Wednesday, February 8, 2012

More Day Laborers on Fifth Avenue

Posted by on Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 2:31 PM

ridgedaylaborers.jpg
The four corners of Fifth and Bay Ridge avenues has long been a congregating space for day laborers, who gather in the morning near the Alpine movie theater in the hopes that a contractor—or, say, some fella who needs to lay some sheet rock but doesn't have a team of able-bodied sons to round up—will give them a day's pay for a day's work. But the number of the job-hopeful has been steadily increasing in recent weeks, the Bay Ridge Journal reports, to numbers that blog hasn't seen since 2008.

Which might seem strange—unemployment in New York state has been on the decline, while the construction sector has recently shown signs of growth (though it's still far from what experts would deem healthy).

I know what you're thinking—maybe the day laborer market has an inverse relationship to the health of the economy, or something, but that doesn't seem to be the case, either. Maybe it's just that local anecdotal evidence isn't always indicative or a larger, more interesting trend? Sorry everybody.

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