America's Economic Refugees

In an overregulated economy, the best preparation for survival may be a Third World education

Glenn Garvin from the November 1993 issue

(Page 3 of 8)

Collado is not surprised at the way the informal economy dominates Miami’s construction industry. He was there at the beginning, in the 1960s, when Cuban exiles fleeing Castro transformed the industry when it tried to thwart their desire to work. In fact, he was one of them.

"I was about 20, working in a furniture store, and I saw these ads in the paper for carpentry jobs on construction projects," he recalls. "It seemed like a good opportunity, so I went over to the carpenters’ union. They told me I had to take a test. I paid 20 bucks, and they gave me this test that was completely in English. I only spoke a little bit of English, but I tried to fill it out.

"The guy came out of his office, took my paper, and went back inside. A minute later he comes out, tosses it at me, and says, ‘You failed.’ ‘Where did I fall down?’ I asked him. ‘I don’t have time for you,’ he said, and walked away.

"I went home, but I kept seeing these ads. It was obvious they really needed people. So I went back again. They took another $20 from me, gave me another test in English, and failed me again. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, nobody was interested in seeing whether I could do the work. It was like the test was just an instrument to keep me out.

"I had just recently gotten married to an American girl. And one night I was telling her father what had happened, and he said, ‘Jeez, why didn’t you tell me? I’m a member of the carpenters’ union.’ So I went back again, this time with my American fatherin-law, and guess what? I was hired."

Most Cubans, however, weren’t lucky enough to have a gringo patron inside Miami’s potent trade unions. They were turned away by the thousands. "The unions really made an effor to exclude the Cubans," says Guillermo Grenier, a labor historiar at Florida International University. "They did it in a variety of ways. The easiest was in the licensed trades, like plumbers and electricians, where they could manipulate the licensing exams. Then, with the unskilled people, they’d just say, ‘We have no work for you.’

"They did the same thing with people who had been contractors in Cuba and wanted to open contracting businesses here. Because the unions were so powerful in Miami at that time–about 90 percent of construction was union–a contractor really had to work closely with the Miami Building and Construction Trades Council, the umbrella group for the various trade unions. And the unions just refused to have anything to do with Cuban contractors.

"The crazy thing was they were turning away people who were very pro-union. Pre-Castro Cuba had a very progressive labor movement. The 1940 Cuban constitution actively encouraged unionization. Most of these folks who they were sending away thought that working in construction was synonymous with joining a union."

The unions apparently thought the Cubans would just go away. They were wrong. "The informal market is always there," Grenier observes. "And immigrants are tenacious." The Cuban plumbers and electricians went to work without licenses; the Cuban contractors formed small companies that operated out of trucks. They took construction projects within their own community at cheaper rates and hired Cuban laborers for wages that were always below union scale and often below minimum wage. Overtime wages were unheard of. The contractors accepted off-the-books cash in payment and in turn paid their workers with cash.

As the flow of immigrants produced a building boom, it was the new and informal Cuban construction industry that flourished; the unions, and most of the firms allied with them, have withered away. Today more than 90 percent of new housing construction in Miami is done by Cuban firms.

"When the Cubans went informal, they destroyed construction unions," says Johns Hopkins sociologist Fernandez-Kelly. "But they created a hugely successful Cuban construction industry. And it was done, for all practical purposes, by violating the law."

Although Cubans own most of the construction firms now, many of their workers these days–particularly the unskilled ones–are, like Miguel the math-professor-turned-ballpeen-hammer-wielder, Nicaraguans. The Nicaraguan consulate estimates that more than 100,000 exiles are crammed into Miami, loath to return to a homeland still wracked by political turmoil and violence.

And there is every indication that the Nicaraguans intend to follow in the footsteps of the Cubans who came before them. Meet Ronald, 39, who came to Miami in 1986 after a Sandinista military commander accused him of counterrevolutionary sentiments and put a gun to his head. Now he runs a small construction business out of his truck.

Ronald has never incorporated; he doesn’t advertise, his business isn’t listed in the phone book, and he has no regular employees. Everything is done through what Nicaraguans call "connections," networks of friends and family. Work comes to him through word of mouth. If the job is too big to be handled by Ronald and his two teenage sons, he checks to see if any of his cousins, nephews, or in-laws need a few days’ work at $60 to $70 a day. As a last resort he stops by the parking lot of a bait shop on Southwest 8th Street in Sweetwater, the little town in western Dade County that’s the heart of the Nicaraguan exile community. The bait shop parking lot is the informal equivalent of a union hiring hall, with three dozen or so men hanging around at any given moment, waiting for offers of day labor.

Ronald couldn’t join the formal economy even if he wanted to; he has no work permit, which means he has no Social Security number, which means he can’t open a bank account or apply for the dozen or so permits necessary for any given construction project. (It’s not clear that he’s even legally permitted to have a driver’s license.)