Luis Valentin is a migrant from Mexico City, who has lived in the US for 33 years. He now works for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), advocating for worker rights. In this interview, Luis explains that worker centres are more than just places for migrant workers; they are community spaces where workers can learn their rights, organise, and build leadership.

Could you introduce yourself?

My name is Luis Valentin, and I’m originally from Mexico City. I’ve been living in the US for 33 years now. I migrated here in 1991 and have lived here all those years. Now, I work for the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, a nonprofit with more than 75 worker centres across the United States, all part of an effort to advocate for labour rights for migrant workers.

What do you mean by a worker centre?

A worker centre is, in a sense, a structure. It is a place where workers can come together and get resources. That is the technical definition or idea of what these places are. But it is much more than that for us in the labour movement. They are like a second home for workers. A worker centre can be a place where workers learn their rights, create community and family, get organised, take action, and create leadership. All of these things are part of the worker centre for us. I think they can also be a beautiful place because you can see people gaining knowledge and losing the fear to take action. They are a place where workers learn to speak up, mobilise, organise, and start to make changes.

Why are worker centres needed?

In the US, our government structures are not the best. People say the US is a country of freedom, but it is not like that in practice. There are some protections, but it is hard for workers to understand or enforce their rights, particularly when the system is aligned to protect employers, corporations, and people with money and power. A worker centre is important for the community to build a space where people can start to understand these structures of power and how we can make changes for ourselves. We have a saying: “no one is going to come and save us but us.” Only the people can save the people, so we try to create the consciousness that we know our rights, how to protect them, fight for them, and improve them even more.

How did you get involved in the Day Laborers Center?

I became a day labourer when I migrated here. It was hard to find work. One option is to stand on a corner of a public sidewalk by a lumber store, warehouse, or wherever. These are places where employers will come and ask you to work for them, maybe for a few hours, one day, or a few days. These corners became well-known as a place to hire workers in this way. They provided a place for us to find work, but they were also important for employers. First, it was a really easy way for employers to hire workers, and second, they provided an opportunity for employers to take advantage of workers. I experienced all of these things. I remember organisers from different groups coming and talking to us about our rights, hosting workshops on empowerment, police harassment and criminalisation, and so on. That is how I first came into contact with the labour movement.

I moved to Arizona in the 2000s, and in 2010, Arizona SB 1070 was introduced. This was a racist law that not only criminalised our community members, but also employers that hired undocumented workers. It made it hard to even look for a job, let alone bring in income for our families. That was when I started organising. NDLON had a partnership with Puente and we organised Comités Populares (popular committees). These brought together people, empowering them, and taking action to protect our communities from immigration officers, as well as police officers who, at that time, were reinforcing that racist law.

It was through this that I met NDLON. I started going to workshops and learning about my rights. I began to feel empowered and understood the importance of learning more. I am now the Regional Coordinator for the West Coast area, which is all of California. NDLON is very good because they believe in the leadership that we have as community members. They understand the creativity we need to put into this work to empower people. That is why I got so involved in NDLON. It supported workers like me and created the path for us to become more useful for the movement.

During this time, the police created a task force to criminalise workers. They were harassing workers on the corners, giving them tickets, and putting them in jail. It was really sad to see those who were looking for jobs on public sidewalks being criminalised. So we had to do something about it. First, organising the workers facing these attacks, but second, fighting the ordinances that were criminalising workers. We put pressure on the city, state, and federal government. This isn’t just the responsibility of workers, but was everybody’s responsibility. It was anti-constitutional to criminalise people looking for work. NDLON used this narrative to get funding and open spaces like worker centres. The city government wanted to give NGOs money to keep workers away from the corners and sidewalks. But NDLON argued that it is the right of workers to look for a job. By 2012, we won a federal lawsuit against the government and this anti-day labourer ordinance. We wanted workers to have this right to find work on public sidewalks. This was a huge win for workers.

We didn’t stop there; we also argued that workers had the right to space to organise. When I talk about creating leadership and accessible spaces for our community, this is what I am talking about. We don’t talk about rules for members, as they are told to follow rules all the time. Instead, we call them community agreements for workers to become a member. These are things we all agree on together, not imposed upon us. We try to change the narratives and how language is used in the space. The space is one where everybody takes action and has opinions. We want to run our centres ourselves, but we also want to ensure that there are jobs and they are distributed more humanely.

How does the centre address issues of migration now?

Migration is still a big issue in the US. There are racist perceptions of migrants created by politicians like Donald Trump. These are narratives that try to create separation and divisions within our communities. The situation in Latin American countries is also used to create a negative narrative. When the first caravans of migrants from Honduras came, the media presented these people as gang members. The media tried to create fear among Americans, particularly among white people. This was hard for us because it meant an even more intense criminalisation of migrants, pushing a negative image of Hondurans then, and now more recently Venezuelans.

We have been really careful to address these topics. We’ve organised community events to introduce the Hondurans to other community members. For example, we asked Hondurans to bring unique food from their regions, as well as the Mexicans and Venezuelans, to share together. We started conversations about the conditions we were living in and why we chose to migrate. Within our community, we remember that everyone migrated for the same reasons. The fact that Venezuelans are migrating for better opportunities and getting documents is not their fault. The fault is with the system we’re all experiencing. We bring these topics to the table because we don’t want our community to have conflict outside of the centres. It is also about creating narratives: it is not about the “good migrant” or the “bad migrant.” We all deserve the right to look for a better life for ourselves and our families.

More recently, we’ve seen these racist narratives within the Latino community. We want to make the centres a place where we can understand each other and create solidarity. There are now more workers coming from Africa and they are facing a lot of discrimination, exclusion, and racism from other migrant communities. For us, it is important to address this and correct these problems of racism in our own communities. We see more African workers looking for work on the corners and coming to our worker centres. We want them to be included in the space and be part of our organising.

What is the day-to-day activity of a worker centre like?

Our worker centres are also involved in the distribution of work. We open at six o’clock in the morning. Workers come in during the day, and there is a process to distribute the work through a raffle. Everyone gets a ticket, we put them in a bucket, and those names that come out get to go to work. However, we also have other processes to distribute the work. If someone hasn’t worked or has particular skills, we ensure they can get work. We try to ensure that we know what kind of abilities everybody has, their experience, and so on. This means that employers come back to get workers.

We do the work dispatch in the morning, but then we run training. We don’t just open the place and have workers standing around waiting there. We train on OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), and we try to provide the tools that workers need so that we can create a powerful worker centre.

We go out of the centre and do activities like community cleanups. During the pandemic, we worked together on many activities. This was supporting our community, as well as getting support from officials, politicians, and so on. After the pandemic, we created food banks in different worker centres so workers could access food. This is about building solidarity and support with the entire community.

We have also put in a lot of effort to respond to the recent natural disasters because workers have the knowledge and the training to respond to those events. This is one way that we promote worker centres. Not only “Come here, we have jobs”, but also “Come here, and you can get training, OSHA cards, certifications, and be a first responder.” We want people to understand that worker centres are a positive thing in the community. It is about a narrative of pro-migration. There are people in power who want to take funding away from these places, because they provide services for undocumented workers. We respond by creating community and political power.

This is what a typical day in a worker centre looks like: it is busy, and a lot is going on. There is also conflict resolution. We have workers from different places, experiences, cultures, and beliefs. We deal with these differences at the worker centre. We brought in dialogue about the LGBT community, which, for the Latino community, can be a hard topic. We created materials and training about making the centre open and more inclusive. So what does that look like? Very busy!

What kinds of workplace issues do you deal with?

The number one issue we face in worker centres is employment problems. This includes wage theft, work violations, all these injustices that workers have to face. We don’t have a good system to hold employers accountable. There is nothing that criminalises the employer’s activity of not paying wages. Let’s put it this way: if workers are hungry and they stop by a store and take a banana or a bottle of water, the owner calls the cops, and the worker is going to face charges. They might go to jail. If an employer refuses to pay a worker and threatens them, they aren’t going to go to jail. The police will say that it is a civil matter. We need to change this. Wage theft should be a criminal matter. Just because it is treated like a civil matter, doesn’t change the fact they are stealing from a worker. That is why we do a lot of training and support on wage theft.

When we call employers who are stealing workers’ money, they always give us explanations that try to make the workers look bad. But we know that employers always want to get away with this. So we talk, that is always the first step. We try to have a mediation process. Then, the second step is to make a wage claim. We give the employers another call and tell them we will proceed with a wage claim. Usually, employers do not care, because they know a wage claim is not going to do much. This is why we set up what we call Committees of Labour Enforcement. Using our First Amendment rights, we gather as a group of workers and allies and then go and visit the employer. It might be at his place of work or his home. Then we start making noise and exposing that person in front of his family, colleagues, or potential customers. These kinds of community actions are really effective. Often, we are able to recover the money a few hours later.

We have also developed a good partnership and relationship with officials from the Labour Enforcement Commissioner and different entities that are meant to protect our rights. We hold them accountable, bring them to the centres, and have a dialogue with them about labour rights violations. We want them to be part of the discussion about ensuring employers do not abuse workers’ rights. We’re still working on this, but the actions involving workers are the most effective. This requires workers to be conscious of what is happening, to have an analysis of the situation, and then to organise and take action. All of these elements are important. It also sends a message to the employers: “You might be able to steal wages for now, but we can do this in response, and you don’t want to mess with us.” We are empowering workers through this kind of action.

What lessons have you learned about worker centres?

One of the main things I’ve learned is that when you start a worker centre, sometimes you want to use the language of telling workers: “This is your centre, do whatever you want with it.” We never thought about what kind of message we were sending because, for many workers, this was quite confusing. If you don’t know what a worker centre can be, you don’t know how to start building it. Workers who come in will have different ideas about what they want the space to be and some of the ideas contradict others. It is easy to end up with conflict when we pitch a worker centre like this. Instead, we need to think about how this is all of our worker centre, and that it works because we all work together to build it. This is how the worker centre becomes a second home, because workers are spending time there. It is where they get empowered, find a job and earn an income, deal with problems, and get training.

An important part of this is the alliances with other organisations and the cultural side of the worker centre. The cultural aspect is important because it helps to stabilise everybody. Art and music are very powerful tools for creating a community, as well as action and leadership. Culture is part of our organisation. We used cultural activities to break down divisions and tensions within communities. Trainings are helpful, but so are music and singing classes. We identified workers who had these skills and could lead the sessions. One of the main things I have learned is do not put off doing cultural activities; start them immediately. This creates community, which is the most important thing for building a strong worker centre.