(3) No Limits, No Safety, No Responsibility

In our interviews with drywallers, what we learned about their working conditions was harrowing:

We try to do it simply, as fast as we can so that we’re not hurting. But at the end of the day, your body feels like you can’t lift your hand, then next day to get up at four o’clock in the morning to be in at six, you’re like, I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go. Do we have to? And then you know in your mind that you’re going to have to go do ceilings again. And then you’re going up a ladder, and you’re carrying it, and you’re… ready, I’m ready, and then you miss a screw, and then [a co-worker], he’s like, “Hurry up,” and you’re like, “Trying, I’m trying.” And he’s like, “Oh, shit, I’m fuckin’ tired! Man, come over and help me.”

Fernando, now in his late 30s, was hardened by surviving almost a decade in the non-union drywall industry, recently just joining the union. He brought along with him his nephew, also a drywaller. Maybe 20, he looked young and innocent. Fernando spoke about how hard it was on his body when he first started in the industry. The contractors he was working for would squeeze as much out of them as they could. “I was working six in the morning to six in the afternoon for $125.” He laments that things have not changed at all in the industry over the decade. “This was how I lived ten years ago, but you know, the bad thing is that my nephew here has lived it [since] two years ago—it’s still the same, [he’s] going through the same as what I went through.”⁵⁷

We interviewed two union carpenters who went to work as “salts” for a labor broker. “Salting” refers to the process whereby union members go and work for nonunion employers to both gather information about non-union employers and to potentially organize new union members. One of them describes the setting:

The working conditions there were—the break was 10 minutes, 15 the most. Sometimes they only gave you lunch break, and that’s it. And it was sometimes 15, 20 minutes for lunch and that’s it. Trash is all over the floor, people tripping—you could trip and fall really easy. Nobody ever knows anything. Who’s the foreman? What’s his phone number? “Oh, I don’t know, you have to wait until he walks around.” It took me three days to find out how much I’m getting paid, when I first started working. And the people were afraid to ask for money, because they’ll let them go right away. It was an eye opener because I was in the union sector.⁵⁸

After working several months on this crew, this carpenter’s colleague, who also had more than a decade of experience, told us:

They’re working harder than any documented person, I could say. I see them working, they’re killing themselves. This is slavery, the way that they’re working. This is not humane. … It’s 100 degrees outside, because it was hot in the building we were working, and you want to take a two-minute micro-break, what we call micro-break, to drink water, I don’t think you should get in trouble for that or feel like you can’t do it. These people don’t feel like they can do it. They work so hard that they don’t even want to go down to the bathroom and use the bathroom, they just grab a water bottle, and they’ll just piss into a water bottle and keep going. They feel like they don’t produce X amount they’re going to get fired.⁵⁹

NASRCC organizer Martin Sanchez talks about the pace. “They work more than eight hours, yes. They get paid for those, no. They work seven days a week, yes. They get paid for it, no.” But it doesn’t stop there. He continues, “You know what’s the saddest? That you can go to a project on a Sunday, he brings his kids to help him.”⁶⁰ He describes stopping by Assembly Square, a Callahan (a very large nonunion general contractor) job site in Somerville:

And this guy was insulating, rushing the job because the electricians are behind him. The plumber was ready… And I was there walking the floors. I saw the kids. And I said, “Why you here?” “Oh, I’m with my dad.” “Uh, where’s your dad?” “He’s out there insulating.” People are paid by the sheet, so, in that case, you bring your teenagers along…⁶¹

The vast majority of the workers in drywall are young. When I asked Nuno how many workers over 50 were in this trade, he responded, in the “non-union world, none.” His co-worker responds, maybe “one, two, or three.” They guessed that the average age is 20. “I’ve worked with kids that are 16 years old, man. The thing is they’re hungry, they’re undocumented and need a place to work.”⁶² We asked one of the union organizers, Ernie Belo, to imagine, given these working conditions, what their lives will be like at 60. “Oh, 60? Half of them will be in wheelchairs. Um, they’ll have to go back to their country because they won’t be able to survive here. They don’t have anything. They don’t have any Social Security. They can’t go on disability. They pray that they save enough.” He told me about an undocumented worker he’d been on the job with. “He worked 20 years in the construction industry here. He went back. He’s all busted up. He told me, ‘Oh, Ernie, my back, it’s my knees.’”⁶³ For those who can’t go back, Brain Richardson adds, “That’s a person the average taxpayer is going to pay for, forever, you know.⁶⁴

Workers for the labor brokers that Metro Walls relies on told us about the terrible condition of Metro Walls equipment. “The equipment they provide you, like skill saws and the Baker scaffolds, the ladders, all these other things that they give you, are sometimes in worse conditions than your own personal tools that you brought from your house,” Jonathan Nuno tells us. He describes how Metro Walls supplies Bakers whose “wheels are broken, but you either get it done or you’re going to be out of a job. So, all these guys keep working and keep working until somebody gets hurt, and then they come with new Bakers after, and—because OSHA’s all over the building—they got to make it look nice.”⁶⁵ It’s not just the Bakers, Nuno says: “I’ve dealt with saws with ripped cords, saws with no (safety) guards.”

Without proper equipment they make do with what they have. “I’ve hung over stairs on two-by-sixes, from ladder to ladder, on top of a bucket, to hang drywall,” Nuno recalls. “You can’t say no, because then they’ll just get someone else to do it anyways. So, you just kind of go for it, just kind of wishing for the best.”⁶⁶ It is troublesome to think of these makeshift solutions, when in fact there is equipment designed to assist with the hanging of drywall. A sheetrock lift is a simple mechanical device that allows one worker to load a piece of drywall and, using a crank and a pivot, allow the sheet to be precisely positioned into place so it can be fastened to the wall or the ceiling. These kinds of lifts are standard equipment in union jobs. Nuno worked for over a decade in the non-union drywall industry and reports:

The first time I’ve seen a drywall jack was my first time in the union. … I swear to God I never knew it existed. I never knew it existed until I came on a jobsite for the union, and they were like, “Okay, you’re going to hang ceilings by yourself.” I’m like, “What the fuck?” They’re like, “twelve-footers.” And I’m like, “Give me an eight and I’ll be there all day hanging.” So, [he] comes over with this yellow thing with little buttons. What the fuck is this? I didn’t know how to use it. I’ve never seen this thing before. So, I went to the other room next door where the other guy was working and I see him, he was already jacking it up. I’m like, holy shit…⁶⁷

Instead of using basic technology that would create safer work conditions and higher productivity, the labor brokers throw the bodies of young undocumented workers at the work at the workers’ peril. And this not just the case on small informal jobs, but on the multimillion-dollar projects Metro Walls bids on. But what one don’t see in the glossy photographs on their website is the primitive working conditions that largely undocumented workers must endure to create these spaces.

Accidents and injuries are commonplace on a Metro Walls job. “I have a friend who’s a taper,” says Jonathan Nuno. “She sliced her whole [side of her] face, working for Metro Walls, actually. Never got a dollar for it. Never got nothing. Didn’t even get paid the days she was off. She had no choice but to literally just cover it up and go back to work the very next week.”⁶⁸

Nuno has his own story about being injured on a Metro Walls jobsite “I can’t feel this finger because I got cut on a jobsite, and this whole side of my hand, it’s practically dead. I went to the supervisor and I told him, ‘Hey, I cut my hand,’ and they were like, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, put some alcohol on it,’ and they give me a Band-Aid. Little did I know I cut a nerve.”⁶⁹

Although workers on the Metro Walls jobs are brought in by a labor broker, the broker doesn’t train workers, teach them how to work safely, or even check if they have the general manual skills or the specific skills necessary to hang drywall. Any training that takes place on the job is actually done by the workers themselves. Without any training “You got to learn from somebody,” tells Carlos. “You watch and learn, you listen—that’s how you learn.”⁷⁰ Carlos learned from his brother. NASRCC organizer Frank Gomez concurs “The training they have is another guy.”

Fernando describes how, in fact, it is almost impossible to work safely. “They just want so much production, having [safety] glasses, you start sweating, and they become burdensome. With the gloves, because you’re putting so many screws, so fast, they start getting in the way. In the union, because it’s not at an exploitation pace, you’re able to be safe but in the non-union [work], you’re not, because [this kind of protection], it’s just going to get in the way; you’re not going to get the work done that they want you to do.”⁷¹

Milagros Barreto is an organizer with the Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health (MassCOSH). When we asked her about how often wage theft occurs in residential construction in the Boston area, she replies, “Every day,” and provides example after example.⁷² She is “OSHA-training certified in general industry, and it’s really sad when you stand in front of the students and say, your employer has to provide you your personal protection equipment, and [then the students] say, ‘They never gave me the appropriate gloves, and they didn’t even give me a mask or a respirator.’” Barreto continues, “What I’ve been hearing is that most of the time the equipment is in really bad condition. There’s a lot of retaliation also in construction. … You know, like when a worker says, ‘listen, this ladder is broken,’ and then next day they don’t call him to come to work.”⁷³

Brian Richardson describes how injuries have become commonplace for those working for labor brokers:

I bet [we had] 30 cases in the last five or six years of people who get hurt at work, were dropped at the steps of the hospital, [and told] “You were hurt at home.” … And then, you know, there’s no comp. They’re not being paid. They’re just dumped in the hospital. One of his workers fell off a Baker staging, doing drywall, and had a compound fracture of his leg, bone through the skin. Went to the hospital; they knew he didn’t have insurance. … They treated him, but they didn’t want to do surgery on him because, you know, it’s an expensive bill and they were trying to figure out who was responsible. And it just played on and played on and played on. So, when we interviewed him, it was almost a year after, and the foot was still, like, the darkest purple I ever saw. It wasn’t quite gangrene, but it looked like that. Still couldn’t walk on the leg; had gone a year without any income, his wife working two jobs, trying to keep the house going. And the company just walked away, abandoned him.⁷⁴

A major local subcontractor feels very strongly about safety on the job for his people and is upset about how conditions have changed since labor brokers appeared on the scene. “They’re wearing sneakers. They’re not wearing hardhats, not wearing safety gloves. They’re using stilts instead of ladders. On and on. I mean, it’s just a very dangerous situation.”⁷⁵ They also point out that “Debris is certainly one of the safety aspects. It can be dangerous if workers aren’t focused on putting up barricades. They’re not covering up holes that are open in floors, then there’ll be safety issues there. Those are the types of things that we see.”⁷⁶ The contractor and his site managers are not afraid to speak up about these issues to the general contractors; he provided several examples of pulling their workers off jobs sites because of these safety concerns.

In the middle of conducting this research, tragedy happened at a construction site in the state. “We had a new case in Framingham,” says NASRCC organizer Frank Gomez. “There was a worker that fell through a roof and then he actually died onsite. He was brought back twice, and they sent him to a hospital.”⁷⁷ There were guys working on the roof with a bunch of rotten spots that were covered by plastic and … he went through one of the rotten spots on the roof. It was very, very bad. It was a head injury.”⁷⁸

As reported in a local news site, the worker was not an employee of Dellbrook, the general contractor on the site. Instead, “Framingham Detective Stacey Macaudda discovered Dellbrook had hired a subcontractor, TCT Contractors, to work on the roof at the power plant building. The worker had been hired by a TCT subcontractor, Milford-based GS Siding, just a few days before the accident.” The story continues:

Framingham Detective Stacey Macaudda … interviewed GS Siding owner Camilla DeSouza at the scene. DeSouza told the detective the worker was just trying out for a job and hadn’t officially been hired. DeSouza was unsure if the worker had received OSHA safety training. “I asked (DeSouza) for his information as well as any family contact information, and she responded by saying, ‘I don’t know really know his name or anything about him, we are trying him out, it’s his third day, I don’t even know if he has an OSHA card, I didn’t get any information on him yet,’” Macaudda wrote in a police report.⁷⁹

Something didn’t seem right about the police report to Gomez. First, workers don’t “try out for construction jobs.” The most plausible explanation is that the worker was brought to the job by GS Siding acting as a labor broker. And Gomez found evidence that he had in fact worked for them for a long time. He pulls out his phone, shows us a photo, and tell us, “In fact, I just found a picture when the guys were on the roof of that same building … so it’s happy Fourth of July, it’s on Facebook, the company posts it, the guy’s right there on the roof.”⁸⁰

Although the newspaper reported that the worker had recovered, Gomez went to see him at the hospital and reported that he was in very rough shape, very confused and not even sure where he was. There were no further reports on him, his condition, or his recovery in the local press. Just another victim of labor brokers and this new business model of construction.