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. |
