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July 22, 2003
Labour Party
One of the things that really struck me when I came to live in downtown Seattle is the number of day labourers standing on the side of some streets every morning. Mostly Hispanic, they stand and wait for people to stop to hire them for the day, presumably for manual labour.
Occasionally a pickup truck would stop and the men would crowd around, hoping to be the ones chosen for the day's tasks. Every once in a while you'll see a car full of tourists stop to ask for directions, or stop because they think the one of the men is waving at them, and would get swarmed.
This really struck me because I have never seen anything like this in Canada. But apparently it's so commonplace here that the city has erected NO LABOR PICKUP signs on busy streets. As one would expect, the signs are mostly ignored.
I don't know whether or not these men are legally in the US or not, but I am sure this isn't what they had in mind when they came to The Land of Opportunity.