December 11, 2020
Twenty worksites. Hundreds of workers. There have been (at least) 20 reported COVID-19 outbreaks at construction sites in Nashville. Construction has been an essential workforce throughout the pandemic, but workers will be the first to tell you that we are treated as expendable, not essential. But it didn’t take a global pandemic to show how rampant abuse and exploitation is in an industry that we already knew does anything possible to increase profits at the expense of worker wellbeing. Our Commercial Construction Campaign is fighting to change that. We’ve had many victories in 2020 (read on), and we need your support to keep winning in 2021. Can you make a Year End donation to support the workers who are building this city from the ground up?
Our strategy relies on our people
Nashville relies on construction workers to build our neighborhoods. Our schools. Hospitals. Workplaces. Businesses. Churches. Our source of power, as workers, is our numbers. This year we formed a citywide Construction Worker Organizing Committee– a group of 30 construction worker-leaders and their family members who understand that another world is possible. We do weekly outreach and meet regularly for workers to train each other about their workplace rights, organizing fundamentals, and political education. We are base building, because we know that to take on one of the most politically connected and profitable industries, we need to build our majority as workers. We don’t sugarcoat what we’re up against: Tennessee’s governor owns a $300 million construction company, Nashville’s mayor is a major real estate developer, the opposition is well organized, and the laws are rarely on the side of workers. Sustainable change is hard, but we know that workers have power and we exercise it through authentic relationship building and bold public action.
2020 Victories: What we’ve won
We demanded basic safety and dignity on construction sites during a deadly pandemic.
As COVID-19 and fear spread across the city in March and April, business carried on as usual on major construction sites. Our phones rang nonstop with workers seeking guidance on how to keep each other safe. Workers reported worksites with no running water, no masks or PPE, no social distancing, harrowing accounts of ambulances taking workers away, and retaliation against those who asked for information or safety protocols. We immediately responded by upping our digital organizing to facilitate frequent know your rights trainings. We established a rapid response team to support workers in planning collective action. We raised money to distribute masks and cash aid to workers who got sick. The early months of the pandemic were chaotic, but by staying focused on the realities of the daily working conditions we supported workers in winning hand washing stations, onsite testing and other safety measures, and site-wide reporting of Covid outbreaks. 
We responded when corporate greed took one of our children.
Just before midnight on June 23 we learned that 16-year-old construction worker Gustavo “Kike” Ramirez died hours earlier while helping build another downtown tourist hotel. We immediately responded. Our organizers spent the next day with Gustavo’s family, talked to other workers from the site, and organized a vigil within 24 hours of his death. As facts about the “accident” surfaced, workers’ anger fueled our fight. Gustavo was working at a height of 120 feet without a harness. He was trained for a job that is illegal for a worker his age to do. We mobilized. Workers and supporters led a pressure campaign calling on our lawmakers and TOSHA to hold the general contractor, DF Chase, and the developer, Pinnacle Hospitality, accountable. We held a press conference and public forum, with Gustavo’s sister, other worker advocates and policymakers, on health and safety reforms needed in construction. Our work resulted in more than $20,000 in fines– the highest ever for a worker death. This does nothing to bring Gustavo back or bring justice to his family and loved ones, but it shows that workers won’t sit back while they watch each other risk their lives every day for a paycheck. We continue to meet with local and state policymakers and will push for real policy change in 2021. Every death is one to many. Not one more.
We launched a workers’ compensation education and organizing program.
Gustavo’s death shows everything that’s wrong in the construction industry. Workers are pressured to speed up the work, are pushed into roles without safety training or equipment, and bullied into thinking they’re “lucky” to have a job when work is scarce. Cutting corners means more worker injuries, and most workers are left to suffer alone and without recourse because we have a broken workers’ compensation system that gives power to bosses, insurance companies, and doctors to determine what injured workers need. This fall we hired an intern, Raúl (a member from our base), who has successfully navigated the system on his own and now teaches others. We’ve launched a new program to educate workers on how the system works and how to get what we deserve– things like replacement wages and necessary surgeries and healthcare. We hold monthly clinics for workers to meet with legal advocates, and are mapping the system so we can pinpoint what needs to change about it. This is a first of its kind program, and we’ll tell you more about it later this month.
We’re raising standards for all construction workers on MNPS sites.
We know you’ve been following Armando’s fight to recover $43,000 he’s owed for work his team did at McMurray Middle School. What started as a campaign for a small group of workers has turned into a fight to raise standards for all construction workers who labor on the grounds of any of the 161 schools in the Metro Nashville Public School district. Through Armando’s fight, we are educating people on how the labor contracting chain operates. General contractors sit at the top, and hire layers of subcontractors to delegate out specific pieces of the work. “Low-road” subcontractors exploit workers who perform the actual labor. People at the top of the chain benefit from completed projects and profits, while abuse trickles down to workers and everyone points fingers to avoid accountability. Armando and other workers have been pressuring MNPS School Board members to hold their general contractor, Orion, morally responsible for the low-road subcontractors they hired and the alleged wage theft that occurred on the project they managed. We target the people at the top, because they have the power to hold those below them accountable. Just last month, after a year of public pressure, the School Board failed to approve two more contracts for Orion. This victory was possible because workers haven’t let up one bit in a year-long campaign demanding justice and higher standards (see here and here). No more giving contracts to the lowest bidder at the expense of workers. We deserve and will win better.
It’s the everyday work that makes victories like these and others possible. It happens through worker-to-worker conversations about what we need. It happens through leadership development and training. It’s happening through our regular wage theft recovery popular education program, where workers learn the skills to take on larger industry fights.
We launched the Commercial Construction Campaign last year because workers can’t wait for better conditions. Your support makes this work possible. Every dollar we raise means we can spend another hour doing outreach to reach more workers and train more leaders. Please make a donation to support this work. Donate now and help us raise $40,000 this month.