Recent reports have indicated that migrants are making their way south from New York to Florida to find work aiding in Hurricane Ian cleanup and rebuilding, mirroring recovery efforts from disasters of past years. As previously noted here at Daily Kos, so crucial were immigrant workers to New Orleans’ recovery in particular following Hurricane Katrina that a statue honoring Latino workers was erected in their honor.
As also noted last week, with eager workers come those willing to take advantage of them, particularly if they lack legal immigration status. There are worries that migrants will toil or perhaps even get seriously injured, then fleeced of their wages.
There are already some upsetting indications this is underway for some. Organizers who aid migrants said some workers who left for Florida “are already being told their initial wages will be used to cover transport and housing,” USA Today reported. "It's wage theft and exploitation," South Bronx Mutual Aid’s Ariadna Phillips told the outlet.
RELATED STORY: Following Hurricane Ian disaster, Florida suddenly decides it needs migrant workers again
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To help combat wage theft, USA Today said that Resilience Force has been in Florida to meet with migrants who are looking for work while also “fielding phone calls from contractors looking to hire workers.” The New Orleans-based organization has in the past aided recovery workers who were cheated out of their wages, including a number of laborers who were not fully paid after weeks of work following Hurricane Irma.
Laborers “endured weeks of grueling shifts” that included demolishing walls and replacing sheetrock after being hired by Houston-based Cotton Commercial USA to clean and rebuild Hilton and Hyatt hotels, Resilience Force said. “Yet despite their dedication, their employers, including Cotton, refused to pay the workers what they had earned. In the case of some workers, they worked five weeks and received only one week of pay.” Eighteen workers sued, winning $50,000 in back wages and various damages. “The workers’ claims against the temp agency and its owner, for the remainder of their lost pay and other benefits, remain pending,” Resilience Force said.
”The immigrant workers who helped rebuild the Florida Keys after Hurricane Irma are part of a growing labor force of resilience workers that powers our nation’s recovery following climate-driven disasters,” the organization continued. “Many of the resilience workers involved in this case are veterans of the field, doing the hard labor of rebuilding communities across the country following natural disasters.”
Migration Policy Institute Policy Analyst Ariel Ruiz Soto told USA Today that research conducted by the organization revealed the overwhelming majority of day laborers who aided in cleanup following Hurricane Harvey lacked legal status. “Day laborers’ average hourly wages ranged from $12 to $14 per hour, depending on their precise occupation, but 26 percent reported wage theft in the four weeks following Harvey and many described not having received proper information about job hazards or protective gear,” the survey said.
Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott knows these workers (a significant majority of whom said they’d lived in the region for five years or more) were critical in recovery efforts in his state, but he’s nevertheless launched numerous anti-immigrant campaigns to boost his reelection efforts. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis knows this too, but he’ll look the other way.
Previous reports indicated some workers were being pulled to Florida through ads on WhatsApp, a popular messaging application. Phillips told USA Today that the organization had encountered a group of “cold and disoriented” migrants wandering Queens looking for a white van that would take them to Florida. But they didn’t find one. Bronx Mutual Aid told them to be careful. "They recruit migrants, take them down there, don't pay them and get them deported,” she said in the report. “We've seen it with other hurricanes." Relatedly just this past year, a construction company was ordered to pay a worker $650,000 after he was turned over to deportation agents for reporting a workplace injury.
In Florida, William Lopez, a Honduran migrant, said he traveled from New Orleans to Florida in search of work. He’d already aided in previous hurricane recovery efforts. He’d also been cheated out of $12,000 in wages. "We're risking everything to come out here," he told the outlet. "But we want to help rebuild Florida. We're on the front lines."
UPDATE: In a statement to Daily Kos, a Cotton spokesperson said that “Cotton Holdings takes these issues seriously, and we believe workers are entitled to just compensation. In settling litigation related to a third-party subcontractor’s failure to pay workers for Hurricane Irma cleanup in 2017, Cotton effectively paid twice, first following the project’s completion and then again when the subcontractor could not be found as a defendant. Every Cotton contract includes provisions on subcontractors’ responsibility for payment to their personnel in accordance with all applicable employment laws and regulations.”
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