the Cost of Day Laborers and Temporary Workers

Strawberry picking.

Our area is full of strawberry patches; many day laborers gather at a couple of street corners in Tampa. They get minimum wage ($6.79) and are transported from the street corner to the field and returned to the street corner.

My friend has enlarged what was her strawberry patch into a strawberry field business. These laborers are hard workers and they don't complain. The sun is hot and the work is hard. They are happy to have the work. They start work at about 7 a.m. as soon as it is light and work until noon when they would break for lunch. My friend used to bring them lunch, but she found they preferred to bring their own. They only took about thirty minutes for lunch (unpaid) even though she said they could have an hour. They wanted that extra 30 minutes of work. They worked until the sun went down. They were paid in cash at the end of the day and were driven back to Tampa.

She worried about where they went after she dropped them off.

Most big cities have such set-ups.

If you need to know where the corners are, call the police dept (not 9-1-1) they usually know where they are.