SUMMER 2026
ISSUE 07

₁ Nik Theodore and Zaina Alsous, Behind the Skyline: Labor Conditions in South Florida’s Commercial Construction Industry (Work Center Resource Library, October 2024).

₂ Alexandra Martinez, “Worker Safety Activists Secure Major Victory in Miami’s Largest Redevelopment Deal,” Prism, March 12, 2025, https://prismreports.org/2025/03/12/construction-worker-safety-miami.

₃ Penelope Kyritsis and Sean Sellers, Building Dignity and Respect: The Case for Worker-Driven Social Responsibility in the Twin Cities Construction Industry (Worker-Driven Social Responsibility Network, 2019), https://wsr-network.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Building-Dignity-and-Respect-english.pdf.

It’s 5:45 on a Friday morning, and I hustle to leave the house by six with breakfast, lunch, and heavy boots on. I drive for 15 minutes in the morning darkness before the nightmare of Miami traffic kicks in. There’s already the start of a trickle of construction workers streaming downtown; everyone is wearing blaze orange and yellow shirts. Some days I feel a surge of hope to be a part of a scene that highlights that all wealth is built by workers. Other days, I feel sickened.

If you’re a construction worker in Miami, the grueling heat on your back comes from more than just the sun: Developers and investors shape our cities with the click of a mouse and more money than most can fathom. Those of us who produce their surplus dollars by laying the bricks, raising the walls, and hanging the drywall aren’t paid enough to live in the buildings we construct. The cost of a contracting scheme that relies on precarity and disposability isn’t abstract – one in four workers experiences wage theft, and in South Florida a construction worker dies on the clock every four days.¹

It’s December, dry season, but the sizzle of heat is still palpable in the air as I spend my days framing steel stud walls, hanging drywall, and doing general carpentry labor like cutting plywood and installing vapor barriers. I’m working for a small subcontractor, contracted by a larger contractor in a pyramid scheme that extends up to a general contractor and eventually to a developer and the investors who fund the project. The building will be a 35,363-square-foot luxury gym and spa in the mixed-use development called “Miami World Center” that will transform the heart of downtown Miami. It’s the second-largest urban project in the country, a massive multibillion-dollar residential and commercial build that will occupy more than 27 acres when complete. When I walk into the building, a few of my coworkers are already there, and we shake hands to say good morning: Josué, a 38-year-old man from Honduras who’s been in Miami for 20 years with his wife and kids, and Jesús, a 20-year-old also from Honduras who moved here when he was nine years old. When I first started, he would refuse to work with me because I was a girl; now he brings me a piece of chocolate after lunch most days, and ever since he learned that I’m half Slovak, greets me as la Rusa, “the Russian.”

Miami stands at the nexus of immense capital investment, real estate development, and the labor of the Latino immigrants who make all of this building possible. It’s among the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City as one of the most expensive places to live in the United States, but, in contrast to those places, it offers abysmally low wages. When I first arrived in Miami, I lived out of the truck bed of my Ford Ranger for a month before I was able to find a place with even close to manageable rent – $1,200 per month for a room in a shared apartment while making $13 to $16 per hour. I had called Minneapolis home for the previous ten years and was shocked by the grind of 50 to 60 percent of my income going to shelter. Undeniably, the most affordable way to live is with others. All of my coworkers live in a house packed with other people – sometimes with their parents and siblings and nieces or nephews, others with one another.

Yesterday was a 12-hour workday, so we all have bags under our eyes and are slow to get moving. We start cleaning up the spaces where we hung drywall last night, breaking down cutoffs for the dumpster and sweeping up large amounts of dust. No one knows if we have any masks or where they would be if we did. Our boss, Diego, divides people up in teams, and I spend the morning working with Josué framing out an area in what will be the men’s locker room. We’re in close proximity to each other in small spaces, and there’s not much of a choice but to be touching – or, more accurately, sweating on – each other. The pace is demanding, and I’m often humbled by it.

As the daybreak hours bleed into late morning I switch tasks, working by myself installing wood backing in what will be the boxing room – or maybe it’s the LED-light therapy room. Diego approaches me to talk about a text he sent last night asking if I was all right with the fact that he doesn’t pay overtime. It has never seemed like a choice – we either work a normal eight hours or a longer 12. I ask him if it’s mandatory overtime and if he has decided on what he’ll pay me hourly yet, since we had discussed that he would observe my work for a few days and then we’d come to an agreement. He responds by stating that this work isn’t cut out for everyone and informs me that my coworker Juan Carlos, a 67-year-old Venezuelan man with whom I was becoming friends, will not be returning to the job because he didn’t know how to read a measuring tape. I know that’s not true, and when I ask for Juan Carlos’s phone number, Diego says he deleted the contact.

I check the clock, and it’s noon already. I brush a layer of sawdust off my pants as we pile into cars to drive to Luis’s ex-wife’s restaurant, and I’m impressed by the cleanliness of everyone else. It’s good food – always rice and beans and pollo, or on Fridays, pescado – and I look forward to speaking Spanish in a more casual setting. Alejandro and Daniel are there from the other jobsite, and it brightens my day to catch up. Daniel, a big joker, asks if I want to fly to Colombia with him today after work so we can get married and start a family. I choke out an awkward laugh. Luis spends the hour catcalling women walking by on the sidewalk, and others occasionally join in. Alejandro shows me pictures of the fish he caught this past weekend, and while we eat, faces light up as everyone tells stories of dishes from home in El Salvador, Honduras, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Colombia. We talk about missing our families in other places and everyone offers each other the last plantain on their plate before we head back to work, our stomachs too full.

As we’re walking out of the restaurant, the conversation briefly turns to deportations. Trump has just won his second term and is set to take power in less than a month. He’s promised to usher in a “new era of American dominance” in construction that’s explicitly anti-immigrant. Daniel jokes that the agents will never be able to get him down from the top of the scissor lift because he’ll cut the wires and I can climb up to bring him food. The human rights crisis that is federal immigration enforcement has continued to escalate, and rumors of workplace raids kept some people from coming into work at all this past week. We begin to talk with more gravity about what we would do if ICE agents appeared at our site on the car ride back, and I learn that only one other person on my crew has legal authorization to work.

It’s no secret that entire sections of the economy, like the construction industry, would cease to exist without the labor of a workforce that is undocumented and made invisible. Precarity is the point of an immigration system that functions like this: to control and manipulate a class of people so that they have no option but to accept unsafe working conditions, rampant wage theft, and exploitative subcontracting practices.

It’s late afternoon, and I’m assembling box-beam headers for doors. I can feel my lunch digesting in my stomach as my mind turns to my paycheck. I walk the finished box beams across the jobsite and pass by a room where many of my coworkers are gathered; Mateo waves me in. Pedro, who has a quiet but commanding presence, is saying that he doesn’t believe Luis will pay us today. Each person reports out how many weeks of pay they’re missing – my two weeks is nothing compared to guys who haven’t been paid in six, even eight weeks. Eduardo says that he is worried that Diego won’t pay us anything at all if we don’t continue to make progress on the project. Mateo replies that we can’t keep working for no pay because there’s no pressure on Diego to pay us if we keep showing up. “¿Como vas a pagar el alquiler?” he asks – “How are you going to pay rent?” He has a sure demeanor and a sharp analysis that easily convinces other people to follow, and as we continue to discuss, it’s clear that most of us are aligned. We agree to not come to work tomorrow.

From talking to the superintendent, who only speaks English, I knew that Diego had already been paid by the contractor above him. They pay him in large lump sums for contracts on individual areas of work and phases of that work. For example, Diego is paid by the general contractor when 50 percent of the drywall is hung in the building and receives the rest once it’s complete. This tiered contracting scheme means that whichever contractor can bid the job at the lowest amount, to therefore get it done the cheapest and quickest, will win the contract. When it proves impossible to do the amount of work for the amount of money that was bid, then they are on the hook for the additional costs.

It’s surprisingly routine to navigate these conversations with my coworkers; taking collective action in the form of a next-day work stoppage is talked about in a similar air to discussions of the weather, with just a fraction more emotional charge. Wage theft is a prevailing practice not because workers are foolish, but because aggressive cost cutting at each tier of subcontracting and the violent churn of our immigration system amount to a situation in which, even if a contractor is found to be violating the law, it is unusual for them to face consequences, and the developer at the top of the pyramid walks away without an ounce of accountability.

It’s five in the afternoon when the rolling cooler comes out, and I hear the crack of cans of beer being opened around the site. The other subcontractors left an hour ago, and it’s becoming clear we’ll be here for another long day. The jobsite speaker pumps out upbeat jams and the atmosphere lightens, revealing a sense of camaraderie in our exhaustion. My coworkers are lifting full sheets of five-eighths-thick drywall by themselves and working fast to try and finish so we can leave. When it’s time to call it, everyone exchanges a handshake goodbye and splits, puffing on nicotine vapes into the dark of the evening. As I leave, my eyes glaze over the half-built high-rises and cranes blocking my line of sight each way I turn my head. There are extremely fit people in athleisure walking tiny dogs past the soon-to-be Greek yogurteria and the newly opened Container Store, which sells boxes to organize your other boxes. I walk through a neighborhood where fancy coffee shops and CrossFit gyms have replaced the people who used to call it home.

My phone vibrates in my pocket, and I pull it out to answer the call from Diego. “I’ll pay you by Sunday. I’m just waiting for a payment to come through, but I really need you to come in next week, okay?” Once I’m off the phone I text a couple others to see if they’ve heard from him. One person received partial payment already, some haven’t received any communication, and others yet have been told the same as me. We agree to follow up on Sunday. There’s no good option. If we don’t get paid and therefore don’t come in, we miss a day’s pay. If we do get paid, we all know it will be partial payment. No matter what, we’ll still be missing cash, which has material consequences in our lives. My mind turns to the last part of the day when Josué told me that he needs to pay for things for his kids but Diego is such a scoundrel that he wouldn’t put it past him to call la migra on him if he pushed the issue of late pay any further.

Despite these overlapping forms of exploitation, construction workers have been organizing to change Miami from a city that functions as a playground for the rich to a city that honors and protects the people who make it function. A coalition called Build a Better Miami formed as a joint project between 30 labor, tenant, and community organizations in order to pressure a large developer to negotiate a community benefits agreement (CBA) with the workers who would build the project and the people who currently live where the redevelopment will take place. While this project wasn’t one I, or any workers, were currently building, a strong CBA would set a new standard that other contractors in the county could be pressured to follow. WeCount!, a South Florida nonprofit that supports construction workers in organizing, as well as the Florida Carpenters Regional Council led the coalition to a “landmark victory for worker safety” in what is still to date the largest redevelopment project in Miami history, costing $3 billion and spanning 64 acres in the Little Haiti and Little River neighborhoods.²

The atmosphere is typical of a late Sunday afternoon as I walk toward the building at the center of Jose Marti Park in the Little Havana neighborhood. Kids zoom past, almost knocking me off my feet as they chase each other giggling and playing tag. There’s a family grilling at a nearby picnic table, and the spit of the grill makes my stomach growl even before I smell the thick strips of beef. The sound of Spanish is audible from every circle of people, and Jesús, whom I rode with, responds to a whistle by running over to exchange handshakes and smiles with a friend he wasn’t expecting to see. As we enter the building, we see a couple of WeCount! members sitting with sign-in sheets at a folding table in a quiet hallway. I recognize one of the guys, Luciano, from previous meetings. I introduce my coworker to him as he waves us through the double doors into the bigger community room, where other people are starting to set up chairs and tables. The charla, clumsily translated as “chat,” that we’re attending is an informal meeting and celebration among construction workers who work on various projects across the county. 

Jesús unstacks some chairs to form a semicircle of overflow seating in the back of the room. I run out to the car to help carry in food: carne asada, rice and beans, slaw and plantains, an assortment of Coke and Sprite. By the time we finish laying out the food I hear Santiago, one of the main leaders on the construction campaign and an electrician by trade, greet everyone on the mic and welcome us all to stack a pile of food on the plastic plates provided and make ourselves at home with our tablemates before we start the meeting. Some of the workers who are present today worked for a subcontractor on a past project of Swerdlow Group and, after experiencing wage theft similar to that of me and my coworkers, organized to win their wages back with the support of WeCount!, which led to the birth of the CBA campaign. It’s mid-May and we’re coming off of a victory earlier in the spring so the air feels festive.

Swerdlow Group, the developer of the Little River mega project, has made public commitments to key coalitional demands, and while it is not a legally binding agreement, it represents an agreement that is the first of its kind in the country for heat standards. During the entire decade-long building process, the project will only use responsible contractors who have no history of wage theft or safety violations. They will also adhere to a stringent heat protection and prevention plan, the first of its kind in the country. It’ll include measures like on-site education for managers and workers, compliance with hydration and cooling protocols, designated shaded areas, and mandated breaks.

Jesús and I sit down in the last two seats at a table with people I mostly haven’t met, other than Ricardo, a comité member who was at the debrief on the day that we officially won the CBA. I have a warm feeling in my heart for Ricardo. He’s gone out of his way to help me try to find work with other contractors by calling superintendents and friends to put in a good word for me. He introduces Jesús and me to another man at the table, Carlos, who used to do nonunion rebar work but a few years ago was able to get a job with a union employer. Carlos is extremely friendly and excited to tell us about the difference in his life since he switched work: He has health insurance, he’s paid $10 an hour more, and he collects a biweekly check where he sees his overtime hours counted. But more than that, he feels he’s living a decent life now, not always struggling to just make ends meet. Jesús inquires about how he could get work with the same employer. “You need documentation to legally work,” is all Carlos has time to relay before Santiago asks us all to focus our attention on the larger group.

“Bienvenidos a todos. Mi nombre es Santiago.” He continues to share in Spanish: “I’ve been working for 12 years in the construction industry in Miami. I adore my job, I love it. But every year things get worse. The temperatures are rising, the salaries are sinking, and it’s harder to afford a decent apartment. Working people are experiencing a double crisis: a labor crisis and a housing crisis. Twenty years ago, I used to earn $36 to $50 an hour, and today I earn $18 to 20 an hour. At the same time, rents have increased by 55 percent in the past five years.” He goes on to introduce the agenda for the day. We’d do a spectrogram activity to discuss how working conditions in the industry affected us, we’d talk about the developer’s public commitments, and we’d celebrate the success of the fight. 

The bulk of the meeting is coming to an end as a woman approaches the mic to share a song. It’s a jam that I haven’t heard before but is obviously well known by everyone else in the room because people instantly stand up to clap and sing along, and the kids who were playing in the other room come running through the swinging doors, shaking and wiggling with joy. Jesús rolls his eyes and laughs at my attempts to join along in a song I don’t know, and when the music finishes another member who is dressed sharply in cowboy hat and boots steps up to the mic to usher in a karaoke-style free-for-all. The chorus of laughter echoes out into the hallway. I can deeply feel the resolve of the people in the room to keep fighting for changes that honor that every single human deserves to live a dignified life filled with love and joy – sin miedo, without fear. It’s hard to shake the feeling that we have so much more work to do, but that doesn’t distract me from the tangible solidarity evoked by the chant that the comité ends each gathering with: “Nada se construye sin estas manos,” or “Nothing is built without these hands.”

By targeting large developers to come to the table and negotiate with stakeholders, we can shift more of the market in construction towards fair and just working conditions for all workers, regardless of immigration or citizenship status. Developers and investors wield a tremendous amount of power over politicians, and traditional political organizing, such as attempting to pass laws that strengthen wage-theft ordinances or require a prevailing wage, are worthy struggles but often aren’t politically feasible or lack an enforcement mechanism. In other cities, worker centers and unions are partnering in a fight to tie the construction permitting process at county or city levels to a coenforced labor standards process. This could be established through ordinances or through a Worker-Driven Social Responsibility (WSR) model, such as the work of Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha in Minneapolis, where, inspired by the the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, construction workers are pressuring developers to sign on directly to a legally binding code of conduct, called the Building Dignity and Respect program, that would span across all of a developer’s construction projects.³

The CBA, WSR campaigning, and shop-floor anti-wage-theft struggles like my crew’s are all experiments in organizing in the construction industry. The public commitments that Build a Better Miami won are historic and will undoubtedly positively affect current and future generations of construction workers. However, this alone is not enough to shift the industry and will be a big task to enforce. Wage theft is a pervasive issue, and campaigns against small contractors are time intensive, require vast resources, and can’t reverse systemic issues of the industry. Due to the nature of the permitting process, both WSR and CBA campaigns are future oriented and conclude before the construction project has broken ground, so there isn’t a current group of workers on the project that coalitions can include in the struggle. All of these experiments, and others, build the road while walking on it and have achieved significant progress despite numerous obstacles. Further experimentation is needed: The trade-union movement must contest the new era of domination by organized business that echoes the 1970s and ’80s, when a corporate-backed right-wing agenda waged a comprehensive assault on organized labor. We are once again called to adapt to the challenges of organizing in a changing landscape or become obsolete.

The sun glows a deep orange as it rises in the east, and the concrete jungle that is downtown Miami is almost unrecognizable from eight months ago. The skyline glitters with new hotels and apartments and the glaring absurdity of investing this scale of resources into a sinking landmass.

Months have gone by, and the dry season has turned into the wet season. Every day the scent of the salty Atlantic dances on the breeze, and each afternoon is greeted with a frantic, sudden downpour of rain. Mirroring the skyline, everything feels like it’s changed in our lives. Diego has begun providing housing for four of my coworkers because his continued inability to pay our wages means that people are unable to pay rent. Smith tells me everyone who lives under Diego’s roof is refusing to pay him rent and words are tense and limited there. Mateo has temporarily moved in with Pedro’s family and has decided to move back to El Salvador in a matter of weeks because the risk of deportation is too high. Both of Jesús’s parents have already been deported, leaving him to take care of his 12-year-old sister as a 20-year-old himself. Alejandro has moved up north where wages are better, and he FaceTimed me during the workday the other day riding an ATV around his new jobsite with a huge grin on his face. We’re no longer going out to lunch as a crew every day, and instead there’s a rotating schedule for bringing in a pot of rice and beans or, lately, a strange combination of pasta and chicken nuggets that’s quite popular. We pass around paper plates and a bottle of hot sauce while sitting atop the piles of drywall and laugh about when we used to take an hour to drive all the way to Diego’s wife’s place for lunch.

Unceremonious firing has become a new tactic of our boss’s desperate attempts to keep pace with the contract. Josué was let go for accidentally causing damage to an elevator with a scissor lift. I was also fired and worked for a different contractor for more than a month. (That contractor was unfortunately committing even worse wage theft.) Upon returning to work for Diego there was a new fingerprint recognition system for clocking in and out, and when a tool battery went missing, Eduardo and I were told it would come out of our paychecks. The general vibe had solidified into one in which we felt like our boss was constantly looking for ways to catch us taking advantage of him. I was unsurprised when Diego was fired from the contracts he held with the general contractor, which catapulted us into brief unemployment before many of us were hired back by Diego’s replacement.

Diego was a puppet that the developers used, and my crew and I knew there was little chance that we would be able to collect our wages from him directly. He did not have the money; he was bankrupt, and for months he had been borrowing cash and adding on other side projects in order to collect advance payments in a last-ditch effort to keep his head above water. Over the following days we talked over lunch and agreed I should call the general contractor to see how we could get our final paychecks.

At first, when I talk with Bruce it feels deceptively hopeful. He’s appalled that we haven’t been paid and requests that we compile a document that lists what Diego owes us (collectively over $35,500). It takes time for us to assemble the documentation because some of the people don’t work with us anymore, not everyone is on the same site everyday, and each person has to separate out the dates they worked and how much they were owed on each of the three sites. It’s not long before both the owner and the contractor below him tell us there’s nothing they can do about “Diego mismanaging his money,” and they stop returning my calls. The superintendent on the job, who propositioned me for sex a few weeks ago, tells me that he could figure out a way for me to get paid if he threw his weight around with management, but not the rest of my crew.

I learned from the staff at WeCount! that the county has a wage-theft program that we could use to file complaints. However, none of the materials are in Spanish, the process can be both expensive and laborious, and the complainant must be an employee, not an independent contractor. We would have to take our employer to court and prove misclassification. There are news stories of immigration agents showing up at court to take people into detention centers from their appointments, and there is no guarantee that we would recover any of our wages from this process; the barriers combined with the risks for most of my coworkers were considerable. Another option is to each separately file a mechanic’s lien, which is a legal claim anyone who works on a building can place on the property title for unpaid wages.

A month goes by, and at lunch on a Thursday we gather at the flatbed trailer in the parking lot directly outside the doors of our site. There’s no pretense that we should be doing this off-site as we use the trailer’s surface and the garbage cans nearby for writing surfaces to fill out our paperwork together. While we decided the previous week that filing a lien was the best next leverage point for those that wanted to move forward with action, we also recognize that a lien is simply a tool. Like with a wage-theft claim with the county, there’s no guarantee we will hear from the developer, especially without filing a suit against them. Without a combination of public pressure tactics, such as phone call-ins or marches on the boss, we will likely be in the same position tomorrow as we are in today. No one remembers to bring pens, and we have to go to a notary and then to the courthouse to file the paperwork before they close at 4:00pm. Pedro scoffs at the ridiculousness of trying to make it downtown from Coconut Grove on that timeline but looks up from his paper with a smile and asks, “¿Pues, cuando vamos?” – “So, when are we going?”

As I’m signing my name on the piece of paper with a thick carpenter’s pencil I think about how this morning, just like each morning, someone made a strong batch of Cuban coffee for no less than fifty people, someone else asked if I slept okay last night, and another passed out cut-resistant gloves he had bought for everyone out of his own pocket. The gravity of what the rich steal from us is front and center in the construction industry, and yet, nothing can take away our bonds of care for one another. La lucha sigue.