A ‘Disposable Workforce’ in New Orleans After Katrina
By James
Parks
Robert ‘Tiger’
Hammond is not an emotional man. But when he talks about how little has been
done to rebuild his hometown of New Orleans two years after Hurricane Katrina,
he is moved to tears.
Hammond, president of the Greater New
Orleans AFL-CIO, told a convention of union workers in the Big Easy, last month:
“Parts of this town look like a nuclear bomb hit two days ago, not like it
was two years ago.”
Hammond says the
bottom line is that reactionary ideologues from the Bush administration, and
some business and civic leaders in New Orleans, took the damage and dislocation
caused by the hurricane as an opportunity to conduct a mass experiment in
privatization and union busting.
Tracie Washington, of the Louisiana
Justice Institute, a civil rights law group, says that after Katrina,
“there was an absolute assault on civil rights and social justice
guarantees that we thought we had. There was a blatant assault on workers’
rights.”
In quick succession, she
says, the working people-mainly African Americans:-who were making a decent
living were the first to go: All 4,900 teachers and thousands of bus drivers
were laid off. That was followed by a decision not to rebuild much of the public
housing destroyed by the storm and the slow reopening of the schools and the
decimation of the public transportation
system.
Joe Prieur, a transit union
president said more than 500 members of his union lost their jobs right after
Katrina. And management has refused to upgrade or increase the number of workers
or to buy any new buses to replace the ones destroyed by the
flood.
Brenda Mitchell, of the New
Orleans teachers union, told the ILCA convention that even though many of the
public schools were shut down, teachers have begun
rebuilding.
Washington says the
systematic elimination of jobs and the support system of public housing, schools
and transportation services is something that could happen anywhere. Despite the
glitz of Bourbon Street and Harrah’s Casino in downtown, she says, the
people of New Orleans are
suffering.
“We residents of New
Orleans are the canaries in the coal mine. And the canaries are dropping off.
Don’t think closing schools and cutting transportation is something that
can’t happen somewhere else. The same people who built our jacked-up
levees are the same ones who built your bridges and
roads.”
The assault on workers
can best be seen in the way immigrant workers and local workers are being
manipulated in a race to the bottom, said Saket Soni, of the New Orleans Worker
Center for Racial Justice.
Hundreds of
thousands of immigrant workers were brought to New Orleans to work at the same
time that hundreds of thousands of African American workers were being displaced
and fired.
Soni says the immigrant
workers are being exploited by employers. For example, he says contractors hire
immigrant construction day workers and require that they work long hours. But on
pay day, they call the immigration service to deport the
workers.
Soni said: “They have
created a completely disposable workforce. They have locked one group out and
locked another group in. The reality of New Orleans is that the storm gave the
opportunity to a lot of people to push through a social experiment they
wouldn’t dare try anywhere else in such a short time. You find the
cheapest, most exploitable workers, pay them little or nothing, and if they
complain, fire them or deport them.”
Posted: Thu - November 1, 2007 at 01:44 PM