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As Minimum Wage and Wage Theft Campaigns Bear Fruit, A Fresh Look at Activist Pablo Alvarado

Pasadena day labor organizer takes lessons learned in El Salvador to work for day laborers’ rights in Pasadena

Published on Tuesday, March 29, 2016 | 5:26 am
 
Pablo Alvarado. Image via Facebook

[Publisher’s Note: As raising the minimum wage movement organizers bask in their success and refocus on wage theft, one Pasadena workers’ rights organizer can be seen repeatedly on the front lines of local demonstrations and actions: Pablo Alvarado. Alvarado was once called “The Cesar Chavez of the jornaleros (day workers)” by TIME Magazine. Here is a close-up look at this Pasadena newsmaker.]

 

Pasadena day labor organizer Pablo Alvarado can clearly remember one of the defining moments in his life that led him to the path of working for the rights of America’s day workers.

It was as a young boy during the turmoil of the early ’80s civil war in El Salvador.

“I grew up in a small village (in the eastern region of El Salvador) called El Nispero,” he remembered. “It was a hillside village, and there were coffee plantations all around. The only place we had to play soccer was on a field owned by one of the plantations. And one day, the owner sold the field to one of the most powerful families in the village. Now, the reason this family was so powerful was that they had relatives in the army. During this time, the army could ‘disappear’ you. You could be killed and nothing would happen to the soldiers. If you rose up, if you spoke for the rights of poor people, you potentially had that fate.”

As Alvarado recalled, “The next day there was oxen and equipment on the field. They were ready to prepare the land for growing corn and beans. The new owners didn’t honor the previous agreement which had been made with the community.”

Alvarado’s father — who was ironically, a member of a right-wing paramilitary force — was also the president of the local soccer team, and led a delegation to negotiate the use of the field.

“That day,” said Alvarado, “as the workers returned home, they gathered at the field, asking for the family to come out and negotiate. And my father was there, leading them. This family was going to take over their land.”

“And we were so close to a massacre,” said Alvarado, 48, who was 10 years old at the time. “The family came out, and the villagers came out with machetes and guns. It was such a heated debate there in the middle of the field, and I was there, watching all of this play out, and it was then that I began to understand some of the basic concepts of justice.”

He took this concept of justice to America in 1992, and specifically to Pasadena, where he has lived since his arrival, now married with a son at Odyssey Charter School and a daughter at Pasadena High Shool.

Alvarado is the current director of The National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), which “works to improve the lives of day laborers in the United States,” as well as the director of the Pasadena Community Job Center.

Founded in 2001 in Northridge, California, the NDLON was the first such national organization to take up the cause of day laborers, to not only organize workers but to protect them, and help them integrate into their communities. Though not all are directly affiliated with the Network, NDLON has helped to open more than 70 day labor offices in 21 states.

Alvarado is a familiar face in Pasadena’s Latino community; a regular visitor to City Council meetings, where since September, he argued for the passage of the City’s soon-to-be-enacted minimum wage ordinance, which aims to raise the minimum wage in Pasadena to $15 an hour by 2020.

In 2005, TIME Magazine named him one of the “25 Most Influential Hispanics” in America, calling him “The Cesar Chavez of the jornaleros (day workers).”

He is articulate and media-savvy, but loath to take credit for the dramatic changes he has made in the lives of workers who simply trust that the employers who hire them from local labor centers, or even street corners, will live up to their promises.

For the last few years, and more so over the last few months, Alvarado, along with other members of the NDLON, has taken the fight to protect day workers to a new level.

Just a few weeks ago, he brought 25 workers, NDLON members and supporters, to the front door of a Pasadena Korean BBQ restaurant which had recently changed owners. A former employee, Florentino Ceron, claimed he was owed just over $350 for work he had done in helping to remodel the restaurant in January. When the business changed hands, Ceron said he was left unpaid.

Twice before, Alvarado said, he and Ceron and an attorney had attempted to negotiate payment with the owner, who claimed not to remember Ceron. So they escalated the discussion. The group negotiated directly — literally in the doorway of the restaurant as patrons inside ate — with the current owner, who eventually agreed to pay the amount.

It’s a method of up-front, in-your-face mediation, which according to Alvarado, has been successful in “one hundred percent” of its cases, which he said now number in the hundreds.

In fact, their demonstrations have “now increased,” he said, “in the context of the new minimum wage ordinance, which also has a wage theft enforcement component.”

But, says Alvarado, “it’s the power of workers,” Alvarado says. “That’s all it is.”

“The most effective way (to recover unpaid wages),” he continued, “is demonstrating in front of the owner’s establishment. We use the Labor Commission sometimes, but those cases can take a year or more. And every time we go and do this, the workers feel empowered, they feel like they are the ones who are determined to fight. And this is protected by the Constitution.”

Alvarado continued, “Some would say a wage dispute, when an employer steals wages from his employee, that’s between the worker and the employer. I believe that is a social issue, it’s a community issue. We are all involved.”

When the question is raised, is it extortion to demand payment from business owners, or threaten bad reviews on Yelp, for example?

“Extortion is when you force people to give you money that you do not deserve, that you have not earned,” Alvarado responded. “These people have worked for this money with their sweat. We’re not asking for a handout.”

Alvarado recalls instances where owners and employees have come to an agreement on-the-spot to settle for the wages.

“An owner will say, ‘I owe $500, but I only have $350. Will you take that?’ I don’t encourage this,”says Alvarado, “but it happens. It’s all up to the workers.”

And when Alvarado is not negotiating on behalf of the workers, he is literally serenading them. Since 1996, his band, Los Jornaleros de El Norte, (“Day Workers of the North”) has traveled up and down California playing rallies, marches and demonstrations in support of day laborers. It’s a fluid, ever-changing group of musicians who will set up and play in venues as diverse as the parking lot next to a shopping center where day laborers have gathered, or literally on the sidewalk in front of LA County Jail.

It’s yet another way of taking his message of solidarity directly to those who need it most.

And, these days, more than a hundred members of that small village in El Salvador, now relocated to Southern California, are raising funds and sending it south to build a brand-new soccer field for the people of El Nispero.

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