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Louisiana Worker Center Gets $300,000 Boost from Bush-Clinton Fund |
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The union movement is in the forefront of helping to rebuild the lives of Gulf Coast working families after the devastation of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita through multimillion dollar housing projects, humanitarian aid and other assistance for union members and their families.
But many of the workers don’t have jobs—critical to ensuring they get back on their feet. And that’s where the Louisiana Center for Workforce Recovery (LCWR) comes in. The center, with locations in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, tries to find jobs for workers whose jobs were destroyed or eliminated after the storms or train them for new jobs.
Today, the center received a huge boost when the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund gave the center a $300,000 grant. The center plans to use the money to add more staff and expand its career counseling programs, says LCWR Director Chad Ikerd. The fund, set up by former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, has collected nearly $129 million from 60,000 donors to help rebuild the Gulf Coast.
Says AFL-CIO President John Sweeney:
The Louisiana Center for Workforce Recovery is playing a key role in making real our nation’s wishes and hopes for the Gulf region, and their work on behalf of working people will be strongly supported by the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund grant received today.
The Center is a project of the Louisiana Human Resource Development Institute (LHRDI), a nonprofit union-led organization whose main constituencies are union members, their families, and government workers affected by the hurricanes. Through its special partnership with the Louisiana AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions, the center has matched up workers with jobs, helping to build a workforce that can rebuild Louisiana.
Ikerd says most of the center’s referrals for jobs and training have been in the building and construction trades because the need for skilled construction workers is high and those unions have long established apprenticeship programs.
With the grant, he says, the center hopes to expand the scope of its job training into new areas such as film and entertainment and some white-collar jobs.
Ikerd says the need for good jobs is the key to whether or not working people will be able to rebuild their lives:
After Katrina, people had to make a conscious decision to survive now or bet on the future. When we rebuild we have to foster a complete recovery. Gross poverty is rampant and the only way to defeat it is to put people in jobs where they can make a decent living and don’t have to live from paycheck to paycheck or from welfare check to welfare check.
The union movement has been instrumental in speeding recovery in the Gulf. Last month, the AFL-CIO’s Investment Trust Corp. (ITC) and Providence Community Housing—the post-Katrina housing initiative organized by Catholic Charities of New Orleans—were awarded 196 properties to develop in the Tremé/Lafitte and Tulane/Gravier areas of New Orleans.
ITC and Providence plan to develop up to 200 units of housing in Tremé/Lafitte and Tulane/Gravier as a first step in a $35 million comprehensive plan by ITC to rebuild and revitalize communities across the city.
The ITC/Providence project is part of the AFL-CIO’s commitment, announced in June, to a $1 billion Gulf Coast Revitalization Program, which will finance badly needed affordable housing, spur economic development and create family-supporting union jobs in Gulf Coast communities devastated by Katrina.
The Gulf Coast Revitalization investment is the first major infusion of private capital into the area since last summer’s hurricanes. In the absence of meaningful help from the Bush administration, the AFL-CIO project is expected to open the door for other substantial investments in rebuilding the area.
Quality, affordable housing is so sorely needed in New Orleans, the city is seeking to lure public school teachers by offering them pod homes—the size of large, walk-in closets, according to AFT.
The city is trying to recruit teachers because it shut down nearly all of its public schools. Some 4,500 public school teachers, mostly members of the United Teachers of New Orleans/AFT were forced to retire or just lost their jobs.
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