Home Depot seeks relief from day-labor rules

[RamboLiberal]

Source: MSNBC/AP

Home Depot is tired of being forced by local governments to accommodate the day laborers who turn up in its store parking lots seeking construction work. So the Georgia-based company turned to Congress for help.

The Senate could respond this week by attaching language to the immigration bill that would prohibit city councils from requiring home improvement stores to pay for shelters or other services to help maintain orderly day labor sites.

The amendment, sponsored by Sen. Johnny Isakson, a Georgia Republican, is designed to curtail a practice in the California communities of Mountain View and Burbank, where city councils recently have forced Home Depot to build facilities for day laborers onsite or elsewhere, hire security staff and offer bathrooms in order to get the permits necessary for its operations.

Local governments in Los Angeles, San Francisco and other cities, including in Illinois and Washington, D.C., have imposed or are considering similar measures.

Read more: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19453488/

[seriousstan]

1. Why should HD have to accommodate unsolicited competition?

HD offers it's own installation and professionals. That is like saying Bob Evans has to reserve parking spaces and water hookups for taqueria wagons.

[redqueen]

3. not competition

more like symbiosis... sort of.

sorry, can't think of a better word just now.

[seriousstan]

4. It is competition. Home depot offers installation and handyman services.

Why should they accomodate anyone who loiters in their parking lot?

[redqueen]

5. cause their customers use it?

you know, the people who own construction businesses?

i dunno really. can't say i care all too much, either. this is a fight i'm sure they're more than capable of handling without help from activists.

[KittyWampus]

8. Why aren't those construction bosses hiring guys from their neighborhoods?

Sorry, but I know a lot of guys around here that are nail bangers.

They need the work.

It's hard to compete when contractors from up island can underbid jobs cause they use "day laborers".

They drive an hour to get here and an hour back, but HEY, who cares about the locals.

And so what if rents out here are skyhigh cause the wealthy Wallstreet assholes can afford to pay for like $50 a pound lobster salad.

[redqueen]

11. they don't want to pay a fair wage, of course.

was that a rhetorical question? :shrug:

[KittyWampus]

12. yes, just asking a question.

[uppityperson]

2. oh fuck home depot.

[Warpy]

6. On the surface it seems unfair to require them to do this

but Home Depot is wrong on another level.

You see, providing a safe place for day laborers to gather is enlightened self interest. It gets contractors into the lot and quite probably into the store when they look for workers. They run the risk of having the city or a competitor set up a sheltered area elsewhere. No laborers, no last minute runs into the store, and no association of Home Depot as a place to get everything for the day's work.

They'll go to Lowe's instead.

[Sedona]

7. HD has RUINED the flooring business!

I have first hand experience running a Mom & Pop flooring installation contract business for 10 years in Northern Arizona. They have lowered the wages across the board on all flooring types by hiring under-qualified installers willing to work for slave wages. Drove us (and the half dozen highly qualified installation professionals we employed) right out of the business within a year of HD arriving in our area. Home Depot and the illegal alien employment agencies in their parking lots are to construction professionals as Walmart is to retailers.

Put THAT in your SAT test!


Thank goodness my husband became educated enough in the technical end of the profession to be of great service to a flooring manufacturer in the R&D department or we'd of starved two years ago.
I bounced back working in the hospitality industry in Sedona.

:rant:

(edited for an inelegant use of the English language)

[KittyWampus]

9. Good point, HD may have installers etc. But our experience with them is THEY SUCK

And every other person who tried HD says the same thing.

[Warpy]

10. Oh, I hate Home Depot as much as anybody else does

because they drove indie lumber yards and hardware stores in this city of 600,000 completely out of business. There isn't so much as an Ace Hardware chain store in this town. We are stuck with Lowe's and Home Depot and walking miles for what one of those little old guys with a cough could have located for us within 5 seconds in a hardware store.

I'm just saying they're missing a golden opportunity by fighting this thing. I guess they'd rather these guys wait out in rain and in sun on 100 degree days and don't realize somebody is going to shelter them elsewhere.

It's the kind of selfish stupidity that made them great.

[Donnachaidh]

18. My DH and his bosses LOVE HD -- because customers come to their store

after being jerked around by both HD and Lowe's. While both those stores in our area are empty for the most part, the contractors go to the local yard where he works. Business is booming, and has been ever since those stores were built.

[AlCzervik]

13. i worked for HD for 7 years--they do suck but it wasn't always that way.

Bob Nardelli is the one who ruined the place.

[Warpy]

17. I have to admit the new CEO has improved service

enormously. All the old guys who used to work construction and know what they're talking about are back and all the bored teenagers who worked cheap are gone.

Maybe Circuit City will figure it out next, fire that CEO, rehire the techies, and get their business back.

[liberal N proud]

14. I can't say as I blame them

I realize these people are just trying to make a living but Home Depot didn't build parking lots for people to loiter around until they found a job for the day.

But this problem will get more serious as the times get tougher, people will do what ever they can to find work even if only for a day.
Desperate measures and it will eventually lead to conflict. The companies recruiting these day laborers need to find some where their potential help can congregate that isn't intruding on other businesses.

[Edweird]

15. As a contractor I won't shop at HD. Their service is awful. So are their policies.

[brentspeak]

16. Solution: Home Depot can move all their stores out of the country

They and Mall-Wart are the two biggest Main Street America destroyers around.