Nashville has been experiencing one of the largest construction booms in the country. For years, the city skyline has been dotted with cranes as developers have scooped up land to build tourist hotels and playgrounds for the rich. The construction is also tied to the political structure: Tennessee’s governor owns a $300 million construction company and Nashville’s mayor is a major real estate developer. While the wealthy have benefited,  Nashville has also come to carry the shameful statistic of being the most deadly city in the South for construction workers, with more deaths per capita than any other Southern city. The very workers who have built this city (our schools, workplaces, hospitals, businesses, churches and more) too often work without proper health and safety training, without proper protective equipment, and under abusive and hostile conditions. On top of that add on a global pandemic in which construction workers never got to work from home, have labored on the sites of numerous COVID-19 outbreaks, and are told to feel lucky they even have a job while work is scarce. The pandemic only showed what workers already knew: abuse and exploitation is rampant in an industry that does anything possible to increase profits at the expense of worker wellbeing.   

Our Commercial Construction Campaign is fighting to change that.

In 2020 we formed a citywide Construction Worker Organizing Committee-- a group of construction worker-leaders and their family members who understand that another world is possible. Workers to train each other about their workplace rights, organizing skills, 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 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 spread through Nashville business carried on as usual on major construction sites: 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 upped our digital organizing to facilitate Know Your Rights trainings, form rapid response teams, and train workers on 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.

On June 23rd, 2020, 16-year-old construction worker Gustavo “Kike” Ramirez died when he fell 120 feet while buiding a downtown hotel. 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, we learned Gustavo was working at a height of 120 feet without a harness and was trained for a job that is illegal for a worker his age to do. Workers, Gustavo’s sister, and other advocates held a press conference and public forum called on our lawmakers and TOSHA to hold the general contractor and developer accountable and demanded reform. Our work resulted in more than $20,000 in fines-- the highest ever for a worker death. Workers won’t sit back while they watch each other risk their lives every day for a paycheck. We are continuing to 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, and expected to buy and pay for their own equipment like boots, vests, helmets and other proactive gear. 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. We’ve developed workshops to educate workers on how to navigate the system and get what we deserve-- things like replacement wages and necessary surgeries and healthcare. We hold quarterly clinics for workers to meet with legal advocates, and are mapping the system to identify what needs to change about it. 

We’re raising standards for all construction workers on MNPS sites. 

For more than a year, Armando has been fighting 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 works and how it leads to abuse and wage theft. 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 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. And in November 2019, the School Board failed to approve two more contacts for Orion; then in January 2020 changed the contracting process to include more guard rails against structures that enable wage theft. This victory was possible because workers haven’t let up one bit in a year-long campaign demanding justice and higher standards.