We are going to see alot more of this in the next couple of years:

More than 50 day laborers stood, bored, anxious and mostly silent, in the sun-blasted parking lot of a Home Depot here last week, tracking the ebb and flow of customers and hoping for work. The hours crawled by. Six, maybe seven men scored jobs. The rest just waited.

“To stand here doesn’t make a lot of sense to a lot of people,” Jairo Mancillas, 29, a day laborer from El Salvador, said glumly as he waited on a grassy median in the parking lot. “But to us, it’s a very important thing. It means a lot.”

This bleak scene is playing out at scores of day laborer sites across the region. Here on Long Island; under the elevated No. 7 line on Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens; at the intersection of Port Richmond Avenue and Castleton Avenue on Staten Island; along Bay Parkway in Brooklyn; near highway on-ramps in Westchester County; and into New Jersey and Connecticut, clusters of day laborers, their numbers swelled by people laid off from full-time jobs, wait for work that, more often than not, never comes.

Two years ago, when the economy was booming and home-building was thriving, many of these same laborers were working every day. Now, they are lucky if they work twice a week, many of them say. Their lives have become a test of wits, patience and hope.

   And, of course, there are always the bottom-of-the-pond employers who smell exploitation opportunities:

As demand for day labor has plunged, some employers have taken advantage of the glut of workers by paying them less or not paying them at all, several workers said.

One of Mr. Mancillas’s friends, David, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, said a contractor did not pay him for several days of work soon after he arrived last year in Hempstead. But he did not seek help from the authorities because he was afraid of being deported.

“He owed me $1,000,” said David, who refused to give his last name. “But fear kept my mouth shut.”

   There is is fear. Fear will spread as the economy darkens. Fear about the ability to find a job and pay bills. Fear of standing up to a bad employer.

   And another fear: I worry about a rising new wave of anti-immigrant feelings fanned by difficult times for all workers. The labor movement needs to be out there now, making it clear that greedy financiers and over-paid executives have caused the impending severe economic conditions, not people just trying to make ends meet.