When Gerardo Avila decided to leave San Luis, the dusty industrial city in north Mexico where Spanish colonialists once mined for gold and silver, he set his sights on America. The year was 2000, and Avila wanted to find a well-paying job in Northern Virginia. But he found himself lining up for day-labor work, unable to distinguish himself from all of the other workers who showed up every morning to compete for a limited number jobs.
Then he found Astracor, an association of residential construction workers. Now he keeps an identification card in his wallet that documents his experience as a drywall finisher.
“For me, this card is a credential,” said Avila, 35, while taking a break from laying bricks on a recent construction site. “Without this card, I might not be able to find work.”
Formed last year from a grant secured by Gov. Tim Kaine’s office, Astracor offers a wealth of free services to participants: job referrals, professional development, legal advice and English classes. Clayton Sinyai, executive director of the nonprofit organization, said that his organization’s wallet-sized identification cards offer the kind of services that a union might be able to offer in other states.
“Workers often labor for years under informal agreements of one kind or another,” said Sinyai. “So they don’t have any way of demonstrating their skills when applying for professional jobs.”
ASTRACOR HOPES TO create a kind of network for laborers who want to learn new skills and have a way of proving them to potential employers. When contractors look for people who have experience laying tiles, for example, they are often confronted with workers who say they have experience but don’t. Astracor’s identification cards give employers an indication of how much training an individual has received in a simple format that is verifiable through the non-profit’s Wheeler Avenue location. In many ways, the group serves the kind of function that would otherwise be offered by a union or trade association.
“No contractor wants to invest in training workers who will probably be working for a competitor within a month,” said Sinyai. “So we teach classes, and then issue cards that show what the workers can do.”
A recent class happened in the backyard of the ALIVE! House, a modest 1850s-era townhouse on North Payne Street that serves as a shelter to mothers and families. After any amount of rain, the yard would turn into a mud pit that would leave the house’s children looking for another place to play. But with Astracor’s workers and teachers on the job last week in a volunteer effort to learn and help the community, a herringbone pattern of red bricks emerged with a drainage system designed specifically for the yard.
“Many people will look at a job and ask how much money they can get for doing it,” said Wilfredo Bohorquez, program director for Astracor. “We’re trying to erase that from their minds.”
David Daly, a retired construction teacher at T.C. Williams High School, was on the ALIVE! House site last week overseeing the completion of the backyard herringbone patio. He worked with two Astracor students, giving them specialized training in the kind of ornamental brickwork that is common in the region — work that contractors are frequently looking for qualified workers to complete.
“There’s a disconnect between high school and the working world,” said Daly, who taught at T.C. Williams for 29 years. “If students were interested in construction there was no post-secondary educational opportunities unless you joined a union — and Virginia is a non-union state.”
BY PERFORMING THE role of a union, Daly said, Astracor is providing an invaluable service to people like Avila. Daly said that his long-term goal for the nonprofit organization was to help workers find permanent work with health-care plans and long-term financial stability.
“I would like to see the need for day-labor sites eliminated,” said Daly. “These workers deserve full-time jobs with W2 forms and benefits.”