When Hermelinda Guadarrama and her daughter went to work to clean Netflix Hollywood’s offices last week, they had no idea that it might be their last day. 

An hour after they started, their employer told them to go home as the Sunset Fire ignited. A couple days earlier, Guadarrama’s other daughter, who cleans Netflix’s offices in Burbank, was sent home because of power outages.  

Anxious about whether her other employers, homeowners in the Altadena area, were okay, she called them again and again and finally got a response from one. 

The homeowner called her crying. She had lost everything in the Eaton Fire. 

“She said she was doing very badly. She said her home burned down. And she said, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to hire you or not, but for now you won’t have a job.’”

Now Guadarrama and her two daughters are completely without income.  Guadarama said she has no idea if the homes of her other employers are still standing or if they evacuated. The bills are stacking up, and her next rent payment is only two weeks away. 

“Maybe we didn’t lose our apartment (to the fires), but what’s going to happen to our rent? To our jobs? What will happen to my daughters, my granddaughter?” Guadarrama said. 

Guadarrama is one of potentially thousands of service workers in Los Angeles County who are now out of work because they were employed by the tens of thousands of people who were displaced or lost their homes and businesses in the fires that burned Pacific Palisades, Altadena and Pasadena.

Their stories illustrate that the impact of the firestorms goes far beyond the devastating loss of wealthy and middle class communities’ homes: Low-income and undocumented Black and brown residents and immigrants have also lost their livelihoods. 

They’re gardeners, housekeepers, landscapers and car wash workers living paycheck to paycheck, trying to feed their families with less each year as the cost of living rises.  

The U.S. Labor Department announced Thursday that the Los Angeles region will receive $10 million in emergency grants to create temporary jobs and on-the-job training for displaced workers, and the state decided to use another $10 million in federal funds for the same purpose. Jobs will include debris removal, shelter operations and community health support.

As many as 35,000 jobs held by Latinos could be lost permanently because of the Los Angeles County fires,  according to research by the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute.

Although Latinos are just 23% of the population across the three major evacuation zones, they make up 36% of all workers in those areas. In the Palisades fire area, Latinos hold 34% of jobs despite representing just 7% of the population, the report says.

After the 2018 Woolsey Fire tore through Malibu, the advocacy group Instituto de Educacion Popular del Sur de California surveyed nearly 200 housekeepers, nannies, gardeners and domestic workers in the area. More than half responded in 2020 that they had permanently lost their jobs; others reported losing on average 15 days of work. 

Community organizers say the losses highlight how the climate crisis harms vulnerable communities the most. Nearly 90% of house cleaners in California are Latino, and more than 80% are foreign-born, according to the UCLA Labor Center. 

It’s an especially grim outlook for undocumented immigrants who often don’t qualify for federal unemployment or disaster aid that U.S. citizens are entitled to.   

For years, immigrants’ advocates have campaigned for the state to extend unemployment aid to undocumented workers — during the pandemic, then during winter storms that put farmworkers out of work for weeks and then during wildfires. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed legislation twice, once in 2022 and again last year, citing cost concerns. The original version of the 2022 bill would have given  undocumented workers who lost their jobs as much as $300 a week in benefits for as long as 20 weeks. The program would have provided $330 million in benefits yearly and cost as much as $237 million to start, according to estimates by the state Employment Development Department.  

Amid a state budget deficit of up to $56 billion over two years and increasingly hostile rhetoric on immigration during the presidential election, Newsom killed a bill last year that would have directed the employment department to study how to extend unemployment benefits to immigrants. The bill, he said, “sets impractical timelines, has operational issues, and requires funding that was not included in the budget.” 

The unemployment insurance system is funded by state and federal taxes on employers; since the pandemic, California’s system has been $20 billion in debt. Because of federal restrictions on eligibility, the state would likely need to pay for benefits for undocumented immigrants with its own funds. 

“The idea of unemployment insurance is really prudent at this moment because every time there is a catastrophe the most vulnerable workers end up paying the price,” said Veronica Alvarado, deputy director of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, which advocated for the legislation. “What we’ve seen in the hypocrisy of California has been that there is a population that gets to be exploited, gets to be leña (fuel) for the fire.” 

The lack of an unemployment system for immigrants means community organizations are stepping in to offer cash assistance. The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles has launched a campaign to request donations for a relief fund that will offer cash assistance to families. 

The organization is also assisting mixed-status and low income families who have lost homes in the fires and may be hesitant to seek government aid. 

“Black and brown communities are on the frontlines of the climate crisis and again and again,” said Vladimir Carrasco, the coalition’s director of climate justice programs. “(They) constantly get left behind. What do we do? We lean into mutual aid to be able to distribute info and resources. We’ve done it before and we’ll do it again.” 

Thirteen staff members are surveying community members in evacuation centers. It’s too early to identify how many people have lost income, but partner organizations are already reporting that the need exceeds the available funds. 

Carrasco said he expects at least a thousand people to request cash aid. So far, the Instituto de Educacion has been in contact with 80 domestic workers and day laborers who have lost all or much of their income. 

At the Malibu Community Labor Exchange, a hiring center where gardeners, house cleaners and handymen wait for work, director Oscar Mondragón said several workers had already lost jobs after the Franklin Fire forced evacuations in December and damaged dozens of buildings. 

Others, Mondragón said, worked as housekeepers for Pacific Palisades homeowners until the fires last week. “Right now, there’s no calls for jobs at all,” he said. 

The nonprofit or government aid could help people like Rhamone Ricardo, a Jamaican immigrant and Altadena resident who owned a car-detailing business in his community. The business and his apartment building are still standing, but everything around them is burned to the ground, he said.

“There’s no communities so there’s no car wash. There’s nothing more to explain. No business, no income,” Ricardo said. 

Ricardo said he moved to Altadena 17 years ago and started the business. It represented years of hard work to establish himself and build a reputation for offering friendly quality service to his community. 

He has some savings, but not enough to start over, he said. Ricardo is staying in a nearby hotel until he’s allowed back into his home. Even though his apartment is standing, he plans to move out because it’s partially damaged. He started a GoFundMe to help with the costs.

“I’m just stuck between a rock and a hard place,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do but try to keep going.”

Guadarrama said she’s waiting anxiously by the phone for a call from Netflix about returning to work. If no one calls her back soon, she’ll have to start applying for jobs in factories. She’s made business cards that she will distribute in hopes someone will hire her. If it comes to it, she’ll start selling food on the streets, she said. 

“Right now, we have nothing that can help us,” she said. “We’re hardworking women. We don’t want companies to close the door on us.” 

Magdalena Chavez Tomas, who works cleaning and housekeeping jobs in Malibu, was on her usual route up the coast on Jan. 7, the day the fires ignited. She spent the morning cleaning and taking out the trash at a store in the Palisades then cleaned a home in Malibu in the afternoon. 

All throughout the neighborhoods, it looked like people were fleeing or preparing to leave. When Chavez Tomas finished cleaning and left the house, the area was engulfed in smoke. Homeowners were hosing down their houses and Pacific Coast Highway was impassable. She and other workers sheltered at an apartment down the road owned by one of her occasional clients.

“The air thundered,” she said. “The air whipped all night long. I didn’t eat that day, or the next.” 

It was the third wildfire in the Malibu area that she had experienced as a housekeeper and by far the most traumatic. 

The client who had helped her to shelter, she said through tears, died in the fire. She described him as a great man, an “unforgettable” person who checked on her family during the pandemic and helped them with rent and groceries. 

And she’s mourning the destruction of a neighborhood where countless immigrant women saw, reflected in the wealth and success of others, their own opportunities to survive. 

Along with the rest of the Palisades, the store where Chavez Tomas worked as a cleaner is gone. She doesn’t know the status of the house she cleans in the afternoons. She hasn’t had any income in a week, and while applying for cleaning jobs she’s thinking about other options. She could paint houses or garden or sell tamales and tacos. 

“All the people who were working for their dreams, all those who had built their businesses … it all ended in a second,” she said.

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