Building Home
IT’S BEEN NEARLY two decades since Hurricane Katrina, and in that time, there have been over 200 US climate disasters that have done a billion dollars’ worth of damage or more each. Our recovery in their aftermath depends on these workers, who have become America’s white blood cells. They travel from disaster to disaster, rebuilding homes and schools and hospitals and whole cities for the federal government and private insurance companies. They’re at the center of an economy that spends tens of billions of dollars a year on rebuilding, weatherizing, and decarbonizing America, an economy that is poised to receive $2 trillion in federal investment over the next decade. These workers are incredibly skilled and highly dedicated, but they’re also very vulnerable because they’re overwhelmingly immigrants, and most of them are undocumented. They come from Mexico and Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela. Some come from as far away as the Philippines and India. And most of them are dislocated from their own homes even as they’re rebuilding the homes of others. These workers are on the road six months at a time, traveling from state to state, doing the rebuilding. Yet, they are separated from the multibillion-dollar contractors at the top of the disaster-recovery industry by layers of subcontracting, earning poverty wages on contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Since many of them are undocumented migrants, they’re subject to political fearmongering and scapegoating. Saket Soni, founder and director of Resilience Force, advocates for the rights of highly skilled, yet extremely vulnerable, workers who help us return home after climate disasters.
|
