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By Roberta Wood
It’s 6:00 a.m., still chilly, and hundreds of construction workers, coolers in hand, leave the safe confines of their cars to join a stream of carefully spaced humans on to the future site of Oracle’s newest office building in downtown Austin. They’re standing apart, they’re wearing bandanas and masks and the air is heavy with uncertainty.
The electricians walk toward their gang box, careful not to crowd. It’s a geometry problem to hold the required daily safety meeting while trying to maintain a 6-foot separation. They unload their power tools and personal tools out of the box onto a cart. Nowadays, there’s little of the customary shooting the shit.
These days, rumors spread as fast as a virus. By lunchtime, just about everyone has heard that four drywallers were sent home with fevers, but not before working on site for a couple of hours. The atmosphere is quiet, fearful.
When the electricians’ steward, Dallas Dean, sees a drywaller being sprayed down in a thick mist of alcohol he thinks it might be time to go beyond waiting and watching. Dean, 39, wonders why he and hundreds of coworkers are being put at risk to build luxury office suites for the tech giant Oracle? “Nothing essential is going on there,” he says. “It’s basically going to be a glorified sales office...
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