Legal?

I suppose I could say something here about immigrants, legal and otherwise. They do have a place in the story of my life.

In the late 1960’s, we had a large project to do in Waterbury, Connecticut and we were having a terrible time finding competent help…then someone suggested that we explore the idea of hiring some French Canadians. We did and they were great workers! Yes, they were union members as well, but the other carpenters wouldn’t have anything to do with them. At lunchtime, we would sit on a stack of drywall with our Canuck crew, while the rest of the crew ate elsewhere…with their backs to us.

In the early to mid 1970’s, we saw a lot of immigrants coming into the drywall trade. Argentine immigrants with a few Uruguayans thrown in. And by 1973 I had a framing crew that was 80% Argentinean. Why? Because they worked the hardest and they were smart! I had no idea as to whether or not they were legal. It simply didn’t occur to me to care. They happened to be my friends and my fellow workers. Sure, I was the foreman, but that didn’t mean that I wasn’t their friend as well. I remember that most of them were 7th Day Adventists and the only problem I had with that was the fact that they couldn’t work overtime on Friday nights. They had interesting surnames, Müller, Buchhammer…Germanic names and quite common in Argentina. And most were college graduates, but without the US credentials to get them jobs in their normal professions. Francisco Müller, a good and dear friend, was a Mechanical engineer in Uruguay. In Los Angeles he was a drywaller.

In the late 1970’s, it changed again as the immigrants were now coming from Mexico and they were desperate for work. The contractors obliged by lowering the piece work rate until the union workers left. Then it was a race to the bottom as the contractors tried to see how cheaply they could hire the labor. In the tracts it was common to come to work in the morning and find “Claim sheets” nailed up in every house in the tract. Claim sheets used to be used to secure a house for yourself when you knew you were about to finish one house and needed to start another in the middle of the next day. You would find a house and nail up one sheet on the wall with your name on it. Now, every house had a claim sheet overnight.

Most of the pieceworkers just moved on to hourly work and without much regret. Piecework wasn’t the most desirable work and if someone else wanted to fight with the contractors over money…more power to them. Legal? Illegal? In the construction trades you were only known and respected by your skills. As it should be.