379
Home Depot in LA installs noise machines that ‘penetrate bones’ to deter day laborers
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
379 points (99.0% liked)
News
33781 readers
2796 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Hanging around in a parking lot hoping to get work sounds strange. Is this a common thing? Does it have to do with working off the books or working without work permit?
It is. If you go to Home Depot in the morning you'll see contractors picking up Hispanic guys to hire for the day
100% off the books
The same contractors are MAGA and support ICE.
Slavers loved the slave patrol too
Easy to keep people in line when you can just whistle and away they go
Both and more. There are very few places you can walk into and get a job these days. Many Mexican immigrants come to America and try to work trades jobs to get by because it’s easier than a traditional 9-5 job with citizenship/visa requirements.
Are they allowed to be hired or does tht happen off-the-books illegally? Undeclared work around construction is not rare where I'm from but the scale of it just surprises me, that you'd just wait around in a parking lot for work.
I live in San Diego, California. where I can literally see the city of Tijuana, Mexico.
Day laborers would traditionally gather near the entrance of Home Depot or Lowes just beyond their property lines early everyday.
They will then solicit themselves to customers by offering to do either construction, landscaping, painting, moving or other physical labor jobs for cash paid work of either a half day or a full day.
They will not do anything less than 4 hours of work because it may result in them not getting another job for the rest of the day. They will often ask for a small amount upfront or at a minimum: a verbal agreement on a total amount to be paid in cash when completed.
They work hard and do a good job. Now however, they do not congregate in large groups anymore and many are just getting jobs being paid under the table doing gardening or whatever. Anything to stay below ICE's radar.
I'm guessing most of these are people who have come in illegally or otherwise don't have work permits? It makes more sense that they're hired for simpler handyman stuff, I was imagining some bigger construction projects where at least where I live they can be pretty strict about checking the paperwork. Off-the-books handyman stuff is somewhat common, but theyre hired through different ways. "I know a guy", some websites or Facebook groups. Usually it is local or maybe Estonian people who do it because they want to avoid taxes.
They do not have any documents, permits or reasonable identification most of the time. They are truly illegal immigrants who came to the USA illegally using what we call Coyotes (Human smugglers) who move humans to the US for a paid fee (very similar to what immigrants coming by boat to the shores of the EU or UK go through in a way).
They send some or all of their earnings back to Mexico btw. Sometimes the money goes to a wife and kids there, other times it's for an ailing parent/sibling. They're truly taking a risk to better their lives.
IB or San Ysidro?
IB here.
South Chula Vista actually, just north of the 905 off main st haha.
LA county is more populated than most entire states. It’s a numbers game. My husband hired a Home Depot laborer to tile the entire house (before we met) for like 1K. That kind of labor on the books would cost probably 5x that because of overhead.
I don’t see how it’s possible to police under the table work. Many labor deals fly under the radar because of that fact.
Now, the downside to hiring cheap labor is that there’s absolutely no recourse should the worker fuck up your house or project. I’d personally never hire someone to do an under the table job for something important like a roof or electrical work.
There are almost no trades certifiers in the US.
A lot of temp agencies in my area have day laborers on the books, which means they're supposed to use the verification database, in theory.
It's quite common for native - born and immigrants to gather in parking lots where construction, hotel and other service industry supervisors may need an extra employee or crew due to regular hire unforseen absences, or rush projects. For example, a smoker in a non-smoking unit, hotel deep cleaning, or a construction project that won't get paid because the deadline is too close for the regular crew to finish on time. Also ordinary citizens who may need help moving, or a home repair they thought they could manage on their own but can't.
I just foresee this irritating customers, and without forethought.
We are talking about a shithole country so it may well be normal.
Yes, and it was pretty convenient, honestly, and I doubt laborers were harassing people to hire them for non-existent work.
Yeah this is kind of conflicting feelings for me because definitely fuck both megacorps and ICE, but on the other hand I don’t know any other countries where it’s common practice for individuals hang around hardware stores for work.
How rich and pampered are you that you don't notice day laborers hanging around the Home Depot, do you live in LA, what the hell
We don't even have home depot in my country you fucking genious
They probably just aren't American
Found the rich kid
Why do you think I'm a rich kid? I work construction myself. And not the lucrative work either
You work construction and you don’t know what a day laborer is? My ass.
This is not a thing in my country you asshat
Which country is that?
Finland. I've never ever in my life heard about people picking up workers for anything from a damn parking lot.
Sorry for jumping down your throat, I guess shit works different in Finland
Not everyone lives in the US
This is shocking news to some, it seems. Some of these loons thought I was some government spy for not knowing about hiring work from hardware store parking lot.
Not the rich kid. More like the government/republikidfucker plant. Notice how every post he made has some mentioning of under the table or off the books or without a permit? He's trying to get ideas planted about how these workers are shoddy and doing illegal things and undercutting real, licensed, above board workers.
Funny how some of you think it's more likely I'm some government spy instead of not being an American. Get your head out of your ass, the rest of the world exists too.
I think we are just surprised you know so little about the rest of the world.
Yes how dare I not know about the home depot workers in the Los Angeles. Fucking hell. Get over yourself and realize the rest of the world might work differently to you
It’s about how you can’t comprehend undocumented immigrants finding cash work as day labor. Just shows you live in an isolated bubble.
I could comprehend it just fine when someone explained it. I've just never heard of this hanging around in parking lot to get work thing before so I was asking what the deal was. What a bubble to live in, not knowing about some Yank thing.
Like fuck off dude, stop assuming everyone is American and knows everything about the US. Rest of the world exists too. And you are saying I live in isolated bubble lol
I never made an assumption of your location.
Day laborers exist in every country, even Finland, the method of hiring them and the popular industries vary from place to place. In the US, day laborers that work construction and landscape usually hang out at stores that sell those things.
This type of work is popular among undocumented people, because it usually pays cash and no one asks many questions. Curiously, the number of undocumented people in the United States is estimated to be almost 150% of the entire population of your tiny little backwater country.
It is very clear that your bubble does not extend beyond Finland… And I would suspect even more likely not to the end of your block.
You just assumed I had to be rich for not knowing in the US people hire random people in the parking lot of some store. Very reasonable, especially if you didn't assume I was already somehow familiar with this custom.
Yeah I assumed you had no experience with the working human… I was very wrong. You have no understanding outside of Finland. Which btw is 0.20% on the land surface on earth. I’m not sure which is worse.
And how common do you think this hiring people on the hardware store parking lot practise is, globally speaking? Can you name some countries where you know this is a thing, or where you've seen people hang around the parking lot, waiting to be hired?
Hardware store specifically? Which is not what your original comment said: parking lot.
Yeah: China. India. From basic web searches those appear to be parking lots and transit stations. They gather in mass to be picked up for day labor. Construction, warehouse work, etc.
BASIC INTERNET SEARCHING
Just admit you don’t know anything outside of Finland.
I mean I've only visited 15 countries and worked in 4. What would I know. You've what, searched this thing so I assume this is new knowledgw to you too that it happens elsewhere. And here you are shitting on me for not knowing this is a thing. That's funny.
You visited 15 countries and worked in four yet you didn’t pay attention to anything while you were there outside of your own little bubble. That’s funny. Then when you are presented with the idea of day laborers, it’s something you can’t possibly fucking understand, and you dismiss the wealth of information online, falling back to your experience must be the only experience.
That’s not just funny, that’s hilarious.
I'm sure you know those countries hire people from the parking lots better than someone who lived and worked there, despite not knowing even which countries I'm talking about. I think that says it all, really.
Right. Your experience is limited, as you said. I’m glad we agree. Goodbye
I mean I hadn't heard of the practice of hiring people from parking lots, yeah. That was sorta the whole reason I asked the comment section about it. But you are assuming everywhere must have the practice and people not knowing about it must be rich, not realizing not everywhere has that practice. (I mean tbh pretty sure you just assumed I was American, because of course)
I had limited experience and asked about it, you came in hot calling me names because you didn't know better.