AFTER KATRINA - New Orleans Working Families Still Struggle for Higher Ground

[Omaha Steve]

http://neworleanslabormedia.org/after-katrina

Submitted by Vibhuti Mehra on February 19, 2008 - 3:56pm.

BY VIBHUTI MEHRA


Imagine this. You are a proud union member and live a comfortable middle class life with your family. Suddenly a hurricane strikes your city and destroys everything you owned. You try to start life anew, but your union job no longer exists. The insurance company will not cover the damages to your home. Rents have skyrocketed. For over two years, you have been living with your family in a FEMA trailer. The neighborhood public school is boarded up and your children are on the waiting list of another public school 10 miles away. You and your spouse now rely on public transit to get to your temporary low-wage jobs but the buses don’t run as often as they used to. There is no childcare available nearby and your children are often left unsupervised. Your spouse is showing signs of clinical depression but you have no access to mental health services. Recently, FEMA served you an eviction notice stating they wanted their trailer back.


A sign outside the St. Bernard public housing development protesting the decision of New Orleans housing authorities to prevent residents from returning to their homes. Photo by Vibhuti Mehra


This is the story of many working families in the post-Katrina New Orleans . It is the story of racism, greed, opportunism, corruption and political apathy. In the two years since Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans , barely 50 percent of its residents have been able to return home. Those who have come back are still seeking higher ground.


Says Wade Rathke, chief organizer for ACORN and SEIU Local 100 in New Orleans , “The storm became an opportunity for every discredited policy, every proposal that had been turned down by the voters, to spring forth.” Designers of the city’s reconstruction seized every opportunity to lock out and exclude the city’s working poor and union members – largely African American. Among the first to be fired were thousands of public school teachers affiliated with United Teachers of New Orleans. The Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1560 lost 700 members. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is pushing ahead its plans to demolish public housing units that were only minimally damaged and replace them with “mixed-income” housing – with fewer affordable units and golf courses!


The concerted effort to privatize the city has led to other workers being exploited. Under the guise of labor shortage, private contractors are bringing in migrant workers from other states as well as guest and undocumented workers from Asia and Latin America . The reality that greets them is that of cramped trailers, confiscated passports, hazardous jobs, no access to healthcare, below minimum wages or no wages at all, and constant threats of police violence and deportation.


Saket Soni, lead organizer at the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice points out, “It is a race to the bottom where workers are made to undercut one another…You find the cheapest, most exploitable workers, pay them little or nothing, and if they complain, fire them or deport them.”


The story of New Orleans is the reason why we need a stronger workers’ solidarity movement that preempts social experiments conducted on the backs of workers. So, next time a disaster strikes a city, unions and workers rights groups can be prepared to take action and restore the jobs, lives and dignity of workers.


Published in the Winter 2008 issue of Labor Family News - the quarterly newsletter of the Labor Project for Working Families. www.working-families.org
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