On a damp, early Monday morning last month, five community organizers crammed into a car heading to downtown Houston.



They didn’t have a particular destination, other than street corners and parking lots. They were looking for day laborers and construction workers, a workforce often seen in Houston but rarely felt. They were driving to places where these workers gathered each morning in search of work to rebuild the city after Hurricane Harvey.

As the car wound through streets lined with mountains of furniture, countertops, and ruined clothing, someone would occasionally spot small groups who looked like they might be waiting for work. Many spoke only Spanish, and the organizers knew that these men and women could soon face dangerous and even deadly working conditions in homes and businesses across the city. The car pulled over so organizers could talk, listen and educate them on their labor rights.

They spoke to men using shopping carts to haul sheetrock debris out of ruined homes and apartment complexes with their bare hands. Others were demolishing rotted, moldy structures without respirators or safety equipment.

At one apartment complex, they learned residents were in the process of being evicted because they could not pay rent in the wake of the devastation. Jose Oriames, a worker removing debris from the complex, said his boss refused to pay him or his crew for that day until they came back tomorrow to throw away more debris.

After navigating 150 miles of Houston streets over three days, the organizers had talked to more than a hundred men and women, but they knew larger challenges loomed for Houston’s construction workforce.

Even before Harvey, it was already tough being a construction worker in Houston. A construction worker dies on the job in Texas every three days. Those who survive often endure dangerous working conditions, and are denied overtime pay for poverty level wages. A recent study done with the University of Illinois found 40% of Houston construction workers do not have access to any form of benefits such as health care, paid sick leave, or even workers’ compensation.



Nationally, construction workers are facing new challenges: Donald Trump’s Department of Labor has already established troubling ties to the construction industry, with opponents of worker protections gaining a louder voice.



Even pre-Harvey, it was tough in the Houston construction industry – a worker dies on the job in Texas every three days

In Texas, however, the industry’s successful drive to dismantle such protections has been a reality for decades. There’s a reason Texas is the only state that doesn’t require any form of workers’ compensation insurance coverage, and it’s not because working families want it that way.

Undocumented immigrant families are especially exposed. Roughly half of Texas construction workers are undocumented, and these individuals often have no choice but to accept the industry’s worst abuses silently. Working men and women who attempt to recover their wages or request safety equipment from their bosses are routinely fired or threatened with deportation.

While industry leaders in Texas are the first to say they need undocumented workers to build our homes, roads, and cities, their support depends on maintaining poverty wages and bare-bones regulations.

The already dire working conditions in the Texas construction industry have worsened since Trump’s recent immigration crackdown, and since the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, signed senate bill 4 into law this spring. SB4, as it is known, turns police officers and sheriffs into an arm of Trump’s deportation force. Although it’s in legal limbo, the law has already had a chilling effect, leading many construction workers to leave for other states.

There is a better path. We opened our first Houston office earlier this year, and we are identifying and developing worker leaders to build power and win collective change. Since Harvey, working men and women have already reached out for help.



One woman contacted us when she and her crew, after spending more than 90 hours clearing out a Holiday Inn, were turned away without pay. Using flood maps and news articles, we are surveying the ground to find out where more construction workers are doing demolition and rebuilding.

There was a time in Texas when progress was out of reach. But in recent years, this kind of painstaking work has helped win wage and safety protections for hundreds of thousands of Texans. For example, in 2015 construction workers in Dallas joined together to win the right to a rest break that would have been unheard of years earlier.

Organizers will continue tohighlight the stories of immigrant construction workers, and advocate for new policies that ensure good, safe jobs with living wages and lead to careers in construction.

As Harvey’s floodwaters recede, Houston will either become a poster child for the construction industry’s worst abuses, or it will emerge as a model for construction work as it could be. Until then, we plan on putting a lot more miles on our cars.

Jose Garza is the executive director of the Workers Defense Project