New Day Laborer Center in Yonkers to provide support, job training. What it looks like

Catholic Charities of New York celebrated the grand opening of its Day Laborer Center in Yonkers Monday, which will be a hub for day laborers to take life skills classes and find training for future jobs.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, was on hand to celebrate the occasion and offer a blessing in center’s community garden, where a new mural will be unveiled to celebrate efforts to support the often-hidden day laborer community.

“We need to listen to the community,” Janet Hernandez, who runs the Day Laborer Center, said in Spanish at the event. “We need to invest in the community.”

Catholic Charities, a federation of programs and agencies throughout a 10-county region in New York, has been helping the state’s immigrant population find work and join their local communities since 2009. The agency launched the Bronx Day Laborer program in 2016, providing Site Safety training required for construction job sites in New York City. It now operates two day laborer regional programs in the Bronx and Yonkers.

The new Yonkers center will also provide Site Safety courses, as well as OSHA-approved construction safety and skills, leadership training, English as a Second Language classes, and access to high-level training courses, such as electricity and scaffolding classes.

The Center also assists with wage theft cases and ensures workers have the knowledge to advocate for their own rights. Last month, The Journal News/lohud published a story illuminating New York’s patchwork regulatory system that makes it easier for employers to commit wage theft and exploit day laborers who might not understand their rights or labor protections.

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Catholic Charities staff helped workers build a wage theft case against contractor Artemio Fuerte, who has been accused of wage theft in criminal court by at least six workers across Westchester County, translating to nearly $24,000 in money owed. More than a dozen additional workers say they were never paid for work done for Fuerte, according to workers and organizers.