Union Summer Interns Help Rebuild Louisiana Homes
 |
Emily Mendenhall, an AFL-CIO Union Summer intern in New Orleans, reports the interns there joined a home rebuilding project in Chalmette, La.
The New Orleans Union Summer team volunteered to spend a day last week joining the St. Bernard Project in rebuilding a house in Chalmette, La., just outside New Orleans.
Established in 2006 by Liz McCartney and Zack Rosenburg, the St. Bernard Project is an award-winning, nonprofit organization that has rebuilt more than 385 homes in the greater New Orleans area. The project also has restored the hope of many people by offering free therapy to help citizens deal with the lasting psychological effects of Hurricane Katrina.
Five Years After Katrina: Frustration and Determination
 |
||||
|
||||
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.
Katrina Four Years Later: Iraq Being Rebuilt Faster
 |
||||
|
||||
Four years after Hurricane Katrina killed more than 1,800 people and left thousands homeless along the Gulf Coast, many residents, especially those displaced in New Orleans, still cannot come home, because there are no homes to come back to.
From the beginning, the union movement has sought to aid in rebuilding the communities, with the AFL-CIO’s Gulf Coast Revitalization Program early on committing to spending $1 billion to produce new housing, fund economic development projects and create thousands of new jobs. Already more than 400 workers have been trained to fill those jobs.
But outreach efforts continue to be stymied. Robert “Tiger” Hammond, president of the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO, tells Press Associates that local and state officials keep putting up “roadblock after roadblock after roadblock” to building housing for displaced residents.
