Day Laborers of the LA Firestorm
The fires that swept through vast swathes of southern California were something straight out of a movie about doomsday infernos. Tongues of flames leaped from palm trees and engulfed the home on whose grounds it stood. Embers, riding on hot winds, as powerful as those that drive hurricanes, ignited a fresh conflagration on a mountainside. People evacuating from expensive, oceanfront homes incinerated to the core.
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Pablo Alvarado, who lives in a neighborhood not far from the area that has been impacted, has seen all of that with his own eyes. He is the co-founder of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), a collective of day laborers, based in southern California. Though its purported goal is to offer protection to such workers—almost all of whom are in the U.S. illegally—from unscrupulous employers and to improve their lives, it is more than a labor pool.
Anywhere a disaster strikes, a local chapter of the NDLON, of which there are 70 across the U.S., is tapped into, said Alvarado, speaking at a panel of experts, at an Ethnic Media Services press event on January 24.
One such chapter is the Pasadena Community Job Center, which is located close to the area that was gutted. Having been on the ground with the workers of this center in the immediate aftermath of the fires, he saw them transform it into a vital resource, even though they needed help themselves.
“Many of the workers have lost everything, barring the clothes that they were wearing. They said, ‘Not only my apartment is gone, but the house that I clean is also gone,’” said Alvarado. “That’s how interconnected we are.”
“The magnitude of the disaster being what is it, I don’t think anyone expected the government—local or state—to be prepared it. So, that’s when humble people lent a hand.”
Backbone of the construction industry
Many of these people make up the backbone of the construction industry, a sector of the U.S. economy that will need to attract nearly 500,000 new skilled construction workers (over and above the standard hiring levels) to reduce a deficit of 1.5 million homes, according to a report by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB).
“In Southern California, we’re told, there’s a huge dearth of roofers, painters, carpenters, plumbers,” said Nik Theodore, another speaker, who heads the Department of Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois, at Chicago.
Soon after Donald Trump took office (again), men in uniforms began knocking on doors and hauling away illegal immigrants in handcuffs to military planes that are ferrying them out of America. Things being what they are, how will his hawkish stance on illegal immigration affect the efforts to rebuild after these fires?
Living in a state of fear
Against the backdrop of the threats of deportation, “people will be too afraid to show up to work,” said Jennie Murray, president of the National Immigration Forum, who also spoke at the panel. “And this will only exacerbate the lack of workers, offered Theodore.
And even when they weren’t living in a state of perpetual fear, workers have faced other, more routine perils, he added.
When a climate-related disaster hits an urban area, everything from the trail of destruction that it leaves in its path to the cost of the damage to the infrastructure to the number of people it affects is extraordinary. The volume of harmful substances that are released into the air, the water, and the ground, is also colossal. The need to clean up and rebuild is, therefore, almost immediate. And that draws both employers and workers to the area.
Exploiting workers
“Unfortunately, this urgency makes it easy for employers to exploit workers,” said Theodore.
Elaborating on how that happened, he said that contractors swoop down into the impacted area, often from out of state and they pick up a lot of the work of cleaning up. But as they don’t come with their own crews, they hire locally and rapidly, while also making sure that they operate under the radar.
This harms workers at two levels.
One: They don’t know what they’re walking into and they’re not provided with adequate protective gear. In the instance of these fires, they have had to jump in and clean up mounds of toxic ash.
Two: They become victims of “wage theft.” “In the construction and landscaping industries, wage theft is very high in the best of times. In a crisis, it tends to go through the roof,” Theodore said.
But that didn’t stop them from offering the support that they continue to offer in southern California.
The fire relief brigade
Recounting how the efforts to rebuild began, Alvarado said, “At the corner of the Pasadena Community Job Center was a huge tree, which was blocking the road. When the winds abated somewhat, we came together and we asked the assembled workers, ‘What do you want to do?’” They said, ‘We know how to operate chainsaws. We know how to handle machetes. We have the skills to cut the branches of trees.’” They banded together and formed what they named the ‘fire relief brigade.’ They volunteered to move that tree and then the next and then the next.”
Not only have the folks at the Pasadena Community Job Center offered themselves, but its very structure has been a refuge, of sorts.
In the wake of the blaze, the center, ordinarily, a place where high-income households hired their housekeepers and gardeners, became a depot where those impacted could come to pick up donated supplies they needed, from baby formula to diapers to food to clothing to shoes. “The center is serving about 1,000 people a day. Every day, we have about 500 cars coming to pick up donations there,” he said.
“The fire destroyed so much. But it also burned away our differences. Some of the folks we saw come to the center to help were from the MAGA crowd. We complement each other,” Alvarado said.