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Five Years After Katrina: Frustration and Determination
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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.
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2 Comments
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well , well , well, 5 years latter and what do you got ? ” who that ” !!! the same level 3 dike at a cost of 30 billion dollars just for dike , thats a lot of bucks ! who’s to say when the next big one comes again and takes that out that dike , do we do this all over gain ? thats the qusetion !
you could have built a brand new city in a better area , even moved the old one , for less money and been more happier klnowning you would be safe , your living in a storm time flood area at any time , once is not good , but second time swim for it , thats the way it should be , the goevernment said it spent over 700 billion dallars and still counting in all the moneys spent there ! thats a lot of buck for mud flats , hey its a beauftiful place , and mostly great , but some one there should have had a brain fart and came up with a better plan !
the main road to the area has been bebuilt and the homes and they have to be 29 feet above the road , thats a lot of climbing to get into your house every day , building the city in the same spot was like building a swiming pool and not putting water in it and then diving in to it when its empty ! this could happen gain at any season , what are the lessons lernt from this and what programs that are polace there now and do they exercise them yearly, this was one of the big reasons why there was so much failure there they had 9 days of warnings to get out of the area when the storm was coming 5 years ago .
wishing all the folks there a very happy and safe seasons and hope that never happens gain to them , god bless all
This is a sad situation but as in most things there are no easy solutions. My father was a union man in the US Steel Gary, IN, works. Near the end of his life he said that the unions were demanding too much. There has been corruption in union ranks just as there is corruption everywhere. Many people became discouraged and quit union membership. Seems we need to encourage people again with and old slogan, “Strength in Numbers”.