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Wanted: Answers from Bush on Exploited Immigrant Workers in New Orleans |
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We’ve highlighted two reports showing how undocumented immigrant workers are being exploited by contractors working to rebuild New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Now comes evidence that the exploitation continues, as various groups have documented cases of widespread labor abuses against mainly immigrant workers as contractors try to ignore or lower labor standards during the cleanup.
Two members of the U.S. Senate, along with unions and religious and civil rights groups, want to know what the Bush administration is doing about the problem.
In an Oct. 5 letter to Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.) write:
Individuals and civic organizations on the ground in the Gulf Coast region have reported widespread abuse of workers in the reconstruction effort. We’re concerned that the Department has not taken sufficient steps to increase its presence in the region or apply effective enforcement activities.
The senators ask the department to provide the number of Wage and Hour Division investigators and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspectors assigned to various Gulf Coast offices before September 2005, when the hurricane hit, and those currently assigned to those offices. They also are seeking data on the number of Labor Department complaints filed and investigations taking place in the region.
Representatives of the AFL-CIO, along with members of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Catholic Charities, LaRaza and other groups met numerous times with officials at the Labor Department in recent months. In the meetings, the Labor Department could not tell the groups how many investigators it had in the field in New Orleans.
The senators’ letter comes just as the civil rights group Southern Poverty Law Center sent a letter to President Bush and Chao, along with a petition signed by 20,528 concerned citizens. The petition demands the administration “act immediately to stop the cruel, profit-driven exploitation of migrant laborers in New Orleans by ordering the U.S. Department of Labor, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to ensure that workers are treated fairly.”
In a statement, the Southern Poverty Law Center says:
The Department of Labor has ignored rampant, well-documented labor abuses by government and private contractors, many of which have used multiple layers of subcontractors to avoid responsibility for mistreating workers.
In the course of interviewing more than 500 migrant workers who came to New Orleans to do the backbreaking, dangerous cleanup work after Hurricane Katrina, the center’s Immigrant Justice Project (IJP) documented widespread labor abuses involving theft of wages by employers, violations of workplace health and safety standards and threats of retaliation against workers who assert their rights. Many workers reported they were denied overtime pay—and some reported not being paid at all.
Because of the Bush administration’s failure to enforce federal wage and hour standards, the Southern Poverty Law Center has filed three federal lawsuits against companies working in New Orleans. One of those suits, against major disaster contractor Belfor USA Group, has been settled, with workers recovering hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid overtime wages.
Earlier this year, Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ) and Washington, D.C.-based Good Jobs First created the Gulf Coast Commission on Reconstruction Equity, which issued a report showing that the Labor Department has not done enough to protect workers drawn to the Gulf Coast to perform cleanup and rebuilding work.
AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson, a member of the commission, says President Bush should never have repealed Clinton administration rules that required federal contract officers to consider whether a contractor had a satisfactory record of compliance with tax, labor, environmental and other laws before it received federal contracts:
Doesn’t a record of…regularly putting workers at risk by violating our health and safety laws say something about a company’s business ethics? If a company can’t play by the rules that Congress set for businesses, why should it benefit from government business?
The report ends with a call to action urging Congress and the Bush administration to:
…take immediate steps to address the failures by government and the private sector to rebuild the region in a manner that benefits those who live there. IWJ and the Commission are calling for a comprehensive effort, on the scale of a new Marshall Plan that includes:
- A driving plan and vision for rebuilding the Gulf Coast that is informed by democratic participation and debate.
- Legislation to create new contracting standards and criteria.
- Department of Labor investigation of worker abuses in the Gulf Coast rebuilding.
- Housing and job options that target low-income and minority residents, both those in the Gulf and those displaced by the storm.
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