Report by Samual Tabory and Karen Engle et al. The Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice.
November 2020.
Austin, Texas is the fastest growing major metropolitan area in the country. It is home to over 69,000 construction workers, many of whom earn low wages and are Latinx, often undocumented. On March 31, 2020, Texas Governor Greg Abbot issued an executive order making construction work “essential.” That order superseded local stay-at-home orders by the City of Austin and Travis County that had only exempted construction for some limited projects. Epidemiological analysis from October 2020 demonstrates that state’s decision to allow unrestricted construction work was associated with construction workers in Austin being five-times more likely to be hospitalized for COVID-19 than other workers in the region.
This report explores how state preemption of local ordinances, federal immigration law, and lack of social provisioning have combined with regional urban growth politics in the Austin region to drive unequal health and economic consequences for low-income Latinx construction workers in an era of COVID-19. It suggests that, at a minimum, large corporate players that specifically benefit from Austin’s urban-regional economic configuration and identity should be made to carry a greater share of the total costs necessary to sustain public investment in broad processes of urban-regional social reproduction for all classes of workers. To provide a grounded account of such drivers, the report includes interview responses from Latinx construction workers in the Austin region.
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