To gird them­selves against Houston’s freak­ish sub-40-degree weath­er, the jor­naleros, or day labor­ers, draw the hoods of their sweat­shirts so tight that just their noses peek out. Hud­dled in groups of four or five across a Home Depot park­ing lot, the clus­ters dis­in­te­grate when Mau­ri­co ​“Chele” Igle­sias approaches.

'[Contractors] claim that because we were in a state of emergency due to Harvey, they are not required to give overtime, and that is a plain lie,' says Maurico “Chele” Iglesias, an organizer with the Workers Defense Project. 'Harvey is being used as a reason for more abuses.'

Although Igle­sias, an orga­niz­er with the Work­ers Defense Project, has been com­ing to this park­ing lot every oth­er week for five months, he rarely sees a famil­iar face. ​“It’s always dif­fer­ent peo­ple,” he says. ​“They always keep moving.”

The work­ers, pri­mar­i­ly from El Sal­vador, Hon­duras and Mex­i­co, now liv­ing in a state not known for its warmth toward immi­grants, eye Igle­sias with cau­tion and edge away. His beard and dark glass­es could eas­i­ly be mis­tak­en for a hip­ster aes­thet­ic. But once he starts speak­ing in Span­ish, his ease talk­ing with day labor­ers quick­ly becomes appar­ent. A few cir­cle back to hear what he has to say.

The jor­naleros have become Houston’s go-to rebuild­ing corps in the wake of Hur­ri­cane Har­vey. When the Cat­e­go­ry 4 hur­ri­cane made land­fall Aug. 25, 2017, it destroyed an esti­mat­ed 30,000−40,000 homes in the area and caused, by some esti­mates, near­ly $200 bil­lion in dam­age.

The work agree­ments these men enter into are loose at best. When a rental pick­up pulls up, four men run over to it, knock­ing on the win­dow. One gets in after an exchange of a few words, and the truck dri­ves off.

On Dec. 8, 2017, Igle­sias is here to gin up inter­est in an upcom­ing wage theft clin­ic and a two-day OSHA-cer­ti­fied train­ing about health and safe­ty pro­to­cols for gut­ting, clean­ing and rebuild­ing dam­aged homes.

Wage theft and safe­ty vio­la­tions were ram­pant in Houston’s low-wage con­struc­tion indus­try even before the storm hit, accord­ing to local work­er cen­ters. One study found that 12.4 per­cent of con­struc­tion work­ers in the city suf­fered injuries on the job. ​“The Texas con­struc­tion indus­try is … incred­i­bly dan­ger­ous,” says José Garza, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Work­ers Defense Project. ​“For years, the indus­try has absolute­ly failed to pri­or­i­tize safety.”

Har­vey only exac­er­bat­ed the prob­lems, orga­niz­ers say. Con­trac­tors came in from out of town, lured by FEMA mon­ey and work, and may not fear anoth­er state’s enforce­ment agen­cies. Small, inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors and indi­vid­ual home­own­ers may not know or fol­low the rules. Sub­con­trac­tors are under pres­sure to reduce costs and may refuse to pay over­time or not pay until a job is fin­ished — dol­ing out noth­ing if a work­er gets injured.

Con­struc­tion work of any kind pos­es many safe­ty risks: falls from roofs, injuries from heavy machin­ery or heavy lift­ing, eye dam­age from fly­ing dust or fiber, ear dam­age from loud machines, lung dam­age from fumes or gas­es. But hur­ri­cane recov­ery brings its own par­tic­u­lar dangers.

Mold grows ram­pant in flood­ed homes and can cause seri­ous res­pi­ra­to­ry prob­lems with­out prop­er train­ing and equip­ment. Old­er hous­es may have lead and asbestos in the walls. And storm waters don’t just bring flood dam­age: They also con­tain sewage and some­times chem­i­cals from near­by fac­to­ries. ​“All the con­t­a­m­i­na­tion that came [in with storm water] stays in the dry­wall, stays in the car­pet, and peo­ple are tak­ing all of that out and car­ry­ing that and get­ting sick,” says Mar­i­anela Acuña Arreaza, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Hous­ton-based Fe y Jus­ti­cia Work­er Cen­ter. In Octo­ber 2017, Josue Zuri­ta, who had been repair­ing homes dam­aged by Har­vey, died of a flesh-eat­ing bac­te­r­i­al infec­tion like­ly picked up on a job site.

In the Home Depot Lot, the sto­ries of exploita­tion flow quick­ly. After first deny­ing that there are any health or safe­ty haz­ards, two jor­naleros acknowl­edge that not all con­trac­tors pro­vide required gloves or safe­ty glass­es. Many of them sport sneak­ers rather than the work shoes or boots man­dat­ed by OSHA for construction.

Fran­cis­co, a younger man with a spiky mus­tache, pulls out an arm he had kept tucked inside a sweat­shirt for warmth to dis­play a swollen set of stitch­es just below his wrist. He had an acci­dent with a machine at a work­site that required a trip to the hos­pi­tal. He received no work­ers’ com­pen­sa­tion for his injuries — and no pay for the hours he worked that day.

José, whose light­weight boots are splat­tered with paint and dust, says he was cheat­ed out of pay for 20 hours spent remov­ing sheetrock at a post-Har­vey site. An old­er man with a patchy beard, also named José, tells a sto­ry about a work­er who was dri­ven to a job site far away and left strand­ed there with­out being paid. When he tracked down the man who hired him, he was shot in the arm and stom­ach. He sur­vived — and is still show­ing up look­ing for work.

In Novem­ber 2017, the Fe y Jus­ti­cia Work­er Cen­ter and the Nation­al Day Labor­er Orga­niz­ing Net­work released a sur­vey of 361 day labor­ers. It found that more than a quar­ter had been vic­tims of wage theft in the after­math of the hur­ri­cane — about half the num­ber of inci­dents over the past year hap­pened in the first four weeks after the storm — with the total wages they were col­lec­tive­ly owed exceed­ing $20,000.

Eighty-five per­cent of the day labor­ers sur­veyed said they hadn’t received any health and safe­ty train­ing at their work­sites, and more than a third report­ed hav­ing been injured. Thir­ty-two per­cent are doing the work with­out the prop­er gloves, 40 per­cent with­out pro­tec­tive glass­es, 41 per­cent with­out steel-toed boots, 61 per­cent with­out a res­pi­ra­tor and 64 per­cent with­out a hard hat.

“Work­ers are fix­ing up … homes or apart­ments with­out the prop­er breath­ing equip­ment,” Igle­sias says. ​“Some of them get sick the first night: fever, itchy throat, blood­shot eyes.”

Mar­tin Mares, a com­pact man with lined, sunken eyes and heav­i­ly worn cow­boy boots, says he and his wife decid­ed to find work on Face­book after the storm hit. A vet­er­an Hous­ton con­struc­tion work­er, he found an ad promis­ing $120 a day, sev­en days a week. At one work site, the work­ers had to share gloves, over­alls and glass­es. The masks they were giv­en only pro­tect­ed against dust, not mold. And the gloves were made out of cloth and only use­ful for remov­ing garbage, not car­pet or sheetrock. Yet work­ers only got one pair to last the entire day. He even wit­nessed preg­nant women using tox­ic chem­i­cals with­out protection.

“Although they said they had expe­ri­ence and it was a big com­pa­ny … the peo­ple man­ag­ing the projects didn’t have enough expe­ri­ence to han­dle 100 peo­ple,” he says.

When he went to pick up his pay, he says, it took four hours of nego­ti­a­tion, and even then he was short­ed $10 a day. ​“I don’t believe that a busi­ness of this size doesn’t have mon­ey to pay,” he says. ​“It’s part of a sys­tem of fraud.”

Igle­sias believes things are only get­ting worse as the recov­ery con­tin­ues. At a mid-Novem­ber wage theft clin­ic he held, eight work­ers showed up who hadn’t been paid any­thing at all for Har­vey-relat­ed work. He also received a com­plaint about a large, com­mer­cial con­struc­tion site where work­ers were putting in 60 hours a week but not get­ting overtime.

“[Con­trac­tors] claim that because we were in a state of emer­gency due to Har­vey, they are not required to give over­time, and that is a plain lie,” he says. ​“Har­vey is being used as a rea­son for more abuses.”

When Pres­i­dent Trump vis­it­ed Texas in the wake of Har­vey, he basked in applause and boast­ed about the recov­ery efforts. ​“You have been just out­stand­ing,” he told local offi­cials. ​“We won’t say con­grat­u­la­tions … We’ll con­grat­u­late each oth­er when it’s all fin­ished, but you have been terrific.”

Offi­cials sim­i­lar­ly pat­ted them­selves on the back in the wake of Hur­ri­cane Sandy, which hit New York and the East Coast in 2012. ​“Nobody’s ever respond­ed this way to a dis­as­ter. [We have] actu­al­ly fixed things,” May­or Michael Bloomberg said of his administration’s efforts. ​“We haven’t just had press releas­es, we’ve actu­al­ly done an enor­mous amount.” He claimed the effort was so impres­sive some­one would write a book about it.

Yet what these politi­cians are prais­ing, usu­al­ly, is the work of unsung day labor­ers. In the wake of Sandy, work­ers came from as far as Geor­gia to rebuild New York. The work­er cen­ter Make the Road New York was a first line of defense against exploitation.

“The sit­u­a­tion after the storm for work­ers, in par­tic­u­lar undoc­u­ment­ed work­ers, was pret­ty bleak,” says Sara Cul­li­nane, then a staff attor­ney at Make the Road New York and now direc­tor of Make the Road New Jer­sey. Work­ers had sto­ries sim­i­lar to those of the Hous­ton jor­naleros: dri­ven to far­away sites, giv­en no pro­tec­tive equip­ment, and short­ed on wages.

In Hous­ton, Fe y Jus­ti­cia was the only work­er cen­ter in the city for 11 years before Work­ers Defense Project set up shop in 2017. It’s cur­rent­ly at capac­i­ty for wage theft cas­es. At Arreaza’s last count, the orga­ni­za­tion was get­ting about 20 calls a day, 10 of them regard­ing new claims. ​“It’s crazy, it’s unbe­liev­able,” she says. ​“It’s real­ly intense.”

If a work­er brings a com­plaint, the orga­ni­za­tions have a vari­ety of tac­tics at their dis­pos­al: Bring direct lit­i­ga­tion them­selves, send the com­plaint to a state agency or, if the case seems dif­fi­cult to pros­e­cute, orga­nize direct action. ​“Some­times the best thing to do is to show up with 20 peo­ple out­side their house and demand pay­ment,” Garza says.

Since Har­vey, Fe y Jus­ti­cia has also trained about 200 peo­ple in how to use pro­tec­tive equip­ment, what symp­toms of expo­sure look like, and how to pro­tect peo­ple from haz­ards like mold. Igle­sias esti­mates he has spo­ken with hun­dreds of work­ers and tried to edu­cate them as part of his outreach.

It isn’t only up to work­ers’ cen­ters to pro­tect work­ers, of course. Wage theft is ille­gal and the purview of the fed­er­al Depart­ment of Labor, as well as the Texas Work­force Com­mis­sion. State and fed­er­al OSHA offi­cials are tasked with ensur­ing work­places are safe. But they can be slow to respond. ​“I don’t think we have heard a ton from them,” Garza says. ​“We haven’t seen the kind of lead­er­ship [at OSHA and the DOL] that demon­strates that they are mak­ing Hous­ton a priority.”

Accord­ing to a 2015 inves­ti­ga­tion by ABC13, the city’s OSHA offices, like many around the coun­try, are extreme­ly under­staffed, with only two dozen inspec­tors to cov­er the city’s job sites, includ­ing its oil refiner­ies and boom­ing con­struc­tion indus­try. Houston’s OSHA offices con­duct­ed more than 1,000 safe­ty brief­in­gs as part of their Har­vey response, but were not able to say whether they had inspect­ed any hur­ri­cane-affect­ed sites.

Nei­ther the Depart­ment of Labor, the Texas OSHA office nor the Texas Work­force Com­mis­sion respond­ed to requests for infor­ma­tion about wage theft enforce­ment after Harvey.

Ulti­mate­ly, orga­niz­ers say, the goal is to empow­er work­ers them­selves. ​“We want work­ers to orga­nize, to know their rights, to make sure that they claim their rights and … inform oth­er work­ers about their rights as well,” Igle­sias says.

“Los dere­chos lab­o­rales son uni­ver­sales,” he tells the work­ers at the Home Depot lot: Labor rights are uni­ver­sal. He gives them tips to help hold con­trac­tors account­able, like tak­ing pho­tos of license plates and drop­ping pins in Google Maps at con­struc­tion sites.

Work­er empow­er­ment can also be har­nessed to push for longer-term changes. ​“The real impor­tant process … is help­ing work­ing peo­ple to have agency and to build pow­er,” Garza says. ​“And then con­vert­ing that pow­er into mean­ing­ful pol­i­cy change that ensures we don’t have to face this sit­u­a­tion every time a hur­ri­cane rolls through town.” His orga­ni­za­tion has been in talks with local lead­ers about pass­ing leg­is­la­tion, such as a liv­ing wage and work­ers’ comp for con­struc­tion work­ers, although he said every­thing is still pre­lim­i­nary. ​“It is not the moon that we are ask­ing for,” he says. ​“It is basic standards.”

In fact, plen­ty of oth­er places have insti­tut­ed gov­ern­ment con­tract­ing poli­cies that encour­age devel­op­ers to pay well and cov­er employ­ees with work­ers com­pen­sa­tion: Accord­ing to research by the Illi­nois Eco­nom­ic Pol­i­cy Insti­tute, at least 224 cities and coun­ties in the U.S. had adopt­ed such poli­cies as of 2015.

Ask­ing day labor­ers to push for change can be dif­fi­cult. Mar­tin Mares notes that many work­ers he knows don’t both­er to fight for the pay they’re owed. Some don’t want to waste hours that could be spent doing more work or rest­ing. For oth­ers, deal­ing with courts and judges is far too risky giv­en fears over immi­gra­tion enforce­ment. Oth­ers sim­ply accept the con­di­tions they work in.

“But that’s not the point,” Mares says. ​“The point is to show that there are laws that pro­tect us … and show that the pow­er that work­ers have is big­ger than the dollar.”