‘Any mistake can take your life’: the immigrant women working construction in New York
At 7am, Elizabeth Reyes lines up at a designated street corner, called laparada, next to a Brooklyn highway overpass. As the sun rises higher, drivers pull up with offers shouted from the window in Spanish: house cleaning, dishwashing. It’s hours before an employer finally arrives with the opportunity she’s waiting for: construction.
“Quién tiene tarjeta?” Who has a card? he yells out. He’s not referring to immigration documents, but a certification by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha). When Reyes yells that she does, the driver replies, “Vamos,” and motions for her to hop in.
Immigrants make up more than half of more than 200,000 construction workers in New York City, and about 40% of those immigrants are undocumented. But it wasn’t until the last few years that more women began joining the industry, and the numbers are growing every day.
Like many other immigrant women working in New York’s construction industry, Reyes, a 51-year-old former schoolteacher from Ecuador, had to elbow her way in. She landed her first construction gig by pleading with her male roommate to bring her to his job site, where workers were installing floors. After observing them for a while, she convinced them to let her try it and ended up getting hired on the spot. “I always remember my boss’s words: ‘Wow, you’re not big and you’re not muscular, but you’re very, very determined,’” she says.
At the free construction safety classes run by non-profits like Queens’ New Immigrant Community Empowerment (Nice) and Brooklyn’s Worker’s Justice Project, women occupy nearly half the seats – a dramatic increase from five years ago, when hardly any women signed up, staffers say. “The demand is so high that we started doing some women-only trainings,” says Nilbia Coyote, Nice’s director.
The main draw is the pay. Whereas a cleaning or restaurant job might pay below minimum wage, construction work can pay $20 an hour or more. Some women say they prefer construction’s morning-to-afternoon schedule, which better aligns with their children’s school days. Others see it as an opportunity to build a professional career, or simply find the work more exciting. Then there’s the network effect. “Once a woman is in one of these job sites, more and more women feel the aspiration that ‘if Juanita can do it, I can do it’,” says Ligia Guallpa, the executive director of the Worker’s Justice Project.
But construction is a risky job, and even more so for undocumented immigrants, who often work under informal verbal agreements. And for women, being vastly outnumbered on every construction site means more pressure to accept lower pay and mistreatment. That’s why, as more immigrant women don hard hats in New York City, advocates are training them to stand up against exploitation – and transform the construction industry itself.
‘I thought I didn’t have any rights’
Immigrant women entering construction aren’t just signs of an evolving workforce, but a changing world. In the past, “usually it was men who came [to the US] first, while women would stay back home with their children”, says Hildalyn Colón Hernández, Nice’s deputy director. “Now, as the political and economic situation gets worse” in many South American countries, “more women are coming due to necessity”. And compared with past immigrants, the women are more often younger, educated and coming alone.
At Nice’s offices in Queens, I meet Jailin Ramírez, a 27-year-old who arrived by herself just 15 days earlier from Venezuela. There, she had stood out as a female singer of traditionally male-dominated mariachi and ranchera music, but the pay wasn’t enough to support her young children. Now she’s sleeping in a homeless shelter in the Bronx as she hopes to land a construction job – “whatever is available”, she says – to send money to her family back home.
Then there’s Nelsy Suazo, a 25-yearold immigrant from Honduras, who has been living for the past year in a south Brooklyn homeless shelter with her four children and her mother. Before coming to New York, Suazo had worked as a roofer in the small town of Jasper, Texas, as one of two women on a tense and dangerous job site with as many as 80 male co-workers. They called her “mami” and “mi amor”, made comments about her underwear, and taunted her: “Hurry up, this is a man’s job,” they would say. She tried to ignore it, reminding herself that the weekly pay was nearly three times more than the $500 she had made working in a kitchen.
The Texas construction site didn’t have a place for women to change clothes, so Suazo had to use a nearby restaurant. It’s a perennial issue, and more than just a matter of convenience: if women don’t end up changing after work, they could end up bringing hazardous substances on their clothes back home.
Suazo’s job site also lacked proper safety equipment, including gloves and harnesses, in women’s sizes, so often she climbed ladders and walked on steep roofs without them. Sometimes, like the men, she worked without a helmet. Though it was terrifying, she didn’t dare complain. “I was trying to learn quickly because if you make any mistakes, they don’t give you another day of work. But any mistake can take your life,” she says.
One day, she watched one of the men fall three stories after his foot got caught in a ladder as he was carrying tiles without a harness. The man survived, with broken bones. “It was a horrible sight. I felt even worse because they blamed him,” Suazo says. The man didn’t sue, she recalls, because he was afraid of being deported. Suazo kept silent as well: “I felt like I couldn’t say anything, because I thought I didn’t have any rights.”
A ‘completely different world’
One of the advocates trying to change that is 35-year-old Angélica Novoa, a former English teacher in Colombia who never imagined her first job after arriving in New York City six years ago would be building high-rises, dangling hundreds of feet above midtown Manhattan’s ritziest avenues on swaying suspended scaffolding.
Like many other undocumented women in New York City, Novoa initially tried working as a cleaner, but the harsh chemicals were too much for her to handle. Then she consulted Nice, which ended up training her to work on construction sites. Novoa, who has back issues, “never thought I could do it”, she says. “But I did it.”
The biggest issue wasn’t lifting heavy objects but the lack of respect from her male co-workers, who “would call me ‘little girl’ or ‘sweet thing’, even though I told them they should be using my name”, she says. “I would get a lot of invitations from my co-workers: ‘Oh, do you want to go to the weekend to my boat? Do you want to go in my car?’ And even though I was clear I wasn’t interested, they would keep insisting.”
It wasn’t just a question of fitting in; it was a question of safety. Once, while she worked next to a male foreman on the suspended scaffolding, he asked her to stand on top of a bucket so that they could reach more areas without having to reposition the platform. Because she had taken the safety course, Novoa knew the request wasn’t allowed. “I said ‘no’,” she recalls, “And I have a very strong ‘no’. Luckily, he listened to me, but he never should have asked.”
Today, Novoa is no longer undocumented and works as a staffer at Nice, where she is the director of training and education for immigrant workers, including a construction preapprenticeship program reserved for female immigrants (the Worker’s Justice Project has a similar offering). In addition to skills training, the programs seek to shift workers’ mindsets to demand better conditions, Novoa says. “The world is not gonna end because you lose a job, but it’s definitely gonna end if you lose your life.”
At Nice’s offices in Jackson Heights, immigrants take classes from Maritza Ortiz, a 60-year-old from Guatemala who started working in construction in 2001 – a time when she knew of no other female immigrants on the job. Now, Ortiz teaches a popular free, 30-hour, Spanish-language training on Osha’s federal safety guidelines, and a 10-hour New York City-specific safety course, both of which are required to work at major construction sites. Ortiz says her lessons aren’t just about safety guidelines but developing true self-confidence – vital when refusing an unsafe task or negotiating better pay. The waitlist to join the course is months long.
At the Workers Justice Project in Brooklyn, a similar class aims to help women dismantle the gender barriers within their own minds, explains Guallpa, the non-profit’s director. “Most of the women have said, ‘We’ve been told our job is to do cleaning,’ and some have said, ‘I’m scared of touching a power tool.’ So we’re breaking their own misconceptions about what they can do as women, so that they can then break it for others.”
I meet Suazo on the day she passes her final Osha exam at the Nice training center. She’s beaming: the course has opened up a “completely different world” for her, she says. “They prepare you. They let you know about safety, and your rights as an employee, as a woman.” Next, she wants to learn framing, sheetrock, flooring and electricity, and then join a construction company – one that will truly respect her. “I want people to know that I’m actually an independent woman. We’re more than machines to make babies,” she says. “I’m capable, I have experience, and I need more opportunities.”
Building power at la parada
By training workers like Suazo, advocates are hoping to create enough empowered workers that employers across the city’s construction industry will be forced to improve their conditions. Organizations such as Nice and the Worker’s Justice Project try to refer immigrants directly to a list of vetted businesses who follow the rules, but the list remains small, while the number of jobseekers grows daily.
A more common experience for immigrants is to wait at la parada for informal employment offers, negotiated quickly through rolled-down windows. It’s an exchange fraught with uncertainty: “When you are outside, you don’t know anything,” Coyote says. “There’s somebody who is speaking at you from a truck; they promise you this, and say they’re going to do that – but it’s literally a coin in the air.”
These informal job markets have become even more chaotic with the recent influx of new immigrants. The just-arrived are desperate, says Coyote, which means many of them “say yes to any kind of jobs or any kind of work. And we’re talking about places that pay seven, eight, nine dollars per hour, and that’s an indicator they will probably abuse workers and not provide proper safety measures.”
But as more women enter the field, advocates also see an indirect