OPINION: Closing Huntington Station hiring site is shortsighted
Sandra Dunn is the immigration program officer of the Hagedorn Foundation.
The Huntington Town Board's sudden decision to close the Huntington Station Hiring Site comes as a shock to hundreds of day laborers, local employers, the site manager (the respected, 84-year-old Family Service League) and the two foundations that have partnered with the town for nearly two years to fund the site.
Thanks to support from the Long Island Community Foundation and the Hagedorn Foundation, the site was able to hire staff and acquire a trailer - turning an empty lot into a genuine employment service and allowing the town to scale back its funding. Regardless, town officials never bothered to inform its partners that it was considering shutting down the site.
Misinformation abounds. The town claims that the site attracts too few workers to be worthwhile, even though, according to the Family Service League, it attracts between 100 and 140 a day - 25 to 30 percent of Huntington Station's total day labor population. A sizable portion of the day labor population, in other words, finds work through this safe, staffed, well-regulated site, which permits no drugs or alcohol on the premises and provides five portable toilets.
The Family Service League enlisted the help of local institutions, including St. Hugh of Lincoln Roman Catholic Church and the Huntington Interfaith Homeless Initiative, so that the men could receive one hot meal a day from church volunteers and, in some cases, spend the night at HIHI. Treating these laborers humanely and with dignity benefits the entire community. Fewer people have gone hungry or have slept on the street or in the woods.
Site managers connected the day laborers with local English classes and offered them informational sessions on workplace issues, regular meetings with local police, quarterly HIV testing and citizenship services. These services and meetings stressed the importance of health and safety, and strengthened the connection between the day laborers and the community.
Closing the site will not help ease tensions or create a safer community. It will mean more men looking for work on the street, more men without toilet facilities, fewer men learning about citizenship requirements and taxpayer identification numbers, and, therefore, fewer on the path toward integration. The community and the town board appear to want to sweep day laborers out of Huntington Station, not understanding that the users of the site are Huntington Station residents. They have a constitutional right to gather in public places, as numerous court rulings around the country have established.
But closing the site allows the town to say "we did something" in response to the community's concerns about crime. Unfortunately these will be empty words, because the town is punishing the wrong population. Gang violence may be flourishing in some sections of Huntington Station, but not at the hiring site, where working men simply seek a day's pay for a day's work to sustain and improve life for their families.
Closing the site also sends a strong message to many in the Latino and immigrant communities - not just day laborers - that the town does not welcome them or value integration enough to provide them with information about citizenship and income tax payments, and does not care enough about their well-being and quality of life to continue offering the basic shelter that the trailer provides.
We cannot imagine what public good is served by closing this successful hiring site, which has cost the Town of Huntington less and less over the years. In fact, the Family Service League reports that now that the community knows the site will be closed, local residents are hiring laborers there in record numbers. We hope these same citizens will call on the town to reverse its shortsighted decision.
