Nationwide, a historic flood of bipartisan funding for fiber broadband internet is now being unleashed at all levels of government in a bid to close America’s “digital divide”—the gap between those with and without high-speed internet that evermore determines families’ access to income, education, and even healthcare. In this context, a new report shared exclusively with the Observer seeks to draw Texans’ attention to an often-overlooked component of broadband expansion: the workers whose sweat will connect the country, who excavate and bore and trench and install and repair this increasingly taxpayer-funded and essential infrastructure. Are they being paid fairly? Are they safe on the job? Are they properly trained to avoid damaging the neighborhoods they labor in?
Prepared by the Texas Climate Jobs Project, a year-old nonprofit allied with the Texas AFL-CIO that promotes tackling the climate crisis through good union jobs, the study (website here) focuses on Google Fiber, which has been active in Austin since 2013 and San Antonio since 2015. The report homes in especially on the company’s contracting chain—the web of subcontractors that execute Google’s work in Texas. The Climate Jobs Project identified 46 Google Fiber subcontractors in Austin and San Antonio, then dug through government databases to find various violations and problems associated with the companies—issues that labor advocates say often stem from using non-union subcontractors who cut corners on safety and training.
The report found that the subcontractors used by Google Fiber in Austin and San Antonio had been linked to 29 federal safety violations and 65 federal transgressions around unpaid wages since 2016, along with 54 state Railroad Commission offenses—including infractions for improper digging and causing gas leaks—since 2015. These violations did not necessarily occur on Google Fiber worksites but were committed by the same companies used by Google Fiber, the report states.
