After three years of planning, and immigrant rights group is set to launch a smartphone app for day laborers.  The app will come with many tools: workers will be able to rate employers (like a Yelp or TripAdvisor), they will be able to log their hours and wages, post pictures of job sites, and identify employers with a history of withholding wages.  The advocacy group will safeguard the information and work with lawyers to negotiate payment.  This will also help work comp carriers recover lost premiums.

“It will change my life and my colleagues’ lives a good deal,” Omar Trinidad, a Mexican immigrant, said in Spanish through an interpreter. Mr. Trinidad is the lead organizer who helped develop the app. “Presently, there is a lot of wage theft,” he said. “There has always been wage theft, and the truth is we’re going to put a stop to that.” Mr. Trinidad, suggested the name for the app – Jornalero, which means day laborer in Spanish.

Beta testing will go on later this month in the Jackson Heights section of New York City day laborer stop that exist for over a mile. The plan will be for the app to eventually spread to all 70 day laborer stops in the city then move all over the country.  The app began as a project of New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE) then their parent company, The National Day Laborer Organizing Network secured more funding.

The project has been a collaboration of workers, artists, organizers, lawyers, unions and academics. Sol Aramendi, a photographer based in Queens and an activist with NICE, first joined Hana Georg, a local electrician, to propose the idea to construction laborers, who were immediately enthusiastic. The Worker Institute, a program within the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, ran forums for workers across New York City to see what they most needed in an app. The workers wanted an easy way to track payments, record details about unsafe work sites and share pictures to identify employers. Most of all, they wanted to do it all anonymously.

The app has workers record their hours and wages, which are then saved in a profile. That profile, which lists a phone number but no name, is linked to the organization’s database. If a worker reports not being paid or being underpaid, NICE will contact the employer. If necessary, lawyers from the Urban Justice Center, who conduct monthly clinics at NICE, will help recover lost wages. It is not hard to imagine how the app can help worker’s compensation carriers recover lost premium, and for authorities to discover and prosecute employers who commit workers’ compensation premium fraud.