Note: the subtitle for the article is "construction industry typifies trade-offs of two decades of conservative governance in Lone Star State" but the problems cited in the article are not necessarily the result of "conservative governance"; rather, they are because the people running these construction companies are able to abuse the guys they get working for them.
Again, these sorts of problems are not caused by "conservative governance"; rather, it is a problem of deep-pocketed constructions businesses getting their bought-and-paid-for politicians in Austin to turn a blind eye to the nasty goings-on in the construction business. My brother works on jobs like these and he has in past conversations confirmed some of the things the article is saying--potentially dangerous working conditions, supervisors dumping people who get hurt, etc. All these people know each other, too, so getting on the bad side of one supervisor or company can be a problem; the flip side is that if you aren't on their bad side you can, like my brother, pick up the phone and call any major Texas city and get a job within two or three days based only on someone's thumbs-up.
AUSTIN, Texas — Once it is completed early next year, the J.W. Marriott in downtown Austin will jut elegantly into the city skyline, boasting of 1,012 guest rooms, a rooftop pool, a cabana bar and two hotel restaurants, at a cost of $300 million. Blocks away, the ground has been broken on a 17-story, 366-room Westin. A little further than that, a 47-story, $370 million Fairmont Hotel is being erected, in addition to a 160-room Hotel Zaza, which will rest atop luxury apartments.
Javier Bautista, who has worked on such construction projects in Texas’ booming building industry for more than a decade, can measure his life not by floors and square footage, but by a different set of numbers: Fourteen years since he came to Texas from Mexico City. Fourteen years in construction, mostly in Austin. The $8 to $10 he typically makes on the job, despite the fact that he has been building since he was a teenager.
In 2012, Bautista drove to Houston for a job that promised to pay him $200 a day, a significant bump from his typical wages. There, as he was descending from a ladder, a nail that had not been properly folded over on a baseboard pierced his foot. Desperate for the money, Bautista bandaged his wound and worked through the pain for days until finally the whole foot had become infected. When he told his supervisor about the injury, the boss, instead of sending him to seek immediate medical attention, instructed another worker drive him back to Austin. Bautista was left in an emergency room — five of his toes were eventually amputated.
“They didn’t even pay me,” Bautista told Al Jazeera, through a translator. “It was for nothing.”
Bautista, 38, said it was only by “God’s miracle” that he paid his medical bills, with his fellow workers and friends rallying to raise the money and another taking him in for eight months while he recovered and was out of work.
Bautista’s foot painfully swells if he remains standing for too long and he cannot do many of the jobs he used to be able to do before the accident—still, he remains in construction, scrapping together a living on hourly, inconsistent work.
Why? “For necessity,” he said. “You have to pay your rent, you have to something to eat—that’s why we go to work.”
Workers like Bautista might exemplify the underbelly of the “Texas miracle” — the phenomenon touted by three-term Gov. Rick Perry and other Republican lawmakers of steady job creation and economic growth in the Lone Star State.
Indeed, as Perry prepares to leave office after 12 years and embark on a potential 2016 presidential run — as he has hinted at — he has a formidable record to point to: from March 2004 to March 2014, the state created 2 million jobs, accounting for 29 percent of net new jobs in the last decade for the entire country. The unemployment rate stands at 5.5 percent — well below the 6.3 percent national average.
And although some argue that the Texas success story is a house of cards, built on a foundation of low-wage work, a recent study by the Dallas Federal Reserve found that job creation had grown at an impressive clip in all four wage quartiles, with the state economy in fact creating just as many high-end jobs as low-wage jobs.
Perry argues that Texas's success can be attributed to his adherence to conservative free-market principles — low tax rates, a welcoming regulatory environment, subsidies for businesses to set up shop in Texas and a minimum wage no higher than the federal floor. His detractors insist that the root of that wealth is a resurgent oil and gas industry and has little to do with conservative policies.
What’s clear is that despite the bounty, bolstering safety net programs has not been the priority of the Perry administration. His likely successor, Attorney General Greg Abbott, is even more averse to using government interventions as a remedy for poverty and other social ills.
“There’s no miracle,” state Rep. Garnet Coleman, Democrat from Harris County, said in an interview. “We have a lot of poor people, too. We are at the bottom of the safety net circumstance and our budget can withstand improvements.”
Coleman too is armed with numbers — every year, the Texas Legislative Study Group, a center-left caucus which Coleman chairs publishes a report called “Texas on the Brink” that looks at the state’s public policy failings.
In 2013, the study found that Texas ranks first in the nation in the percentage of the population that is uninsured; 8th in the percent of the population living below poverty level; 3rd in the nation for the percent that had experienced food insecurity, and 48th in the percentage of the low-income population that is covered by Medicaid. Texas also has the ninth largest Gini coefficient — a common measure of income inequality.
All of those factors have coalesced to make the quality of life for Texas workers, especially on the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, particularly difficult, said Rene Lara, legislative and political director of the state AFL-CIO.
“There are tradeoffs, there are winners and losers, there’s an illusion of prosperity and the reality of prosperity for some,” Lara said. “But workers at the bottom of the totem pole are only benefitting because they are better off than in their home country.”
This is a case where a modicum of oversight and regulation can, contrary to my otherwise completely Libertarian views, be a good thing. Why not improve worker safety and get the construction companies to carry comp insurance? Yes, this will cause some instances of insurance fraud but no more than is already happening for both medical and auto insurance. Besides, if companies in the State are the underwriters then the money cycles through the State economy.
Anyway....like I said, I prefer to show my State for how it is, both good and bad. I still wouldn't want to live anywhere else, though.