Hunts Point Hustle
"Diamond" is looking for work tonight at the Hunts Point Terminal Market. Though the name she's using sounds more like those of the ladies who sometimes trawl the streets of this Bronx neighborhood, Diamond is here to find a different kind of work that is in its own way demeaning.
Diamond is hoping to be hired as a "lumper" for the night. Lumpers unload the interstate trucks and rail cars that arrive overnight, stuffed floor-to-ceiling with bags and boxes of food, fresh from the fields of North America.
For as long as it takes to empty a container-sometimes from midnight to noon-Diamond will lug items like 30-pound sacks of onions from their perilous perches and stack them onto wooden pallets for storage or sale. If she's lucky, she'll clear $100.
Diamond is here several nights a week. She's a familiar face to the salesmen and foremen of the 50 wholesalers in the produce market and to the buyers who patronize them. But despite her persistence and willingness to take on backbreaking tasks, she has little chance of securing an entry level porter job, which starts at about $12 an hour and, after 90 days, carries union benefits, with pay increases every year.
"You gotta know people here," says a buyer for an upstate food wholesaler, who started coming to the Hunts Point market with his father when he was four.
The food industry in Hunts Point employs around 25,000 people. But right up the hill is a community of 12,000 with a 24 percent unemployment rate-the highest in the city. As the city prepares to launch another huge facility-the New Fulton Fish Market-it has promised jobs for area residents.
But many in Hunts Point remain cynical. They claim they've seen little economic payoff from decades of development, and that the markets remain a closed system.
"The price of the markets has far outweighed the benefits," says Kellie-Terry Sepulveda, executive director of The Point, a leading community organization. She lists that price: "The loss of our waterfront, traffic, prostitution, pollution, and high asthma rates."
To counter those side effects, Mayor Bloomberg unveiled the Hunts Point Vision Plan earlier this year. In addition to reclaiming green space and re-routing truck traffic, it created Hunts Point Works, a new center launched in March that is supposed to connect residents directly to jobs in the markets.
Walk down any street in Hunts Point, and you'll find young men looking for work. Ricky Beck says he's been down to the markets "at least four times" in the three years he's lived here, submitting applications at several of the warehouses that line Food Center Drive. "They never called me back," he says.
Jose Louis Payamps, 22, counts himself as one of the lucky ones. He looked for a year until he got his night-shift job three years ago at Katzman Berry in the produce market. Payamps was tipped off by someone he knew on the inside. Working in his favor were a few months of experience at a small meat distributor.
"They don't like to hire people if they don't already have skills on the power jacks or the high-lows," Payamps says. "If you don't know how to drive those things, you can lose a foot."
For that reason, Payamps claims he has very few friends from the neighborhood who work in the markets with him.
"Hardly none," Payamps says.
Unlike the neighborhoods of New York lore that had intricate, enduring relationships with nearby industries-the Fourth Ward and the Fulton Market, Brooklyn and its shipyards-Hunts Point residents seem to be alienated from the food markets. Walled off by 20-foot fences, open when the rest of the world is closed, the markets themselves are indecipherable labyrinths: Loading docks like airport gates that stretch a third of a mile, office hallways so long you literally can't see the end and a culture of hiring that has its own rules and rhythms.
An assistant manager of one of the larger produce purveyors, who asked not to be identified, described his process:
"We have about 125 employees, around 100 in the warehouse," he said. "We'll hire somewhere between six to ten people on an annual basis." At any given time, he estimates he has "30 or 40 applications" on hand.
But before he gets to those applications, the union-Teamsters Local 202-may get first crack at the job opportunity: "Often they'll have someone they'll try and place with us," the manager says. "But sometimes the guys they send over are guys that somebody else culled out. Unless they're putting pressure on me to absorb some people, I'd just as soon go outside and train them my way."
If they get to the applications, the managers look them over, favoring those that come with personal recommendations from floor staff. Mike Panio, operations manager of another purveyor, E. Armata, explains, "If I've got a good guy downstairs, I'll ask him if he's got a cousin or a brother."
But for many on the docks, neighborhood neophytes have a bad reputation. "People from Hunts Point don't want to work here," said one porter for E. Armata. "People in Hunts Point sell drugs."
On the other hand, there is one group of workers that many employers favor.
"There's a lot of people who like to hire the Mexicans," says Payamps, who is Puerto Rican. "They say they work better for cheaper. With all these Mexicans in the market, it's difficult for U.S. citizens to find jobs."
Undocumented workers are rampant. Officer Simon Tirado of the produce market's public safety office, commented: "The foreigners are hard working, very easy to manage, and do anything not to lose their jobs. They don't know much about labor laws. A citizen knows his rights."
Daniel Kane, Jr., president of Teamsters Local 202, has opted to organize the illegals: "A worker is a worker. We want them to sign up and get paid on the books like everyone else.
"I don't check people's documentation," Kane says. "That's the employer's job."
Yet many employers, in their eagerness to hire, may not scrutinize the papers they're given. "We had a guy here for 10 years under one name," says Kane. "Now his name is another name. Now that he became legal, he's got a real social security number."
Squeezed from above by union seniority and word-of-mouth hiring, from below by foreign workers, the locals have it very tough indeed. And the numbers show it.
One block away from the produce market, the new Hunts Point Works employment and training center is packed. It's Wednesday morning, and there are orientations in both English and Spanish for new job seekers. One of the career advisors, Monique Small, proudly holds four slips of paper aloft, each representing a successful placement. The director, Jeremie Sautter is on his speakerphone, talking to Jayne Allen, a client who has just been hired as a clerk by Yula, Inc., another local business.
"They've got a lot of work to do," says Rocco D'Amato, president of A.L. Bazzini Nuts and a partner in the city's Vision Plan. "But Hunts Point Works is the best effort ever made by everybody of good will to change that old 'ignore the locals' mentality."
Still, hiring locally is a low priority for most Hunts Point businesses. Although there are tax credits for hiring people who live in the federal enterprise zone that stretches from the South Bronx to Harlem, employers like E. Armata's Panio say credits are "not that big of an incentive. For a company this size, it's a fart in a windstorm."
More than anything, the businesses of Hunts Point are looking for the most productive workers-from anywhere-as they struggle to survive in a changing economy.
At the produce market, employees have noticed a steady decline of business over the past few years as more of their customers bypass the market and buy directly from national distributors. Across the street, A&P/Shopwell has just closed its doors, eliminating 300 jobs.
When the New Fulton Fish Market opens-after the current labor and legal disputes have been resolved-it won't be bringing anything near the 1,000 jobs touted by Mayor Giuliani in 2001. Of the approximately 800 jobs migrating from Manhattan to Hunts Point, an estimated 600 workers will come with them, leaving just 200 new openings. And the expansion of the market into a 24-hour operation is "years away," says market manager George Maroulis.
For now, the Fish Market remains an empty airplane hanger-sized refrigerator. Hunts Point Works has yet to train a single fish cutter, and many applications filled out at their booth at the Hunts Point Fish Parade have gone unanswered, leaving residents like Ricky Beck to give up on Hunts Point altogether. He recently took a job working for Security USA in Manhattan.
"The optimum situation would be that people who live in the neighborhood would work in the neighborhood," says the Teamster's Kane. "But where does that happen in this country?"
The foodservice industry jobs of Hunts Point may be "living wage" jobs, as Kane says, but they are not the industrial jobs of years past that anchored urban neighborhoods and sustained generations of laborers.
"People are not falling over themselves to unload vegetables," says Kane. "It's not exactly hanging out with Puff Daddy. This is brutal outside in the wintertime, hot in the summertime." Kane knows personally just how brutal the work can be. His desk faces a huge photo of his grandfather Eddie Hunt, who was killed at 72 when a truck tire fell off a scaffold and broke his neck.
Victor Alvelo, 47, a Grand Concourse resident who found work in the produce market seven years ago after spending 18 years in prison, doesn't know how much longer he can hold on.
"I'm tired already," he says. "And I'm not getting any younger. I don't have too much of a future."
Diamond, who continues to "lump around," takes her work in stride. "I don't plan on doing this forever. But I've got a daughter to support. It's all for my daughter."