Inside the sudden October strike by unpaid lineworkers, the major corporation behind it and how it reveals the exploitation underlying Asheville’s post-Helene ‘recovery’

Above: MasTec line workers on strike in the parking lot of the former Sears, from an Oct. 30 video announcing their strike due to terrible conditions and a lack of pay

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For weeks after Helene hit the Asheville area, lineworkers employed by engineering giant MasTec had helped restore power, internet and phone to nearly a million people across disaster-struck WNC. They’d put in 12-18 hour days for weeks, sleeping in their vehicles and struggling with housing and bills.

These were the heroes lauded by officials, businesses and media around the country.

And they weren’t paid a cent.

By Oct. 30 they’d had enough. Over 500 lineworkers went on strike, filling the parking lot of the abandoned Sears building on Tunnel Road. Their trucks packed in with their baskets raised against the late October sky, signaling a work stoppage.

“Pay us what you owe us” Jax Suriel, an operations manager, declared in a video that went viral on TikTok. The workers, eager to return to the job, still had bills themselves. They emphasized that they simply wanted to be paid according to their contract, nothing more. Many of the workers didn’t speak English, which created even more barriers for them as they tried to advocate for themselves.

And so, after weeks of unpaid labor for a $12 billion company, hundreds halted work in protest. They demanded their pay, adequate housing and promised reimbursement for their many expenses.

The first videos of the strike spread swiftly on social media. While some sided with the company or feared that the strike could delay the restoration of power, more expressed sympathy for the workers and outrage at their treatment, especially as more information came to light.

Locals gathered in solidarity with the striking workers almost immediately after their video went up, descending on the old parking lot. With a sea of raised booms stark against the cloudy Halloween-eve sky Suriel, manager turned labor rights advocate, told the growing crowd “We deserve to be paid!”

The local community here largely agreed, as exploitative labor practices are often, sadly, as Ashevillian as tourists and craft beer.

In recent years Mission Hospital, run by for-profit healthcare giant HCA, has been sued for not paying workers. They also tried, unsuccessfully, to crush a union campaign among nurses. EarthFare closed all 50 stores while owing two months of unpaid wages and facing a union drive.

Even when wages are paid they often aren’t enough. Rent is unaffordable for 51 percent of Buncombe county renters, while 53 percent of renter households in Buncombe pay more than 30 percent of their income on rent. As the poverty rate climbs in the Asheville area after Helene due to the storm and its aftermath, the situation will likely only get worse. Fortunately, people are becoming angrier, more organized and more aware of the class war as conditions get worse and leave them no other option.

The scene on that October afternoon was a powerful reminder that, under capitalism, no one is exempt from exploitation: whether restoring power in a storm’s aftermath or laboring unseen for poverty wages. The system always prioritizes profit over people. We saw this during the height of covid, when county officials re-opened hotels in summer 2020 to appease tourism barons and in 2021 when the CDC changed its quarantine guidelines at the behest of Delta Airlines and other major companies.

As working class locals rallied to support the striking linemen, more stories of MasTec’s exploitative business practices began to emerge.

‘A fascist gangster’

Founded by Jorge Mas Canosa in 1994, MasTec is an American multinational infrastructure engineering company based in Florida. With around 35,000 employees, Mastec is among the Fortune 500 with an annual revenue exceeding $12.4 billion in 2024. Since 2000 the company has also faced numerous lawsuits and labor grievances for violations of unpaid wages and exploitative practices, costing it well over $16 million.

To understand how a company can repeatedly receive government contracts despite a long history of failing to compensate their workers fairly — or at all — we need to delve into its founder’s past.

In 1960, a 21-year-old Canosa — later accurately dubbed a “fascist gangster” by Cuban revolutionaries — fled to the United States and settled in Miami.

As a leader of the anti-Castro movement in Miami, Canosa signed up as a young man to take part in the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion. He then went on to play a role in various CIA-backed exile groups and found the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) in 1981, along with a group of wealthy businessmen. This helped gain him a sympathetic ear in the Reagan administration. By 1986, the far-right foundation had entered the White House, presented testimony at congressional hearings and published scholarly texts on Cuba. Canosa also served as an adviser on Cuban affairs to presidents Reagan, former CIA director George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, all happy to collaborate with this particular fascist.

The history of MasTec is an interesting one. The company started off as a merger of two separate companies: Burnup & Sims and Church & Tower. Burnup & Sims was the oldest of the two, and was founded in 1929 by Russell Burnup and Riley V. Sims. They were tasked with providing design, construction, and maintenance services to the telephone and utilities industries. During the Great Depression, the two established an office in West Palm Beach, Fla., and by 1936, the company’s first telecommunications projects were undertaken.

This is important because Church & Tower was hired to construct and service telephone networks. When the company faced bankruptcy for “overextending itself in Puerto Rico,” the company’s owner asked his friend and fellow shadowy far-right business figure Canosa to help save the business. In exchange for half ownership of Church and Tower, Canosa began to manage the company in 1969.

A twenty-something far-right exile with a history as a CIA asset owning a telecommunication company that laid internet and landlines through the country and global South is terrifyingly revealing in itself.

But Canosa’s career continued unimpeded, even when his name emerged as part of the Iran-Contra scandal, showing up in Oliver North’s notes as one source for untraceable cash.

In 1994, Church & Tower Group acquired 65 percent of the outstanding common stock of publicly traded Burnup & Sims, Inc. The name of Burnup & Sims was changed to MasTec, Inc. and Jorge Mas Canosa became MasTec’s chairman. In April 2007 Jose Mas, Canosa’s son became CEO, proving once again that nepotism and unearned millions are as ‘American’ as indigenous genocide and chattel slavery.

Canosa called MasTec “the American dream.” After 30 years of violations, it’s clear the dream in question was cheating workers. Canosa’s fervent far-right views, shadowy ties to the CIA and coziness with multiple presidential administrations were certainly ideal qualifications to run a telecommunications company. So was a long history of refusing to pay workers, something that’s seemingly unchanged in its 30-year history.

MasTec has secured a variety of government contracts, including with the Department of Transportation, Department of Defense, National Park Service and Department of Homeland Security, which FEMA falls under. MasTec has also been involved in private sector contracts such as AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, NextEra Energy, Florida Power & Light, & Spectrum.

And, just after Helene, they received a contract to help rebuild Asheville. As usual, they’d do it on the backs of the workers.

‘We love Asheville but we have bills’

When the hundreds of linemen went on strike on Oct. 30 it was already nine days after MasTec was contractually obligated to pay them. The linemen had been contracted by MasTec for a net 14-day schedule and per diem. As Suriel explained in one of the videos, “I arrived on Oct. 6 and was due payment on Oct. 21. By Oct. 30, we still had not been paid.”

Normally for storm work FEMA allots the money to the service provider, the service provider pays the prime contractors, in this case MasTec, and the prime contractors are supposed to pay the workers. The service provider, Spectrum, has net 90 pay terms with MasTec, meaning Spectrum wasn’t obligated to pay MasTec for 90 days after the first invoice. However, the linemen had their own contract with MasTec which agreed upon a net 14 pay schedule after the first invoice.

After hearing about the strike, MasTec agreed to pay the following Monday, Nov. 4. But by Nov. 5 they still hadn’t paid and many of the workers decided to take new jobs and count the losses.

Although some of the striking linemen opted to stay and wait, many didn’t speak English or have anyone to translate for them once Suriel left the area. This obviously created even more frustrating barriers for them. The workers had been working 12-18 hour days, sleeping in their cars, with no compensation for expenses or a way to pay their own bills back home. A strike was their only option.

After being blacklisted by MasTec, Suriel left the area and headed to Florida for other employment opportunities.

Locals supported the workers by giving them shelter, feeding them hot meals, and calling out MasTec wherever they could.

“We love Asheville but we have bills ourselves,” Suriel emphasized in one of the videos, after remarking that he’d racked up $30k in personal credit card debt paying the striking workers’ bills. Marco’s in Hendersonville, in solidarity with the workers, gave some of the linemen free pizza. Feeling the love, some of the striking workers decided to volunteer while they waited on their compensation. They first started at the World Central Kitchen by handing out meals to recently displaced hurricane victims and then they headed to Blue Ivy where they helped rebuild a park and cleanup.

As the news spread and political pundits were using the strike for political fodder, ex-employees and ex-contractors for MasTec had started to come forward with similar experiences of unpaid wages. In fact, MasTec workers in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Georgia joined the striking workers here in solidarity once learning of the strike in a MasTec whatsapp group chat. Others learned of the strike from Suriel’s advocacy on tiktok.

As of Nov. 17 Mastec fired a bunch of the linemen, though the public fallout may put several of their contracts at risk. Several of the workers who stayed behind sought compensation and had been paying their own lodging and food.

Since the strike began, three additional workers from other MasTec contracts had come forward with claims of unpaid wages, according to Suriel. Workers from Southeast Utilities of Georgia (SEU) say they also had not been compensated for over five weeks of labor. SEU had refused to even return their calls.

If it’s done anything, the strike has spurred people to speak up about their exploitation. Hopefully it encourages more to come forward.

In one of the owners’ groups, a linemen mentioned that someone at MasTec had “accidentally” sent them the ratecard of what MasTec gets paid from FEMA, and it was a 200 percent markup on the wages they are contracted to pay their workers. MasTec is paid $380 per truck and linemen are paid $180- $190 a truck (when they’re paid at all). That is quite the profit for a company that does none of the actual labor in restoring the lines after a storm.

“If I get blacklisted for doing what’s right, I do not care,” Suriel said in a tiktok Oct. 30. and that he was, he was fired along with many of the striking workers, the same day the strike started.

Since the strike, Suriel has returned home to Texas where he proposed to his longtime girlfriend and is currently looking for a union job.

Meanwhile, the strike reveals a reality about exploitation both under capitalism in general and at Mastec in particular. Asheville, long marketed as a haven of creativity and craft beer, stands as a striking example of capitalism’s ‘features’ in the wake of a climate change disaster. With Helene’s destruction of well over 1,000 homes, the tourism industry, once the city’s (brittle) economic backbone, also saw a devastating 70 percent workforce reduction, with an estimated 8,200 jobs lost in the asheville area alone.

Yet, as these crises compound, corporate profiteers like MasTec continue to thrive, exploiting labor while Asheville’s working class bears the brunt of the financial fallout.

Through it all evictions mount with no end in sight.

As of mid-October at least 225 new eviction cases have been filed in Buncombe County, with 40 new eviction cases being filed daily, according to the Western North Carolina Tenants’ Union. In Henderson County there were 30 evictions in the same timeframe. This is just the beginning of the tidal wave to come.

Meanwhile the response from state lawmakers and city officials has been insubstantial, both having pledged separate $1 million pots of money for rental and mortgage support. For context city hall’s annual budget is over $250 million. The far-right general assembly has prioritized more power grabs over disaster relief.

While Asheville City Council agrees, on paper, with an eviction moratorium they have taken no local action to push one forward. The city manager could direct police to not assist with evictions. On the county level the sheriff could refuse to enforce them and the chief district judge could refuse to schedule them on the court calendar.

Instead they have charged ahead with kicking locals out of their homes.

Currently, over 1,000 children don’t have stable housing in Asheville after Helene.

Understandably, these mass evictions have been met with outrage. Just Economics and Asheville Food and Beverage United organized a demonstration of around 50 local residents outside of the courthouse on the same day the MasTec strike began, demanding a moratorium. So it’s important not to dismiss those hundreds of workers gathered in the old Sears parking lot as some exception. People are justifiably angry. As of Dec. 5 the MasTec workers have still not been paid and exploitation remains embedded in the city’s post-disaster “recovery.”

The contrast is impossible to ignore: billion-dollar companies profit while working-class families lose their homes, their jobs, and their ability to keep up with rising rents. All while endless cash is spent on Palestinian genocide and forever wars.

The MasTec strike may have started as a demand for unpaid wages, but it has demonstrated how capitalism consistently places profits above its people. As more residents stand in solidarity, one thing becomes clear: Asheville’s resilience lies not in its corporate image but in its workers refusing to be silenced.

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Theia Sagan is a covid-conscious, chronically-ill decolonial communist who writes about the injustices faced by the working class. She is involved in local mutual aid efforts and is part of the WNC Mask Bloc

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