Pablo Alvarado

by Site Developer
on August 24, 2026

Pablo Alvarado is a founder and co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), which works to improve the lives of day laborers, migrants and low-wage workers.


Alvarado, who was born in El Salvador, fled that country’s civil war to the U.S. in 1990, when he was 22. He was a day laborer in Los Angeles and learned English in night school. He taught literacy to immigrant workers in the early 1990’s, then began organizing day laborers, bringing them together to fight workplace abuses, set wage standards, improve relationships with the community, and defend their rights to speech and assembly. He led many successful court battles against anti-soliciting ordinances that banned jornaleros from standing on sidewalks.

The rapid spread of jornalero organizing in California and on the East Coast led Alvarado and others to plan a national coalition of worker centers. The National Day Laborer Organizing Network was born in July 2001 in Los Angeles. Today it has more than 70 member organizations nationwide. They defend labor and civil rights, fight workplace abuses, offer job-site health and safety training, and organize jornaleros as “second responders” rebuilding after disasters like hurricanes and wildfires.


This year NDLON has been organizing nonviolent resistance against authoritarianism and racist anti-immigrant campaigns. As masked vigilantes from ICE and other agencies have staged raids on jornaleros at Home Depot and other places, NDLON has stood firm against violence, racial profiling, unlawful arrests, mass deportation and other violations of immigrants’ human, civil and labor rights.


Alvarado lives in Pasadena with his wife, Sharon Nicholls, and their two children.