By Sameer Bhuchar

Uncompensated worker recounts horrors of injury

Fernando Adame spent 45 minutes waiting around with a battered wrist, broken arm, and sore back before his supervisor finally took him to a hospital.

“My boss told me to wait until my co-workers finished their work before he would take me to a doctor,” Adame, an Austin-based construction worker said. “I sat in a corner with a bone sticking out of my arm while the rest of the workers continued painting.”

He told his boss that the ladder he was provided looked unstable, but was ordered to either climb it and do his job, or not get paid. He did, and he fell. Bedridden for more than two months, Adame was out of commission, out of work and out of money.

His struggles depict a problem that he said is all too common for construction workers in Texas, where there are no worker’s compensation laws for employees injured on the job. Texas is also considered one of the most dangerous places to work in the country as 138 workers were killed on the job in Texas in 2009. According to the Bureau of Labor, a Texas construction worker dies every 2.5 days, and nearly 16,900 accidents occur annually. California, the most comparable state in terms of number of total construction workers, lost 67 workers in 2008. This is the most recent data for California currently available.

For Adame and many of the one in every five Texas construction workers injured on the job, the dangers of the state’s workplace conditions and unregulated compensation statutes have profoundly and negatively impacted their lives.

Adame’s surgery cost nearly $11,000 which he didn’t have, and frantic calls to his boss went unanswered. He received no compensation.
With his medical bills rising and his income cut, Adame’s eldest son was forced to quit school in search of work to help support his struggling family of five.

“My accident was terrible for my whole family,” Adame said. “It happened right before Christmas when I was planning on using my wages to buy presents for my family. We couldn’t even afford a Christmas dinner.”

To bring in any supplemental income, Adame pawned nearly two-thousand dollars worth of his family’s possessions to keep them barely floating above water.

It was 5 months before Adame could find work again and even still he isn’t the sprightly young man he said he once was when he moved to America nearly 20 years ago. His back still hurts and his right-arm is too weak for any heavy lifting.

He now works as a managing supervisor in the very field that caused all his troubles. With his new employer Adame tries to run things differently.

“I make it a point now to manage the safety conditions of every site I oversee. I make sure each worker has the right goggles, helmets and gloves, among other things. I don’t want my carelessness to cost someone’s life, like my last boss’s mistakes affected mine.”

Advocacy groups and responsible companies work for change

Adame eventually found a place to help him and the thousands like him. He contacted Austin’s Worker Defense Project (WDP) headquartered on the city’s East side, which fights for better working conditions and recovery of lost wages for injured construction workers. The WDP also held a rally on the steps of the capitol last Tuesday in honor of the 138 workers who died on construction sites in 2009.

Though Adame found the WDP long past the deadline for him to recover any wages himself, he shows up to the group’s weekly worker’s meetings to air his grievances about safety issues he has encountered.

The meetings are packed with thirty plus members every week crammed into a converted day-care cafeteria, each hoping to tell their horror stories and for a chance for WDP volunteers to examine their individual case in hopes of recovering lost pay.

One of the initiative’s volunteer’s Amalia Smith-Hale is just a senior in high school, but said she feels like she is making a visible social change.

“When workers walk in to WDP for the first time, they truly believe that they have no rights in America as illegal immigrants,” Smith-Hale said. “They are demoralized, dejected, and manipulated. It is amazing to watch this mentality evolve as they become more involved in our organization. After seeing that they do have rights, the once powerless workers are ready to fight against the injustices which greatly affect their lives.”

Most of the workers having their cases examined speak only Spanish. For Smith-Hale, who grew up in Guatemala, this is not an obstacle. Her biggest hurdle is receiving a case that hits a legal road block.

“Injured worker cases are probably the most heart-wrenching because of how severely the workers’ lives are affected,” she said. “We find that most of the injured workers who come in to WDP have been employed by a company that does not have workers compensation, and, there is very little we can do legally to help them pay for their incredible medical expenses.”

Though Texas does have an optional Workers’ Compensation program, which pays for medical bills related to the workplace injury and provides a wage replacement while a worker is unable to work, only 45% of Texas construction employees receive these benefits. Texas is the only state that doesn’t require employers to provide workers’ compensation. Instead, the state allows employers the option of providing compensation, which some opt out of a means of cutting business expenses.

WDP volunteer Emily Timm says that while this practice may be cost-effective initially, it hurts the Texas tax payer.

“When a worker gets injured on the job and is rushed to the hospital and they don’t have compensation, guess who is paying for it?” she asked. “Texas homeowners pay to help cover uncompensated health care costs through their taxes, and if more low-income, uncompensated workers are injured, the more we pay.”

The Workers Defense Project estimates that it receives $6,739,200 in wage theft complaints annually from construction workers.

Not every construction company in Texas is at fault for injustices. Some companies like the state-wide KST Electric place a premium on optimum safety conditions and wage payment for its workers. The company even offers a safety incentive programs that rewards employees for promoting safe workplaces.

But Timm said the real solution of defending worker’s rights goes beyond responsible companies and advocacy organizations.

“This is a legislative issue,” Timm said. “We’ve been combatting this on the city-level, but Texas needs to implement a mandatory compensation law and promote safer conditions if we ever want to see this problem fixed.”

Deaths of Construction and Extraction Workers

Click the play button to see how the number of deaths in construction and extraction have fluctuated between 2006 and 2009.