If you hire day labor, you may go to jail (unless you know the loopholes)
Wow! Did you know you could go to jail for hiring day laborers? (Well, okay, so maybe you did.) But did you know the legal loopholes around that fact? I did not until I read the following article below.
Check it out…
The paint is peeling off your front door. There are leaves to rake in the yard. And you desperately need a strong back to help move some furniture.
These jobs are typically too small to attract the attention of a contractor — but not so small that an entire industry hasn’t sprung up to accommodate them. In most cities of any size, there’s a ready pool of cheap labor available on short notice, congregating in parking lots near the local Home Depot or a similar store, or at high-traffic intersections.
The catch: There’s a chance you could be prosecuted if you pay an illegal worker more than $50 or don’t pay your share of Social Security taxes. Beyond that, any work the laborer does comes without a guarantee. And you’ve invited a stranger into your home.
This underground economy is thriving. A snapshot of one business day last year found 117,600 day laborers working or looking for jobs at 500 sites, according to a January 2006 study funded by the Ford Foundation and other think tanks. Three-quarters of them were undocumented workers.
READ: Dirt Cheap Labor
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Cincinnati has a lot of problems of this sort. Fairfield, OH (suburb of Cincinnati) just had a raid of a local food manufacturing plant this week. Check it out here. My favorite line from this story is “They’re here to work and being treated like they’re doing something wrong…It’s true they don’t have papers but feel they are being treated like criminals.” I would think that not having legal immigration papers means that you are an illegal immigrant, and last I checked doing something illegally makes you a criminal.