Advocates fear day laborers are being exploited
HOUSTON — Hundreds of day laborers have quietly become an integral part of the recovery from Hurricane 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 interviewed by the Associated Press said they’ve been hired by a mix of individual homeowners, work crews from out of state and subcontractors. Mostly immigrants, they gather in parking lots near construction stores and gas stations and wait to be offered work.
Advocates from the National Day Laborer Organizing Network recently fanned out to survey 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.
About a quarter of the more than 350 workers surveyed said they had been denied wages promised for cleanup work after Harvey, 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, a professor at 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, the survey found. Their wages have stayed at around $100 a day, according to the survey, though some said they were being paid more after the hurricane.
In Houston, which has an estimated 600,000 residents in the country illegally, community leaders worry about the impact of immigration policies on worker safety. Even day laborers without legal residency are entitled to federal protections against wage theft and safety hazards.
“These people are scared,” said Stan Marek, who owns a construction company and has long pushed for a program to legalize workers. “They’re not going to go to the police if they get robbed. It’s a formula for disaster in our community.”