As a vibrant, immigrant worker rights organization, Casa Latina empowers low-wage Latino immigrants to move from economic insecurity to economic prosperity and to lift their voices to take action around public policy issues that affect them. Casa Latina was founded in 1994, shortly after unprecedented numbers of Latino workers began arriving to Seattle. Since then, the organization has grown from doing street outreach out of borrowed spaces, to organizing job dispatch out of a trailer in a parking lot, to now providing a suite of impactful programs—including day labor dispatch, ESL classes, job skills & safety trainings, and community organizing for almost 750 worker-members—out of a three-building campus in Seattle’s Central District.
Since our humble beginnings, Casa Latina has grown greatly in size and stature. In 2015 alone, Casa Latina dispatched 9,092 jobs with an average hourly wage of $17.50; taught English to 300 people; and recovered more than $21,000 in stolen wages.
In addition to directly serving the Latino community in King County, Casa Latina has national impact as a model day worker center whose programs, curricula, and operations have been shared and implemented at worker centers throughout the country. Amongst other projects, our popular education model of English instruction and our worker dispatch software Machete are distributed widely. It’s through local and national change that we envision a future where the Latino community participates fully in the economy and democracy of this country.
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