Proposed law would restrict the hiring of day laborers

Gaithersburg leaders will discuss anti-solicitation ordinance Monday night

Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Brian Lewis⁄The Gazette Day laborers in Gaithersburg crowd a truck in hopes of finding work one morning last month. If the city passes a proposed anti-solicitation ordinance, job hires of this kind would against the law.

The proposed law, an anti-solicitation ordinance intended to prevent day laborers and their employers from meeting anywhere in the city other than at an approved center, was supposed to coincide with opening a center.

City Manager David Humpton said the city continues to research ‘‘various issues” surrounding the law and that it remains on the table for City Council discussion Monday night.

‘‘I am still hopeful that we can adopt one,” he said Friday, shortly after plans for a storefront day-laborer center at Festival at Muddy Branch shopping center fell through.

The ordinance was a key recommendation from the task force of Gaithersburg residents that studied the day-laborer issue earlier this year. If approved, it would be the first such law in Montgomery County.

According to media reports, cities across the country have looked at similar laws to help them deal with mounting issues surrounding day laborers. Most of those adopted have been challenged in court.

In some places the laws have been upheld, but in some cases — where there was no formal center for the workers to go — various courts have struck down the laws citing First Amendment violations.

Though the city now has no pending plans to open a center, Humpton said that the city’s research of the proposed law has touched on whether existing job placement services might satisfy the courts’ requirement for day laborers.

‘‘For instance, one of the questions that was raised is, ‘Is the Labor Ready center an alternative to direct people to that is acceptable?’” Humpton said.

Both day-laborer advocates and the city’s task force have said that Labor Ready, a private job placement company in south Gaithersburg, is not a practical solution. It does not have Spanish speakers on staff, takes a large cut out of wages and checks immigration status, they said.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which has successfully challenged similar laws elsewhere in the country, says it is monitoring the Gaithersburg discussion.

‘‘We will certainly be watching it very closely and we’ll be looking to see what the City Council ultimately does,” said Meredith Curtis, state chapter spokeswoman.

While groups like the ACLU oppose such laws on the grounds that governments are not allowed to pick and choose which forms of speech they protect, critics of day-laborer centers point to the tendency of large numbers of workers to forego formal centers to gather at informal spots where they feel more likely to find work.

County Council President George L. Leventhal, (D-At Large) of Takoma Park, said he is well aware of the problems associated with the scores of workers who flock to the Takoma⁄Langley Park crossroads area every morning despite county-funded centers a few miles away in Wheaton and Silver Spring.

But he stands resolute that day-laborer centers are ‘‘good policy.”

They ‘‘bring order and rationality to a situation that is disruptive to businesses and neighborhoods,” he said.

Still, ordinances like what Gaithersburg is considering are part of the necessary dialogue in how to regulate day laborers, but is not sure that an outright ban is the best way to go about it.

‘‘That’s an ongoing conversation,” he said, ‘‘and I’m not prepared to say whether an ordinance like that is a good idea or a bad idea. ... My preference is to use a carrot rather than a stick.”

He did not elaborate on what the ‘‘carrot” might be, saying that what needs to happen first is that a new county executive be sworn in, so the county can then craft a ‘‘unified position.”