On Wednesday morning, as America’s COVID-19 death count neared 5,000 and workers flooded state agencies with a record-shattering deluge of unemployment claims, business carried on as usual at the site of a future soccer stadium in North Austin.
Dozens of workers shimmied up ladders, loaded vehicles, and toted steel beams to and fro. Without facemasks, they huddled together to plan out next steps in the project. Across town, dozens more workers who were building luxury apartments and expanding the campus of the tech giant Oracle did the same. At lunch time, a woman arrived with a trunk full of meals in styrofoam containers; the workers crowded together, eager to retrieve the food.
Such scenes are playing out all over Texas and the nation. As many white collar professionals work remotely, and laid-off service workers desperately seek unemployment insurance, construction laborers are still reporting to job sites. Like medical professionals and grocery workers, they’ve been deemed “essential.”
