The Workers Rebuilding Communities After Natural Disasters: Saket Soni (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Labor organizer Saket Soni’s talk titled “The Workers Rebuilding Communities After Natural Disasters” at TED 2024 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

My name is Saket Soni, and I’m a labor organizer who spends most of his time in disaster zones. How many of you have been through a hurricane, flood or fire? When that happens, thousands of families lose their homes overnight. I represent the workers who come in and rebuild them.

Now we’re living through a time when all of us, in some way or the other, are experiencing a loss of home. Some because of escalating climate disasters, but also just as much because of economic upheaval or the pandemic or war, racial violence, social unrest, and of course, because of the crisis in democracy. The question is, where is hope being born in this time of pain? Because I’m here to tell you, it is being born.

Hope for the very renewal of democracy itself. And it’s being born in the last place you would expect, among the least likely people. It’s happening in the midst of climate disasters between the residents who are having their lives turned upside down and the workers who are rebuilding them.

Personal Journey

Now speaking of hope, I grew up in New Delhi, India, and when I was growing up, I saw America as a place exploding with hope and possibility. And this was somehow mysteriously captured for me in one iconic image that I would see again and again, week after week, in the back of my Archie comic books. So I came to America on a college scholarship, but soon after I graduated, my hope turned into a hard reality.

I missed an immigration deadline. I became undocumented. After 9/11, I faced racist violence. I felt I no longer belonged.

I turned to community organizing to help others who had lost their footing in America, but also to strike back against what I perceived to be America’s lies and hypocrisies. To strike back against the false promise of hope. Then a conversation with a mentor changed my life.

Lesson from Dr. Vincent Harding

We were in the center of America’s pain, in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. There were over a million homes to be rebuilt across the Gulf Coast, and that rebuilding was mostly being carried out by immigrant workers. I was a labor organizer working to protect them when I uncovered a shocking crime.

I found hundreds of immigrant workers, all from India, trapped in forced labor and being held in Gulf Coast labor camps. I went to seek advice from Dr. Vincent Harding, who had been a friend and close adviser of Dr. Martin Luther King. I railed on against this most recent injustice, portraying America as “the place hope goes to die.”

I expected him to say, “Now you get it.” Instead, he leaned forward wisely, gave me a look and said, “Young man, you need to get some sleep.” (Laughter) Then he said the words I’ll never forget. He said, “America is a country that is still being born.”

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He explained places of pain are not proof that there is no hope. Places of pain is where hope is born. My job wasn’t to rail against America’s false promises. It was to make the promise of democracy real for those who didn’t have it.

The Resilience Workforce

I took that lesson back to the Indian workers, and we launched a freedom journey that started with an overnight escape from the labor camps, and ended with the men winning justice and a path to citizenship for themselves and their families. Dr. Harding’s lesson is at the heart of how I think about democracy, and it led me to the places where hope is being born today. In the aftermath of hurricanes, floods and fires.

Between the immigrant workers who are doing the rebuilding and the residents who once saw those immigrants as the enemy. I call these workers the “resilience workforce.” It’s been nearly two decades since Hurricane Katrina, and in that time, climate change has made disasters more furious, more frequent, more destructive.

And these workers have become America’s white blood cells. They travel from disaster to disaster, rebuilding homes and schools and hospitals and whole cities. They’re in the center of an economy that spends tens of billions of dollars a year on repairs.

It’s paid for by the federal government and private insurance. And so, as you can imagine, these workers are incredibly skilled and highly dedicated, but they’re also very vulnerable because they’re overwhelmingly immigrants and most of them are undocumented. They come from Mexico and Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela.

Stories of Resilience Workers

Some come from as far away as the Philippines and India. And most of them are dislocated from their own homes, even as they’re rebuilding the homes of others. One worker, Mariano Alvarado, became a climate refugee after a drought in Honduras wiped out his job in his fishing village.

Another worker, Baeliz Gonzalez, was an environmental engineer until the authorities in Venezuela cracked down on her job, forcing her to flee. A third worker, Saul Hernandez, had to run away from El Salvador to find safety and a better life in America. In the United States, these workers are on the road six months at a time.

They do own homes. They live often in the first places they help rebuild — New Orleans, Houston, Florida. But they’re on the road following disaster after disaster, traveling from state to state, doing the rebuilding.

And as I followed these workers over the last 15 years, I’ve noticed something remarkable about them. I’ve noticed that the work they do, restoring other people’s lives, has transformed them, has become sacred to them. So here’s a story.

Transformative Experiences

A worker from El Salvador, who I know, found himself one day staring through the broken wall of a child’s bedroom.

He was so moved that he drove for hours to find a Salvadoran doll to place in that family’s home in time for that family to find it. Another worker, my friend Mariano from Honduras, risked his life to get up on a roof and fix it in driving rain.

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He slipped and fell. He found himself in a coma. When he recovered, he told me why he had taken such a big risk. It’s because he got to know the elderly couple that lived in that home, and he knew the only hope of stopping the rain from not destroying what little they had left was to get up there and fix that roof.

Equally amazing is the way that residents are transformed by the unexpected bonds they form with workers. In a Florida town, after a recent hurricane, a family that had its home wrecked put up a sign that said “strangers will be shot.” Well, we showed up at their doorstep.

A whole crew of strangers, Baeliz, Saul, Mariano and I and dozens of other resilience workers, and we rebuilt their house and they took that sign down and invited us over for dinner. In a nearby town, a Republican mayor, who ran on an anti-immigrant ticket, was distributing water to immigrant workers and asked what else they needed. In Louisiana, a church community nursed a worker back to health after he got hurt fixing a parishioner’s home.

Building Community and Democracy

When that worker recovered, he gathered us together to fix their church from the ground up. So my work is to weave these spontaneous moments into common purpose and community, to turn these chance encounters into the seeds of lasting change. And it’s working again and again, in the last place you can imagine, we’re going from building homes to building home.

So what does that mean? At the heart of our crisis of democracy is our loss of common purpose, our loss of home, our loss of shared faith with our neighbors. That’s what we’re rebuilding in disaster zones: new social cohesion. And if we want to rebuild our democracy, I believe that’s where we need to start.

We need to renew our sense of shared purpose. We need to reweave the civic fabric that binds us all together by restoring our sense of shared faith with our neighbors. So how do we do it?

Three Keys to Rebuilding Democracy

It takes three things. First, we need to see each other’s vulnerability. We need to understand it. Of course, resilience workers have a very profound sense of their own dislocation, but our first project is to connect them with the profound dislocation of the residents and the other way around, because people who understand each other’s vulnerabilities will protect each other’s dignity.

The second key is to find purpose in being of use to others. Of course, resilience workers start focused on their own families. They’re rebuilding homes to put food on the table. But we connect them to residents.

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And then something profound happens. Residents express the depth of their gratitude. And when that happens, resilience workers find the same kind of purpose and vocation that firefighters and health care workers feel. Meanwhile, the residents move beyond the urgency of their own pain and find purpose, too, in offering the resilience workers the kind of embrace and welcome that they may never have felt in America before.

The third key is to turn these momentary encounters into lasting relationships. When a resident in a red state offers a hug to a roofer from Peru, that’s a beautiful moment. What happens next is we have them break bread together and build a bond, and that creates the kinds of friendships that feed all of us in a time of radical isolation.

Lasting Change

The moment of truth comes in the future, though, when these people are no longer sitting side by side. And I’ve seen it happen. When the anti-immigrant talk starts in the neighborhood bar, the residents speak up. Resilience workers drive again to check up on residents whose homes they rebuilt months, sometimes years afterwards.

Mayors start hiring halls in their neighborhoods so that workers and contractors can bargain for safe conditions. That’s how we build hope in the place of pain. I’ve seen these miracles happen 1,000 times. My team and I are working to build them every day.

Often the changes are lasting and permanent. Sometimes they’re not, sometimes they’re partial, and sometimes it’s true. People change for a time and then snap back to their old fears and prejudices. That’s natural, it’s a result of needing control in a time of trauma.

By rejecting those who remind us of our vulnerability, we seek to erase that vulnerability. It doesn’t work, but it’s a strategy, it’s human. And the way to counter it is to practice at remaining present to each other long after the storm has passed. That’s how we turn these miracles into lasting change.

Conclusion

And speaking of miracles, the thing that I find most amazing about this work is that the people who are creating the hope for the renewal of democracy, the people who are doing the rebuilding that is the source of this hope, they themselves are not even citizens. I am so grateful to have been able to share their stories with you today. And now it’s my pleasure to introduce them to you. Mariano Alvarado, Baeliz Gonzalez and Saul Hernandez.