Labor & Employment Law

Five Years After Katrina: Frustration and Determination

By James Parks

This trumpet player is painted on a house still unrepaired five years after Hurricane Katrina.

Unemployment in New Orleans is below the national average, but the poverty level is twice the national rate. The reasons behind that stark contrast tell the real story of what is going on five years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Crescent City.

There?s lots of work that needs to be done in New Orleans. The problem is that nobody?s making a living off the work but the ?chiefs and the thieves,? says Robert ?Tiger? Hammond, president of the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO.

Even though the federal government just announced a $1.8 billion school construction grant to the city, Hammond says workers will be hard pressed to get good-paying jobs out of the grant. The money is coming to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and doesn?t include Davis-Bacon requirements that workers be paid the prevailing local wage. What?s happening, says Hammond, is that construction workers are being deliberately misclassified as independent contractors so employers can pay them less than if they had a union contract. He adds:

 It was hard enough to get a union job before Katrina. Now it?s even harder.

New Orleans is not alone. With many of the shipping lanes in the Gulf of Mexico closed after the BP oil spill, longshore workers across the area are now working. And to add insult to this tragedy, just over a month after it announced the closure of its shipyard in Avondale, La., Northrop Grumman said this week it plans to lay off 642 workers at its Pascagoula, Miss., shipyard by the end of the year. AFL-CIO Metal Trades Department President Ron Ault responded to the announcement by slamming both the company and the U.S. Navy and highlighting the economic repercussions for the Gulf region, still trying to recover from both Katrina and the BP oil spill.

Teachers aren?t faring well in New Orleans either. With the huge majority of the city?s schools under state control or operating as charter schools?and with a post-Katrina state law banning collective bargaining for many teachers?the United Teachers of New Orleans/AFT, which once had 4,500 members is down to fewer than 1,000 now after some 200 were laid off this summer.

About one-third of the families that evacuated New Orleans in 2005 have never returned, leaving fewer people to revive the culture and spirit the city is known for. Add to that the fact that many areas still have not been rebuilt?Hammond says his parish still has no hospital five years after it was destroyed?and the situation just sucks, he says.  Hammond adds:

 It?s frustrating. We are surviving but it could be much better. We ?re not going anywhere. We?ll be here until we win or we die.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on August 29, 2010 (boomark / email).