Speaker 1: Hurricane Season on the Atlantic coast has been one of the most ruinous and expensive on record and it's not even over, not officially until the end of the month. For some time, Staff Writer Sarah Stillman has been looking at the rebuilding that comes after these storms and disasters, specifically the people who do the work. The legions of workers who show up overnight to cover blown-out buildings with construction tarp, who rip out ruined walls and floors and who start putting cities back together. Sarah has been spending a lot of time in Louisiana with an organization known as Resilience Force.

Sarah: We're in the parking lot of a home depot in Laplace, Louisiana, which is a suburb about 40 minutes outside of New Orleans. It's been about two weeks since Hurricane Ida tore through the area, and there's maybe about 100 or so workers in the parking lot and they're all here hoping to find work rebuilding after the storm.

Saket: [foreign language]

Sarah: There's also a man here named Saket Soni.

Saket: Okay, I'm going to speak in short sentences. I'll stop and then you--Yes.

Sarah: His colleague Daniel Kassianos is interpreting.

Saket: How is everybody? How is everybody? Okay, just very quickly, say your names. Just very quickly.

Jose: Jose Oviero.

Antonio: Antonio.

[crosstalk]

Oscar: Oscar.

Lopez: [crosstalk] Lopez.

Carlos: Carlos.

Saket: Welcome. Let me ask you this. How many of you have worked more than one hurricane?

?Jose: Everybody.

Saket: How many of you have worked more than two? How about five?

Sarah: Over the past year, I've been following workers who rebuild after climate crises. After hurricanes and fires and floods, and I've learned so much. It is this vast, largely undocumented workforce who travel much the way that migrant workers do in agricultural work. One season, they may be doing berries, and then stone fruit, and then they may be following apples. In this case, they are following from one climate crisis to the next.

Saket: What about before that after Hurricane Michael in Florida?

Sarah: When Hurricane Ida hit this past August, this town that we're in, Laplace was directly in its path. About two weeks later, you can see row after row of houses covered in blue tarp. There's telephone lines, power lines that have fallen all over the place of routed trees, roofs that are completely ripped off the houses and the homes destroyed.

It is a huge amount of work to get a town up and running again, and most of the time these are the workers who are doing it. They are cleaning up flooded buildings, they're putting blue tarp onto the rooftops, they are repairing complex electrical wiring. When you hear about what a recovery effort really takes after a hurricane, these are the workers who are making it happen.

Saket: When you go in after a hurricane, what are the kinds of things you're rebuilding?

Speaker 2: The churches, hospitals.

Saket: Churches are hard, right? The roofs are very steep. The work you're doing after hurricanes is essential work.

Daniel: We came with no money, we came to help, but sometimes the people don't appreciate that.

Saket: Well, we have to change that. Where are you all sleeping? Right here in the parking lot in cars, right?

Speaker 3: Under the car.

Saket: Under the cars, in the cars, and in the morning you wake up, this is where you brush your teeth. This is where you get ready for work., right?

Sarah: These workers are constantly on the move, and often they're sleeping in parking lots. Even though their work is tremendously urgent and really, really valuable, often these workers are not treated as if they are valued. The work is very dangerous, and they have very few protections. There's almost no regulation when it comes especially to safety on the job. There is rampant wage theft and because so many of these workers are undocumented or have some precarious legal status, they often feel like they're just not in a position to fight back when something bad happens.

Saket: Around the country a lot of people are waking up to the idea that we have to be prepared for climate change. Well, part of the argument we're making is, one of the ways we can be prepared is to protect and support the workforce. We need infrastructure for the workers and we need a path to citizenship for these workers. That's the argument we've been making for a few years.

Sarah: Saket Soni, the guy you hear speaking to these workers is truly one of the most interesting people that I've ever met in my life. He grew up in India, his dad was a civil servant so he was moving around from Pakistan to Jamaica. He wound up going to the University of Chicago, and then he wound up after he graduated undocumented for a period of time. He messed up his immigration paperwork and I think that really changed his sense of-- And deepened his understanding of what it means to be living in the shadows, as he put it.

When Hurricane Katrina hit, he moved to New Orleans to do labor organizing and he ended up doing a lot of work with people who were rebuilding after the storm, many of whom were migrant workers. Then as time went on, he noticed that it was those very same people who started to work other disasters. They went on to Baton Rouge after the flooding there, and then they went to Texas after Hurricane Harvey.

Saket: I remember pulling up to this pickup truck, where a husband-and-wife couple were sleeping, a hurricane had just battered the Florida Keys. They woke up, they rolled down their windows, they greeted us and they talked about their work very much as Hurricane recovery work. They didn't call themselves construction workers. They didn't call themselves day laborers. They'd come from San Antonio in their truck, they had a Virgin of Guadalupe hanging from their windscreen and they have created a whole life for themselves out of this truck as they were chasing this hurricane.

They really talked about themselves as the white blood cells of the recovery. This is a phrase I've heard from more than one worker gathering in a place after an injury has happened, and healing the wound.

Sarah: Saket and his colleagues decided to start this organization called Resilience Force. It's basically a group that fights on behalf of these workers both really locally and also on Capitol Hill. Resilience Force operates a lot like a labor union, but since these workers don't have a shared collective job site, Saket and his team wind up spending a lot of time at what people call the corner, which is not a literal corner but it's how workers and organizers referred to the parking lot. Some places like Home Depot all around the country, where workers gather after a storm.

[distant chatting]

After socket finishes talking to the workers, they start passing out these ID cards, which are a little laminated Resilience Force membership cards that the workers can use to present to police or whoever they need to, and that can really help them feel more safe.

Saket: These IDs are really interesting. They're not given by a government entity. They're the membership cards of our organization. We're trying to do is win recognition for this rising workforce. In the past, we've used it to win recognition from mayors, to win recognition from the police. You just heard a story of a gentleman who was pulled over by a police officer and he presented his ID, presented himself as a Resilience worker who helped rebuild Lake Charles and the police let him go. We'll come back tomorrow and day after to start training people on how to negotiate fair wages with employers and use these ideas in that negotiation.

Sarah: As the morning goes on, that's when the work starts. The contractors and the homeowners, they're rolling into the Home Depot parking.

Jean: I'm looking for somebody to sheetrock.

Sarah: Jean [unintelligible 00:09:05] owns a few homes in the area that got really badly damaged in the storm, so he drives up to the corner and he's looking for help, looking for workers.

Jean: I need that fixed.

Daniel: [foreign language]

Saket: We can go look at it, and then they can give you an estimate. Will you?

Jean: That's what I want to do.

Daniel: [foreign language]

Sarah: Saket helps Jean get set up with the worker named Leo. Leo has brought his whole crew from Houston, so they all arrange to go together with Jean to his house for an assessment of the damage.

Saket: This is not your house.

Linda: No, no, the idea is our house.

Saket: You're renting it out right now.

Linda: It's a rental.

Sarah: His wife, Linda is just showing the crews around.

Linda: This other wall is compromised as well.

Saket: Oh, yes, that's lot of mould down there already.

water damage, mould. All the sheetrock has to come out.

Speaker 3: [foreign language]

Jean: Their recommendation, you have mould, you have to take out.

Saket: Let's help you explain that to them.

Jean: [unintelligible 00:10:17]

Speaker 3: [foreign language]

Jean: Could you ask?

Saket: Yes, let's ask.

Jean: Usually when there is mould, we have to take out all the ceiling.

Speaker 4: Where's the--

Saket: You've got enough mould in the walls and in the ceilings-

Jean: In the ceilings.

Saket: -so the gentleman is saying that you'll have to take it all out.

Jean: That's a recommendation, because you're going to create more mould even though when you paint. After that, they're going to build mould too.

Saket: Because you've got mould spreading in the house now.

Speaker 4: Why you can't use the mould killer? One time in my house, and I used that mould killer which worked.

Daniel: [foreign language]

Sarah: After a little bit of negotiating, they all head to Jean's other house which also needs repairs.

Linda: Excuse the mess. The lady's been sleeping here, because she got nowhere to go. This lady's got four little ones. She's always got a baby on her [unintelligible 00:11:19]. You can't watch four little ones and clean up at the same time. I was hoping she'd be here today. I was going to say, "You watch your kids. Just tell me what you want to throw away." I was going to clean up.

Saket: in terms of all the crews, you could have run up into at the Home Depot, Leo and his crew are incredibly skilled. They're very talented. It will be important for both of you to build a direct relationship.

Jean: Is that Leo?

Saket: Yes.

Jean: Is that him? Do you speak English?

Saket: Yes, we won't be around. We're not going to be here. Leo's going to be leading the work.

Linda: Y'all have worked with him before?

Saket: Well, we're an organization called Resilience Force. We represent this workforce. Part of what we try to do is connect people like you who need the work with people like Leo. Once we leave, it's now between the two of you. You both will be doing this together.

Jean: We'll pay you $600 at the start, the other $600 when you finish.

Linda: That will pay the $2,200 upfront and then $2,300 when you finish.

Jean: Now, you're [unintelligible 00:12:30] $2,000

Saket: You guys should shake on it.

Daniel: [foreign language]

Saket: All right, Leo.

[crosstalk]

[applause]

Saket: Hey, good luck to you all.

Sarah: There's almost a kind of diplomacy in what Saket's doing here. A big part of what Resilience Force tries to do is to build bonds between the workers who are doing the rebuilding, and the often low-income folks who are most affected by the disasters. Often that's happening in areas that aren't particularly immigrant-friendly. That's another key part of the context.

They have to find a way to forge connections between those two groups, the workers doing the rebuilding and the people whose homes are being rebuilt. Leo and his crew stayed behind. They get to work, and Saket and his staff wind up riding back to the Home Depot. They start talking about the rate Leo got and basically wondering if it should have been higher.

Saket: Our role is not to set these rates. We are Leo's organization. We represent him. We advocate for him. We want to make sure the workplace is safe. With the agreement we had today, they shook hands. The numbers are on paper. It's a contract, but it's really up to him to negotiate a better price. In this case, he probably could have, but they will treat him with respect. Now, they'll be here three days. Jean will know somebody who needs help. Jean will introduce Leo to that person. For all we know, two weeks from now, he might have worked 20 homes in a one-block area.

[music]

Sarah: Some of the people who hire workers are people like Jean. They're local homeowners who just need an extra set of hands. Then there's also a much bigger and more problematic story here about the corporate side of disaster recovery. Basically, as the effects of climate change have intensified, disaster relief is becoming this huge business and I would argue a really unaccountable one.

You've got these big disaster restoration companies that are making hundreds of millions of dollars from rebuilding contracts. Increasingly, those are owned by private equity firms who see a ton of profits to be made here. Then these companies work through these really elaborate chains of subcontractors, and sub-subcontractors, and labor brokers.

Then the workers who actually end up doing the physical work wind up with very little leverage, making very little money in what are ultimately very dangerous conditions. I spent a lot of the last year digging into the consequences of that. There's very little data out there, but what I found is that many workers are actually dying from electrocution, from falls, from bacterial infections.

They're also experiencing asbestos, and silica dust exposure, and a lot of potentially fatal respiratory diseases. Frankly, we're not even yet fully aware of all the risks that these workers face.

Saket: I had a worker yesterday, who told me that he had a strong intuition that he'd get sick after working a school job after Hurricane Michael. He went in and stayed in his hazmat suit too long in a school that was too hot, because he was being pressured to work. Now, when he goes into really hot buildings, where there's heat and moisture trapped, his hands start burning. That's three years later, and he's starting to feel the symptoms.

It is possible to create a safer environment than the workers have, but there's just no infrastructure for them, no regulation, nowhere to complain. Because it's a completely private and subcontracted industry, it's also very hard to hold companies up the food chain accountable.

Sarah: Yes, what are some of the policy protections that you think could help now? If you could talk directly to President Biden, and say, "Here's what needs to happen on a policy level for this labor force to be protected and to succeed and to thrive," what would you say?

Saket: Well, firstly, it's unconscionable that these workers are earning as little as $10, $11, $12 an hour. Secondly, it's unconscionable that workers are living under their cars. It would be very easy for the federal government, because so much federal money is funding this work for them to attach a minimum wage and health and safety standards.

Sarah: That seems so basic.

Saket: Yes, yes, it seems completely basic. It's crazy that we don't do it. Look, right now, there is a base camp for the National Guard. FEMA officials in Louisiana are staying in hotels, but the workers who are doing the rebuilding with their hands are sleeping under their cars to protect themselves from rain.

[music]

Sarah: I spoke to more than 100 workers and experts who deal in this terrain. There were just so many stories that stuck with me because it's so diverse the struggles these workers face. One of the stories came from Mariano Alvarado, who now works with Resilience Force.

Mariano: [foreign language]

Sarah: Mariano came here from Honduras. He, himself was directly affected by the climate crisis because he was a shrimp farmer and he found that due to the changing environment there, he really couldn't make ends meet. He came to the US. He helped rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. He started working more and more storms after that. Saket encountered him in a really devastating situation in 2018.

Mariano: [foreign language]

Saket He got an accident in Panama City.

Mariano: [foreign language]

Daniel: There is a company that works here in New Orleans and they take everybody to Panama City. These guys were putting the blue tarp. A big storm shows up. He falls from the top of the roof to the concrete. He got a head break really bad. They took him inside an ambulance to the hospital. That's where they left him.

Sarah: I just want to pause on that for a second to make sure that it's totally clear. Mariano's employer basically pushed him in the middle of a rainstorm to keep working on a roof without the proper protections, like a harness. Then after Mariano fell, his employer brought him to the hospital, but essentially just left him in a coma, and no one there really even knew who he was.

Mariano: [foreign language]

Daniel: When I started to remember a little bit, doctors started to ask for my family or my relatives. They didn't see nobody there, because I was alone. Nobody was with me.

Saket: When we

first saw you we didn't know if you would live.

Mariano: [foreign language] Sorry.

Speaker 5: [unintelligible 00:20:17] He's remembering.

Saket: It's okay, man.

Daniel: It's okay, man.

Mariano: [foreign language]

Daniel: That's why I joined the organization, because I don't want this to happen to another person. I want to stop this.

Speaker 1: That's a Resilience Force worker named Mariano Alvarado. Our story continues in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

[music]

Speaker 1: We're listening to Sarah Stillman's reporting from Louisiana, on workers who rebuild after climate disasters.

Sarah: As dangerous as things are on the job for Resilience workers, they also face a lot of hazards outside of work. Some of these actually come from law enforcement, from the police, and from immigration enforcement. I saw this firsthand in a different city in Louisiana, Lake Charles. Lake Charles suffered not just one but two major hurricanes last year, and for a while, the town really welcomed the workers. Then a few months into the rebuilding effort, the police started to crackdown.

Sonia: [foreign language]

Sarah: I actually spoke to a woman named Sonia. She was selling food in the Lake Charles Home Depot last December, and also doing rebuilding work herself when one day the police showed up with a drone.

Sonia: [foreign language]

Speaker 6: She was out there with another lady selling food and she never realized that police use drones. At that moment, she just heard someone screaming, "Police."

Sonia: [foreign language]

Speaker 6: She got inside the car really quickly, and then saw the police screaming at her. He told her, "If you come here again, I'm going to give you a ticket that you're never going to forget."

Sarah: What happened after that?

Sonia: [foreign language]

Speaker 6: She said that they put them to a site and started giving them tickets, $1,500, $2,000 tickets. She felt terrible that she was the only one who didn't ended up getting the ticket, and all of these people never came back after that.

Sarah: Wow.

Speaker 6: They're being treated as dirty rags that are disposable, just because they already had covered their ceilings and everything has been already rebuilt.

Sarah: I called Saket a few months ago when he was in Lake Charles. He was trying to find a way to get the police to stop criminalizing the workers. It's interesting since the fight on immigration reform nationally has just moved so slowly. Saket and his team, they're often left trying to improve these workers' relationships on a very local level, mayor by mayor. When I called him, he and his team were just headed out to the corner to recruit workers for a meeting with the Mayor of Lake Charles.

Saket: Hang on one second.

Sarah: Naturally, he was not going to show up empty-handed.

Saket: Oh, look at that. Wonderful yellow glow.

Speaker 7: He's making 20 tortillas espanola right now [laughs].

Sarah: Awesome. You're about to go deliver all of these eggs to the workers and then what happens after that? What's the agenda?

Saket: Yes, we'll be going to the Home Depot with 16 tortillas espanola in hand, a loaf of bread, and coffee. Later today, the mayor will be sitting down and meeting with us. I don't think he's expecting us to come in with immigrant workers.

Sarah: Can we talk about the mayor? Has there been any contact with him so far? What's that relationship like at this point as you go into this conversation today?

Saket: Well, the mayor is an avowed conservative, but we're hoping that he's practical in the face of what he has to carry out. Hurricanes, floods and fires either make people much more ideological or much more pragmatic and practical than they've ever been about, how we're going to conduct this recovery, who's going to carry it out? We've heard that before from very conservative mayors who've turned around and decided to throw their lot in with the workers, and we're hoping that Nick Hunter, this mayor will follow suit because he needs these workers.

[crosstalk]

Saket: How're you doing?

Nick: Good Afternoon.

Saket: Good afternoon, Mayor.

Nick: I'm Nick.

Saket: Nice to meet you, man.

Nick: Nice to meet you. What's your name?

Saket: Saket.

Nick: Hey, Saket.

Sarah: Unfortunately, the Mayor's Office wouldn't let our producer in to record.

Speaker 8: I don't think we were 100% clear on what the meeting was about. Given that this is an introductory meeting--

Sarah: The mayor opens the door and greets them warmly. Then they all funneled into his office.

Nick: All right.

Speaker 8: How are you doing?

Nick: How are you? I'm Nick.

Saket: I think the mayor, he was good. Half an hour was not too much time to explain what happened, but I think he'll want to work with us.

Speaker 9: [foreign language]

Speaker 7: What I truly saw was that he is a person that seems like he's very open and willing to try to help this city and to listen to us. That's what I got from it.

Saket: I think the moment in the meeting that was the most important was when he said the city is recovering, thanks to you. That was a significant moment, a small one but really significant. You really jumped in and you asked for the meeting with the Chief of Police. It'll take more pushing to get that meeting, but that's our next test is when we can get that meeting.

Speaker 10: [foreign language]

[applause]

Sarah: It may seem like a meeting with the mayor is a really small step, and it is. It's one piece in this much, much larger puzzle that Resilience Force and other worker rights groups are trying to solve. The real end game for Saket is getting better legal infrastructure, getting stronger labor standards to protect workers, and in part that really comes down to legislation.

For instance, Resilience Force has been working directly with members of Congress, like Pramila Jayapal and Joaquin Castro. Jayapal's bill would create a two-year path to citizenship for undocumented essential workers. Frankly, most legislators have no idea about the real challenges that Resilience workers are facing every day. I think about Mariano Alvarado, the man who suffered the terrible head injury in Florida and I think about what he said. That he wants lawmakers to know about his own life and the lives of his colleagues.

Mariano: [foreign language]

Sarah: He wants Congress to know that these workers, what they're doing is not just about making money. They're also doing it because they really want to help rebuild these cities.

Mariano: [foreign language]

Sarah: He sees what these disasters do to a city. He says, the desolation that they cause, the workers are really the first ones there. Cleaning up and moving away the trash and helping people to return to their homes. For Mariano, that feels like satisfaction doing that work. That's really what he wants lawmakers to know, that these workers are performing a job that the climate crisis has rendered completely necessary for our whole collective functioning.

I think we all know that these years ahead, they are going to bring more brutal hurricanes, more awful floods, like the ones we recently had here in New York. More terrifying wildfires and heatwaves, more than any of us is really prepared to handle. Interdependence isn't just some far-off hypothetical thing. It's really what these workers are putting into practice every day. What's at stake is not just these workers' fates, but also our collective shared survival.

Speaker 1: Sarah Stillman, she's reported on labor and human rights from Mexico to Bangladesh to Afghanistan and more, and you can read all of her work at newyorker.com

[music]

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.