce the value of cooperation in a very competitive environment.
The Day Laborers' Union is the most recent organizing effort among Los Angeles' immigrant workers. In 1992, workers who put up drywall in new homes struck, closing down most housing construction in Southern California for a year. The drywallers strike was an autonomous movement which involved closing down job sites and resisting immigration raids. When the Highway Patrol and INS cooperated in raiding caravans of strikers on the freeways, workers stopped rush hour traffic until the harassment ceased. Drywallers allied themselves with the Carpenters Union, and won the first contracts achieved through grassroots organizing in the building trades since the 1930s.