After Hurricane Ian, immigrants help with rebuilding. But will they get fair work conditions?

With every natural disaster comes recovery and reconstruction, the faster the better.

With disasters becoming more frequent cities and states are becoming more and more dependent on having workers available to do the hard, outdoor work to restore power and fix homes and buildings.

In response to that growing need, a non-profit called Resilience Force has started a national initiative to transform America’s response to disasters by organizing – and protecting – the often undocumented immigrant workers who do the disaster recovery work. It calls them ‘Resiliency Workers.’

Univison News spoke to its founder Saket Soni as he was driving into the disaster zone to meet workers arriving from all over the country.

“We've been getting calls from dozens of contractors, all on the hunt for workers,” he said. “They are desperate for a workforce and not just any workers but workers who are skilled, talented, who know how to do the work,” he added. Resilience Force offers to match those contractors with its pool of around 1,200 workers, as long as they agree to a set of standards. “We've already had some huge contractors sign on to our standards like fair pay, pay on time, zero tolerance for wage theft, good health and safety provisions. We're aiming for other contractors to sign on so that we can create an industry in which mistreating workers is not the way to get a gain a competitive advantage in the market,” said Soni.

[Univison News]: What is the mission of Resilience Force in Florida? Are you going to be structuring this labor force?

[Saket Soni]: We've been down here since just after the hurricane ed, since Friday. We're now at the point just now when the first responders are closing out search and rescue operations and ing the baton to resilience workers preparing to carry out the repairs. We will see convoys of resilience workers arrive over the next few weeks. And they'll dive into the work of firstly saving the homes that were left intact, getting up on roofs, hammering away, putting tarp on roofs, and then they'll move on to saving the bigger community infrastructure; schools, hospitals, eldercare facilities.

The economy of course, is all the resorts and hotels that got flooded in the storm surge. So, these workers, the resilience workers, will be also starting the work of restoring those properties. In other words, these workers are going to be the white blood cells of the post hurricane hit landscape. They're already beginning to arrive into the hubs of destruction: Fort Myers, Fort Charlotte. Naples, and other places. And our role will be to protect workers, make sure they're paid well and on time, have all the PPE and safety equipment that they need. We'll also be building bonds between workers and homeowners that they're helping, and local officials.

[Univison News]: Where will they stay and how many do you reckon will come?

[Saket Soni]: We'll see over the next few weeks as they arrive, but certainly several hundreds, perhaps 1000s of workers. These are workers who are seasoned resilience workers. Many have six to a dozen hurricanes under their belt. And they usually arrive in convoys in the middle of the night and set up at Home Depot parking lots. They sleep there, in their cars or on the sidewalk. They wake up in the morning and wash themselves with bottled water. They stay in their cars. This is a transient workforce that follows storm after storm into city after city. Most of their possessions are in their pickup trucks and vans.

Unfortunately, FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) provides no infrastructure for these workers. What we really need is a recovery playbook that focuses on affordable housing stock and schools because that saves families and the tax base, and one that has a plan for keeping workers safe so they can continue to work and finish what they started. That's not the way we do recovery right now. We’re calling on government to build a visionary plan like that, but in the meantime workers are sleeping in their cars or staying in the destroyed homes that they're rebuilding.

[Univison News]: We saw the contribution of migrant workers ourselves in Port Charlotte last week. How well as the migrant workers received?

[Saket Soni]: Immigrant workers are arriving into a place that was unfriendly before the hurricane. The thing is that tragedy makes people change their mind about all kinds of things. And I've seen again and again, it is possible to get homeowners and residents and local officials to change their mind about immigrants after hurricanes because suddenly they depend on those immigrants.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has demonstrated his ability to put politics on hold for disaster recovery. Reporters have pointed out that he voted against relief for Hurricane Sandy victims, but now needs relief for Florida and is accepting it. I view that as evidence of evolution.

You know, Governor DeSantis needs to preside over this recovery. He needs it to move forward. The worst nightmare for him both in of governance and politics, is a recovery that slows down. Without these workers it comes to a screeching halt all together and the consequences for that are very, very severe without immigrant workers. Families can’t come home from the shelters because he can't get homes back up to go and turn the lights back on.

Without immigrant workers schools don't get repaired and parents in the middle of the school year can't put their kids back in school. If homeowners and parents and families can't do all of that they move away. Then what happens is the tax base bleeds out. Revenue dries up for municipalities and entire cities can spiral into a death spiral. So you really do need these immigrant resilience workers who are coming into Florida.

[Univison News]: What is your experience with local government? Will immigration inspectors be going out looking checking their papers?

[Saket Soni]: Well, that remains to be seen. In the next few weeks we will reach out to local officials, start meeting with mayors and county officials and start to show them that it's really in their self-interest that workers stay. In places like Bay County in the Florida Panhandle after Hurricane Michael in 2018 the conditions for workers were so harsh that they had to leave. That's why many municipalities collapsed. So, we don't want that happened to Naples or Fort Myers, or Port Charlotte.

When you look at a place like Naples, you know, that's a place with a high density of people over 65. They need help. They're not going to climb up on those roofs and do the repairs by themselves. And local officials have to understand that we're going to reach out to them and help them see the workers, recognize the workers, understand them as not immigrants but as the human beings they need right now. So we'll start that outreach in the next few days or weeks.

We're arguing that this is a time when ordinary people are focusing on the most practical problems. And if we just sit down to solve practical problems together, then common sense tells you immigrant resilience workers are needed.

The immigrants who are coming, are coming with their eyes wide open. They know when they're coming to a state that has treated immigrants harshly and yet they're committed to finishing the rebuilding because they have a deep sense of vocation that they have to their work. These workers are driving to difficult areas. The lights are still out and they're sleeping on the floors of homes that are destroyed, and climbing up on the roofs in the hot sun. All because they're deeply committed to the work not just because they need the money, but also because like teachers and other kinds of professionals, they have a deep sense of vocation around this work. They know what they're risking. What we're hoping is that we can play a role and build a program that brings workers and local authorities together to create a different playbook for this recovery because God knows we need it. I mean, we need those homes back intact tomorrow before the next train. It's the middle of the school year. We need those schools to reopen.