Latest news with #NationalDayLaborerOrganizingNetwork
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Only a fraction of fire cleanup workers are protecting themselves against toxic debris. One community center is fighting to change that
A crew of 10, many sporting bright orange National Day Laborer Organizing Network T-shirts, funneled out of a Mexican restaurant on the edge of the Eaton burn scar. Four months — to the day — after winds smashed a tree into a car next to NDLON's Pasadena Community Job Center and soot blanketed the neighborhood, a University of Illinois Chicago professor, NDLON staff and volunteers sorted into cars under the midday sun and began discreetly traveling every road in fire-stricken Altadena. They watched nearly 250 crews, working long hours (for good pay) under contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, remove the toxic debris covering the landscape in the wake of the fire. Of the over 1,000 workers they surveyed in the burn area on May 7 and 9, only a quarter wore gloves, a fifth wore a protective mask, and a mere tenth donned full Tyvek suits, as required by California's fire cleanup safety regulations, the group's report, released Thursday, found. For Pablo Alvarado, co-executive director and co-founder of NDLON, the results aren't surprising. NDLON — a Pasadena-based, national network of day laborer organizations, focused on improving the lives of day laborers, migrant and low-wage workers — has been responding to post-disaster worker safety issues for decades. Alvarado couldn't help but remember the laborers he and NDLON supported during the cleanup following 9/11 over 20 years ago. 'Those workers are no longer alive. They died of cancer,' he said. 'These are workers I'd known for decades — their sons, their cousins.' As Alvarado watches a new generation of laborers get to work in the aftermath of the L.A. fires, his call to action is simple: 'I just don't want to see people dying.' NDLON has seen lax PPE use time and time again following disasters. Since 2001, NDLON has dispatched to countless hurricanes, floods and fires to support what the organization calls the 'second responders' — the workers who wade through the rubble and rebuild communities after the devastation. Eaton was no different. 'We always respond around the country to floods, fires, no matter where it is,' said Cal Soto, workers' rights director for NDLON, who helped survey workers in the burn area. For the Eaton fire, 'we just happen to be literally in the shadow of it.' When wildfires push into developed areas like Altadena, they chew through not just trees but residents' cars, plastics, batteries and household goods like detergents and paint thinners, releasing hosts of toxic chemicals previously locked away. They include heavy metals like lead and mercury, capable of damaging the nervous system and kidneys, as well as arsenic and nickel, known carcinogens. Organic materials like wood and oil that don't fully burn can leave polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — or PAHs — which can harm the immune system and cause sickness in the short term and cancer in the long term. Read more: The L.A. wildfires left lead and other toxic material in the soil of burn zones. Here are their health risks Their primary opportunities to enter the body are through the inhalation of toxic air or through ingestion, after collecting on the hands of a person who then touches their face or uses their hands to eat. They can also, to a lesser extent, absorb directly through the skin. Masks and disposable head-to-toe coverall suits act as a barrier against the dangerous contaminants. The responsibility to ensure workers are using those protective barriers on the job ultimately falls on the employer, said Soto. However, the breakdown of the safety standards can happen anywhere in the chain: The state's OSHA division can fail to communicate rules to companies and enforce them. Employers can fail to educate their employees or provide the correct PPE. Workers themselves — despite it all — can choose to remove their PPE on long, hot days where a plastic suit and heavy duty mask feel suffocating. 'Sometimes it's uncomfortable to wear all of that crap — particularly when it's hot," said Alvarado, who was a day laborer before founding NDLON. "Sometimes you feel like you're suffocated.' NDLON and its Pasadena Community Job Center, within hours of the Eaton fire, became a hub for the community's response. Its volunteers handed out PPE, food and donations to workers and community members. By the end of January, it had hundreds of helping hands clearing Pasadena's parks and streets of debris to assist overwhelmed city employees. At the same time, day labor, construction and environmental remediation workers quickly rushed into the burn zone along with the donations, media attention and celebrities. Like clockwork, so did the labor safety violations. In a dimly-lit Pasadena church in late January, dozens of day laborers watched as Carlos Castillo played the role of an impatient boss, barking directions at three workers standing before them. 'Hurry up,' Castillo told them in Spanish, handing out boxes of protective suits and masks. One woman, standing in front of the room, fumbled with the straps of a respirator. Debora Gonzalez, health and safety director NDLON, eyed the day laborer's efforts before asking the crowd: 'What is our friend missing?' 'Gloves!' someone called out. Gonzalez and other volunteers called on the crowd, who quickly pointed out more problems with the equipment that the three workers had hastily donned. One had a mask that wasn't sufficient for toxic cleanup; Gonzalez also pointed out that his beard would allow dust to infiltrate. Castillo, a volunteer trainer and president of the D.C.-based immigrant worker-support nonprofit Trabajadores Unidos de Washington D.C., reminded them that when they are cleaning up an area after a wildfire, there could be a range of noxious chemicals in the ash. Gonzalez said she wanted them to be prepared. 'Tomorrow we'll practice again,' she told them. NDLON set up the free trainings for any day laborers interested in supporting fire recovery after some laborers began picking up work cleaning homes contaminated with smoke and ash near the fire zones. Employers are supposed to provide protective equipment to workers and train them on how to use it, but 'many times employers want to move quickly. They just want to get the job done and get the job done as quickly as possible,' said Nadia Marin-Molina, NDLON co-executive director. 'Unfortunately, workers' health goes by the wayside.' As NDLON worked to educate day laborers, another group of workers moved in: The Army Corps of Engineers' contractors. Alvarado quickly noticed that many of the corps' workers were not wearing the required PPE. Never one to let the 'Day Laborer' in NDLON's name limit his compassion, Alvarado reached out to a longtime collaborator, Nik Theodore, a University of Illinois Chicago professor who studies labor standards enforcement, to do something about it. A week later, Juan Pablo Orjuela, a labor justice organizer with NDLON, made sure the air was recirculating in the car as the team drove through the burn zone, surveying workers for the NDLON and University of Illinois Chicago report in early May. He watched an AllTrails map documenting their progress — they'd drive until they had traced every street in northeast Altadena. Read more: When FEMA failed to test soil for toxic substances after the L.A. fires, The Times had it done. The results were alarming Orjuela spotted an Army Corps crew working on a home and pulled the car to the curb. 'Eight workers — no gloves, no Tyvek suit,' he said. Nestor Alvarenga, a day laborer and volunteer with NDLON, sat in the back, tediously recording the number of workers, how many were wearing protective equipment and the site's address into a spreadsheet on an iPad with a beefy black case. One worker walked up to the car; Orjuela slowly lowered the window. 'Do you guys need anything?' the worker asked. 'No, we're OK,' Orjuela said, 'we'll get out of your way.' Orjuela rolled up the window and pulled away. 'I don't really have to tell anybody what I'm doing,' he said. 'I'm not being antagonistic, but you know … I'm just not saying anything to anybody.' Theodore and NDLON hope the window survey, spanning 240 job sites with more than 1,000 total workers, can raise awareness for safety and health concerns in the burn areas, help educate workers, and put pressure on the government to more strictly enforce compliance. 'This was no small sample by any means,' Theodore said. 'This was an attempt to be as comprehensive as possible and the patterns were clear.' For Soto, the results are a clear sign that, first and foremost, employers are not upholding their responsibility to ensure their workers' safety. 'It's the responsibility of the employer,' he said. 'I want to be clear that we have that expectation — that demand — always.' Yet the window survey found even job sites where the PPE requirements are explicitly listed by the employer on a poster at the site, usage was still low. The reality, NDLON organizers said, is that the state must step in to help enforce the rules. 'I understand that the disaster was colossal, and I never expected the government to have the infrastructure to respond immediately,' said Alvarado, 'but at this point, making sure workers have PPE, that's a basic thing that the government should be doing.' Former Times staff writer Emily Alpert Reyes contributed to this report. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
22-05-2025
- General
- Los Angeles Times
Only a fraction of fire cleanup workers are protecting themselves against toxic debris. One community center is fighting to change that
A crew of 10, many sporting bright orange National Day Laborer Organizing Network T-shirts, funneled out of a Mexican restaurant on the edge of the Eaton burn scar. Four months — to the day — after winds smashed a tree into a car next to NDLON's Pasadena Community Job Center and soot blanketed the neighborhood, a University of Illinois Chicago professor, NDLON staff and volunteers sorted into cars under the midday sun and began discreetly traveling every road in fire-stricken Altadena. They watched nearly 250 crews, working long hours (for good pay) under contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, remove the toxic debris covering the landscape in the wake of the fire. Of the over 1,000 workers they surveyed in the burn area on May 7 and 9, only a quarter wore gloves, a fifth wore a protective mask, and a mere tenth donned full Tyvek suits, as required by California's fire cleanup safety regulations, the group's report, released Thursday, found. For Pablo Alvarado, co-executive director and co-founder of NDLON, the results aren't surprising. NDLON — a Pasadena-based, national network of day laborer organizations, focused on improving the lives of day laborers, migrant and low-wage workers — has been responding to post-disaster worker safety issues for decades. Alvarado couldn't help but remember the laborers he and NDLON supported during the cleanup following 9/11 over 20 years ago. 'Those workers are no longer alive. They died of cancer,' he said. 'These are workers I'd known for decades — their sons, their cousins.' As Alvarado watches a new generation of laborers get to work in the aftermath of the L.A. fires, his call to action is simple: 'I just don't want to see people dying.' NDLON has seen lax PPE use time and time again following disasters. Since 2001, NDLON has dispatched to countless hurricanes, floods and fires to support what the organization calls the 'second responders' — the workers who wade through the rubble and rebuild communities after the devastation. Eaton was no different. 'We always respond around the country to floods, fires, no matter where it is,' said Cal Soto, workers' rights director for NDLON, who helped survey workers in the burn area. For the Eaton fire, 'we just happen to be literally in the shadow of it.' When wildfires push into developed areas like Altadena, they chew through not just trees but residents' cars, plastics, batteries and household goods like detergents and paint thinners, releasing hosts of toxic chemicals previously locked away. They include heavy metals like lead and mercury, capable of damaging the nervous system and kidneys, as well as arsenic and nickel, known carcinogens. Organic materials like wood and oil that don't fully burn can leave polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — or PAHs — which can harm the immune system and cause sickness in the short term and cancer in the long term. Their primary opportunities to enter the body are through the inhalation of toxic air or through ingestion, after collecting on the hands of a person who then touches their face or uses their hands to eat. They can also, to a lesser extent, absorb directly through the skin. Masks and disposable head-to-toe coverall suits act as a barrier against the dangerous contaminants. The responsibility to ensure workers are using those protective barriers on the job ultimately falls on the employer, said Soto. However, the breakdown of the safety standards can happen anywhere in the chain: The state's OSHA division can fail to communicate rules to companies and enforce them. Employers can fail to educate their employees or provide the correct PPE. Workers themselves — despite it all — can choose to remove their PPE on long, hot days where a plastic suit and heavy duty mask feel suffocating. 'Sometimes it's uncomfortable to wear all of that crap — particularly when it's hot,' said Alvarado, who was a day laborer before founding NDLON. 'Sometimes you feel like you're suffocated.' NDLON and its Pasadena Community Job Center, within hours of the Eaton fire, became a hub for the community's response. Its volunteers handed out PPE, food and donations to workers and community members. By the end of January, it had hundreds of helping hands clearing Pasadena's parks and streets of debris to assist overwhelmed city employees. At the same time, day labor, construction and environmental remediation workers quickly rushed into the burn zone along with the donations, media attention and celebrities. Like clockwork, so did the labor safety violations. In a dimly-lit Pasadena church in late January, dozens of day laborers watched as Carlos Castillo played the role of an impatient boss, barking directions at three workers standing before them. 'Hurry up,' Castillo told them in Spanish, handing out boxes of protective suits and masks. One woman, standing in front of the room, fumbled with the straps of a respirator. Debora Gonzalez, health and safety director NDLON, eyed the day laborer's efforts before asking the crowd: 'What is our friend missing?' 'Gloves!' someone called out. Gonzalez and other volunteers called on the crowd, who quickly pointed out more problems with the equipment that the three workers had hastily donned. One had a mask that wasn't sufficient for toxic cleanup; Gonzalez also pointed out that his beard would allow dust to infiltrate. Castillo, a volunteer trainer and president of the D.C.-based immigrant worker-support nonprofit Trabajadores Unidos de Washington D.C., reminded them that when they are cleaning up an area after a wildfire, there could be a range of noxious chemicals in the ash. Gonzalez said she wanted them to be prepared. 'Tomorrow we'll practice again,' she told them. NDLON set up the free trainings for any day laborers interested in supporting fire recovery after some laborers began picking up work cleaning homes contaminated with smoke and ash near the fire zones. Employers are supposed to provide protective equipment to workers and train them on how to use it, but 'many times employers want to move quickly. They just want to get the job done and get the job done as quickly as possible,' said Nadia Marin-Molina, NDLON co-executive director. 'Unfortunately, workers' health goes by the wayside.' As NDLON worked to educate day laborers, another group of workers moved in: The Army Corps of Engineers' contractors. Alvarado quickly noticed that many of the corps' workers were not wearing the required PPE. Never one to let the 'Day Laborer' in NDLON's name limit his compassion, Alvarado reached out to a longtime collaborator, Nik Theodore, a University of Illinois Chicago professor who studies labor standards enforcement, to do something about it. A week later, Juan Pablo Orjuela, a labor justice organizer with NDLON, made sure the air was recirculating in the car as the team drove through the burn zone, surveying workers for the NDLON and University of Illinois Chicago report in early May. He watched an AllTrails map documenting their progress — they'd drive until they had traced every street in northeast Altadena. Orjuela spotted an Army Corps crew working on a home and pulled the car to the curb. 'Eight workers — no gloves, no Tyvek suit,' he said. Nestor Alvarenga, a day laborer and volunteer with NDLON, sat in the back, tediously recording the number of workers, how many were wearing protective equipment and the site's address into a spreadsheet on an iPad with a beefy black case. One worker walked up to the car; Orjuela slowly lowered the window. 'Do you guys need anything?' the worker asked. 'No, we're OK,' Orjuela said, 'we'll get out of your way.' Orjuela rolled up the window and pulled away. 'I don't really have to tell anybody what I'm doing,' he said. 'I'm not being antagonistic, but you know … I'm just not saying anything to anybody.' Theodore and NDLON hope the window survey, spanning 240 job sites with more than 1,000 total workers, can raise awareness for safety and health concerns in the burn areas, help educate workers, and put pressure on the government to more strictly enforce compliance. 'This was no small sample by any means,' Theodore said. 'This was an attempt to be as comprehensive as possible and the patterns were clear.' For Soto, the results are a clear sign that, first and foremost, employers are not upholding their responsibility to ensure their workers' safety. 'It's the responsibility of the employer,' he said. 'I want to be clear that we have that expectation — that demand — always.' Yet the window survey found even job sites where the PPE requirements are explicitly listed by the employer on a poster at the site, usage was still low. The reality, NDLON organizers said, is that the state must step in to help enforce the rules. 'I understand that the disaster was colossal, and I never expected the government to have the infrastructure to respond immediately,' said Alvarado, 'but at this point, making sure workers have PPE, that's a basic thing that the government should be doing.' Former Times staff writer Emily Alpert Reyes contributed to this report.
The Guardian
28-04-2025
- General
- The Guardian
‘Exploitative' contracts and hazardous conditions: life for some of the immigrants cleaning up wildfire-stricken LA
On a sunny day in February three workers swept up the piles of ash left behind on an Altadena driveway from when the Eaton fire raged through the Los Angeles neighborhood the month before. The flames of the blaze had consumed nearly every home on the street, leaving only brick chimneys and charred vehicles. Red signs at the entrances of properties warned in English: 'Unsafe, do not enter or occupy … entry may result in death or injury.' Hazards such as lead paint, asbestos and batteries were strewn amongst the ashes, but few workers cleaning the neighborhood that day wore masks or other personal protective equipment (PPE). Across the street, in the ashes of a home that had burned to the ground, Pedro Ramos, wore a thin blue medical mask as he picked up charred branches and placed them in a wheelbarrow. 'The truth is that it's toxic,' Ramos, who is from Guatemala, said in Spanish about the debris. 'But it's necessary to work to pay the rent and bills for my family.' In the US, after climate disasters such as fires, floods and hurricanes, it is often immigrant workers who clean up and rebuild communities. In Los Angeles, it's no different. In the burn zones of Altadena and the Palisades, many of the thousands of workers involved in clearing the debris from the megafires that killed 30 people and destroyed about 16,000 are from an immigrant background. Immigrants make up about 40% of the construction workforce in California, including hazardous materials removal. Those workers are particularly vulnerable while working in potentially hazardous conditions, say advocates. On several visits to the Altadena burn zone in past months, it was clear that some workers involved in the cleanup had received training and PPE, but many others had not. Advocates say workers are not only risking their health, but they fear speaking out about conditions over concerns of wage theft and potential deportation amid stepped up immigration enforcement by the Trump administration. As climate disasters become more common, immigrant workers are serving as 'second responders', said Nadia Marin-Molina, co-director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), which supports immigrant day laborers across the US. 'It's impossible for me to exaggerate how much disaster response and recovery in this country relies on immigrant labor in this country,' she said. Los Angeles is under immense pressure to rebuild. LA was already experiencing a housing crisis before the fires, and rental and housing prices have skyrocketed since the disaster. The city is also in a hurry to recover before hosting a series of mega-events: the World Cup in 2026, the Super Bowl in 2027 and the Olympics in 2028. Government officials are highlighting the speed of the cleanup. In February, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced EPA workers had cleared more than 9,000 properties in just 28 days – the largest wildfire waste cleanup in the agency's history. Cleanup efforts following wildfires take place in different phases. The EPA is in charge of the first phase, in which dangerous materials like paint, cleaners and solvents, oils, batteries, pesticides, propane tanks and asbestos are removed. In the second phase, property owners have the choice to either allow the army corps of engineers to finish clearing their properties, or hire private contractors. As of 24 April, more than 1,700 property owners of about 12,000 eligible properties had opted out of the federal offer. For homes left standing in burn zones, property owners hire private contractors to clean smoke damage and replace insulation in homes that survived the fires. For all types of work in the burn zones, employers are required to provide PPE and training. That's because the debris can be highly toxic. 'There's a really wide variety of materials [in the burn zones],' said Rachael Jones, an exposure scientist and professor in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health's environmental health sciences department. She said workers may be exposed to carcinogens like Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs), formaldehyde, benzene, asbestos and harmful metals such as lead, arsenic, cadmium and chromium. Soil testing has found dangerous levels of lead in and around the Eaton fire burn zone, likely from lead-based paint in the older housing stock in Altadena, according to the Los Angeles department of public health. Soot and ash contain fine particles and toxic substances that can cause skin and lung irritation, shortness of breath, and exposure to carcinogens. Without proper protection, workers risk long term breathing issues, lung scarring and cancer, said Jones. Their risk level depends on how long they are working in the burn zones, and what type of PPE they are wearing. There is a spectrum of employers at the fire sites, and conditions for workers vary. The federal government has hired large contractors to carry out debris removal; those workers are properly trained and wear Tyvek suits and industrial-grade respirators. But there is also a secondary industry that is bypassing the formal process; contractors are picking up immigrant day laborers from the corner near Home Depot and taking them to burn zones. They are less likely to receive training and PPE, she said. 'They're the ones that I'm most worried about, because it's just completely uncontrolled. They're really at the mercy of the people who bring them to the site.' '[Workers] don't necessarily have a formal employment arrangement, and that creates a lot of gray area about whose responsibility it is to ensure health and safety.' Jones said. 'You end up with exploitative contractors.' Nancy Zuniga, the director of the Workers Health Program at the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California, said workers at the LA burn sites told her their employers have not provided training or PPE. One worker said she was taken with a group of people to a burn zone, Zuniga recalled. They weren't given PPE and were asked to pick up debris and put it in trash bags. After she finished the job, her eyes became irritated and red from exposure to the debris. 'And then she didn't get paid,' Zuniga said. Zuniga led a study on the experiences of hundreds of workers who were affected by the Woolsey fire, which raged in northern Los Angeles county in 2018. The study found workers developed rashes and breathing problems, faced wage theft, and felt pressure to stay on the job. What happened to workers during the Woolsey fire is now repeating at a larger scale, Zuniga said. Cal-Osha is the state agency responsible for regulating worker safety, but Jones, the exposure scientist at UCLA, said she was puzzled by the agency's apparent lack of enforcement at the burn sites. 'These sites aren't that big,' she said. 'It's not like you can't drive through them in an afternoon and stop and look at what's happening. Many of us are wondering why there hasn't been a more aggressive approach to this?' California's department of industrial relations, which includes Cal-Osha, said it has participated in hundreds of outreach events and deployed teams to fire-impacted areas to reach homeowners and small-business contractors. The department said it is supporting worker rights and safety by providing $6m in funding to 21 community groups in Los Angeles through the California Workplace Outreach Project. Employers are required to conduct worksite risk assessments, implement necessary safety measures, train workers to prevent exposure to hazards, and provide PPE, department spokesperson Denisse Gomez said. Employers engaged in fire debris removal must comply with title 8 of the California code of regulations, which outlines legal standards for workplace safety. If a homeowner declines the offer of a no-cost, government-led cleanup, the homeowner or contractor is accountable for any issues that arise, such as permitting, environmental protections and worker safety, Gomez added. 'The Department of Industrial Relations (DIR) helps protect workers on the frontlines of disaster recovery – regardless of immigration status,' Gomez wrote in an email. Some workers have received Osha training. On 13 March in Altadena, four men in Tyvek suits, goggles, masks and gloves cleaned a smoke-damaged apartment. The building was surrounded by the blackened debris of homes that had burned to the ground. But the workers knew how to protect themselves; they had received PPE and Osha training through the Pasadena Community Job Center. Taking a break from cleaning, Cesar Saucedo said he knew workers who were picked up from a corner near Home Depot and taken to a burn zone but provided no training or PPE. 'On the weekend, we went to a corner, where a group of workers were hired by a company for $17 an hour. They had no Osha training and the company gave them nothing,' he said in Spanish. Marin-Molina, of NDLON, said that in the rush to recover, few employers take the time to train workers on the hazards they will encounter when cleaning up after climate disasters. NDLON surveyed workers who cleaned up after Hurricane Ida hit New Orleans in 2021 and found that only 15% of day laborers working in hurricane-affected areas in New Orleans received required training. More than 90% reported wage theft while doing post-disaster recovery work. One study found that one in four workers who cleaned up after Hurricane Katrina were undocumented. Marin-Molina explained that often it's large national companies that hire day laborers through layers of subcontractors. The climate crisis has become lucrative for large disaster cleanup companies, who shield themselves from accountability by using subcontractors. 'Under those layers, it's the undocumented workforce that's holding this all up,' Marin-Molina said. Jones said the vulnerability of immigrant workers and lack of enforcement is nothing new. 'It's a longstanding uphill battle, and I think the fires are just making it more visible,' she said.
