Q&A with El Centro’s new ?organizer Jose Cardenas

The town of Carrboro recently hired former Southern Poverty Law Center employee Jose Cardenas as a community organizer at El Centro Hispano.

City Editor Cammie Bellamy spoke with Cardenas about his efforts to help day laborers and the town’s decision to hire him.

Daily Tar Heel: What will your position entail at El Centro Hispano as a community organizer?

Jose Cardenas: My position is to work specifically with the day laborer task force and the day laborer population. So what I’m kind of tasked with is moving the task force forward and organizing the workers.

The idea is that we organize the workers and then we get everybody’s point of view ­— like different people in the community … so everybody’s kind of coming together to think about how to improve the conditions of the work for the day laborer population.

DTH: What work have you done so far with the day laborers?

JC: Right now, we’re just kind of building a relationship with the workers.

I think that in the past there have been a lot of different groups that have approached the workers and I think — especially with the University and them being a part of a lot of studies — some of the workers are a little tired or weary of outsiders coming into the community at this point.

DTH: What are some of the major issues day laborers face in Chapel Hill and Carrboro?

JC: I think certainly workers don’t make a lot of money, and so they’re struggling with that. Wage theft is a huge issue where specifically employers have come to pick up workers and, in some instances, they haven’t paid them for their work.

Because they don’t make a lot of money to begin with, not being paid for a day or not being paid for a couple days and especially not being paid for a week’s work can really have an effect on their ability to eat or their ability to pay rent.

DTH: What sort of projects will you work on with the day laborers with once you’ve established a relationship?

JC: I think one of the ways I’d like to work with them is find ways to fight the wage theft.

Also, I think once we can build a strong relationship, we’ll assist the workers in having access to better services. So maybe job training, skills training, workshops.

On the task force, we’re working with the idea of in the future, potentially creating a day laborer center … where the workers are shielded from the elements and where workers can have more protections from wage theft.

DTH: Do you think it’s significant that the town of Carrboro is interested in working on the needs of day laborers?

JC: What we see a lot of actually, in different towns, is — especially with the debate about immigration reform and immigration in general that’s been raging for the past 10 years — what we see is more on the opposite end, where you have day laborer populations in cities where the police force has tried to run them off or city ordinances to not allow them to look for work.

There are definitely other towns that have worked on (day laborer rights), but this example I think is significant. I think it’s probably the first time in the South.

Contact the desk editor at city@dailytarheel.com.