Beyond Essential: Growh, a Pandemic, and the Future of Expendable Workers in a "Progressive" Texas Boomtown

During the COVID-19 pandemic, low-wage, largely undocumented, Latinx construction workers were deemed “essential” by the State of Texas. This chapter explores the fundamental connections between growth politics in the “progressive” boomtown of Austin, Texas and the conditions of precarity experienced by racialized workers whose labor is fundamental to the material processes of that growth. It explores the background rules—including immigration law, local employment regulation, and economic development incentives—that shape and sustain both growth politics and undervalued labor. In doing so, it also begins to imagine what alternatives might exist for the future of work and livelihood in an urban-regional political economy that is not centered around growth and that embodies a radically different configuration of value.