NEW YORK, March 2 — Just past sunrise on 69th Street, near the No. 7 subway station in Jackson Heights, Queens, men in backpacks and work boots gather in groups, many on their cellphones.

They are workers at one of the largest day labourer stops in New York City, hoping to be hired. Most are unauthorised immigrants who have reported being cheated by employers. In the fight against wage theft, their phones could soon become their biggest allies.

After three years of planning, an immigrant rights group in Jackson Heights is set to start a smartphone app for day labourers, a new digital tool with many uses: Workers will be able to rate employers (think Yelp or Uber), log their hours and wages, take pictures of job sites and help identify, down to the colour and make of a car, employers with a history of withholding wages. They will also be able to send instant alerts to other workers.

The advocacy group will safeguard the information and work with lawyers to negotiate payment.

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“It will change my life and my colleagues’ lives a good deal,” Omar Trinidad, a Mexican immigrant, said in Spanish through an interpreter. Trinidad is the lead organiser 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.”

The app has its soft launch last night, with beta testing to be held later this month at the Jackson Heights day labourer stop that stretches for a mile along 69th Street. Day labourer centres in Brooklyn and on Staten Island will also be testing the product, which is available in Spanish and English.

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Trinidad, 35, suggested the name for the app — Jornalero, which means day labourer in Spanish.

The plan is for the app to spread to all 70 of the city’s day labourer stops, and then to workers in all kinds of jobs across the country.

The Jornalero app began as a project of New Immigrant Community Empowerment, known as NICE, in Jackson Heights, and then expanded in scope when the group’s parent organisation, the National Day Labourer Organising Network, based in Los Angeles, secured more funding.

“It’s going to be a gift that the day labourers are going to give to the working class in America,” said Pablo Alvarado, the executive director of the national day labourer group.

The project has been a collaboration of workers, artists, organisers, 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 labourers, who were immediately enthusiastic. The Worker Institute, a programme  within the School of Industrial and Labour 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.

Previously, when workers were robbed of their wages, Trinidad said, they were unable to respond; because of their immigration status, they were often afraid to report the theft or did not know how.

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 organisation’s database. If a worker reports not being paid or being underpaid, NICE will contact the employer. If necessary, lawyers from the Urban Justice Centre, who conduct monthly clinics at NICE, will help recover lost wages.

“The app is not just reactionary,” Manuel Castro, the executive director of NICE, said. By keeping records, he said, workers will be prepared to prove they have not been paid. “Just in case something happens, they have it stored,” Castro said.

He added: “We’re launching this as a way to learn more about how to use technology.”

Trinidad will be leading training sessions on the app. He is supporting two children back in Mexico, and after three years of guiding this app, he is eagerly awaiting its arrival. “It’s like a new baby,” he said. — The New York Times