Laborers clean up after Harvey
Survey: Immigrant workers face exploitation
HOUSTON — Guillermo Miranda Vazquez starts his day in a parking lot near the Home Depot where he easily finds work alongside other day laborers who are cleaning up Houston after Hurricane Harvey.
Some days, he clears rotted drywall and hauls out furniture and carpet destroyed by Harvey’s floodwaters. Other days, he chops fallen trees or helps to lay the foundations for new homes. He ventures daily into homes wearing a T-shirt, work pants and tennis shoes, often surrounded by the pungent stench and raw sewage that flowed into homes during the flooding.
“I always wash and scrub myself, and I use alcohol or something similar so that I don’t get infected,” said Miranda, a native of Guatemala. “I haven’t gotten sick yet.”
Hundreds of day laborers like Miranda have quietly become an integral part of the recovery from Harvey, toiling in dangerous conditions amid the fear of being picked up by immigration authorities.
Harvey damaged or destroyed 200,000 homes and flooded much of Houston and smaller coastal communities with record amounts of rain and high winds. In a construction industry that already had labor shortages before the storm, it created a massive demand for the kind of work that day laborers have long performed after hurricanes and tropical storms.
Day laborers said they’ve been hired by a mix of individual homeowners, work crews from out of state, and subcontractors working on residential and commercial buildings. Mostly immigrants, they operate in plain sight, gathering early in the morning in parking lots near construction stores and gas stations, waiting for work.
Advocates from the National Day Laborer Organizing Network recently surveyed the workers about the conditions they’re experiencing. Interviews suggested most are routinely exposed to mold and contamination, and aren’t aware of legal protections they have even if they’re not in the country legally. Advocates have been passing out flyers and holding worker trainings.
About a quarter of the more than 350 workers surveyed said they had been denied wages promised for cleanup work, sometimes by employers who abandoned them at work sites after they had completed a job, according to a report on the survey by Nik Theodore, of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Around 85 percent had not received safety training.
More than 70 percent of the day laborers are in the U.S. illegally, some of them having previously been deported, the survey found. Their wages have stayed at around $100 a day, according to the survey, though some individual laborers said they were being paid more after the hurricane.
The problems they face have cropped up after every major recent storm. Day laborers were an integral part of Houston’s rebuilding after Hurricane Ike in 2008 and more recent storms that flooded neighborhoods in 2015 and 2016. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, one survey found that workers without legal authorization were being paid less and were less likely to have protective equipment than those who were in the country legally.