On a special trip to New Orleans on Tuesday, August 29, one year after Hurricane Katrina, Canadian Auto Workers President Buzz Hargrove said Canadian relief efforts must continue to help rebuild the city.
All levels of American governments have failed at salvaging the city, said Hargrove.
Entire neighbourhoods have been ravaged and thousands of residents made refugees from their homes, most permanently.
Hargrove went to see the devastation first-hand, joining CAW skilled trades members who are in New Orleans helping to rebuild houses one-by-one in the poor, hard-hit Ninth Ward of the city.
Currently, 30 skilled trades workers are scheduled to work in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward over a five-week period, in groups of six each week.
The CAW president said he wanted to extend the CAW project in which skilled trades workers donate their own time and money to rebuild homes.
The New Orleans project was born in the last round of ‘Big Three’ (GM, Ford and DaimlerChrysler) auto bargaining, when Katrina hit the southern US states.
The CAW and the auto companies worked out a deal allowing workers who wanted to help, to take leaves of absence.
CAW skilled trades director Colin Heslop said: ‘There is a shortage of people who can do the skilled work that needs to be done, so that people can get back to their homes in safety or continue to live their in some comfort and dignity.’
The CAW is working with the Association of Community Organisations for Reform Now (ACORN) to coordinate New Orleans relief efforts.
Meanwhile, a survivor of the floods that hit New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, has recounted her experiences to the American trade union movement.
The AFL-CIO union federation in the United States said former teacher Gwen Adams’ experiences illustrated what workers say is a broader move to use the disaster to further the anti-union agenda of the Bush administration and big business.
Adams lost all her possessions.
But the worst damage to her life has come through ‘Katrina’s second crisis’.
This is a reference to the new laws and other measures being pushed through, under the guise of making room in the US budget for ‘rebuilding’ costs, which cut social programmes, undermine survivors’ chances of returning home, and fail to support them in starting over elsewhere.
In the year since the storm, Adams was forced to retire early, after teaching in New Orleans’ public schools for 25 years, when the state shut down the public schools.
Now, the city has bulldozed her house without her permission and the Bush administration has done nothing to help her and her neighbours.
Before Katrina smashed New Orleans’ inadequate flood defences, the south coast city had 128 public schools.
By September, 53 will have reopened.
Thirty-three are autonomous charter schools, the largest group of charter schools in the nation.
The local Orleans Parish School district only operates five schools.
The rest are run by the state-controlled Recovery School District, which took over schools with performance scores below the state average, even if they were meeting yearly progress goals.
Employees in those schools have no union representation.
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.
Adams says the real motive behind the move was to break the union.
‘They had been trying to break the union for years,’ she said.
‘They just used the hurricane as an excuse.
‘Now, without a union, they can tell the teachers to work on Saturday.
‘I have a friend who teaches at one of the schools who is not scheduled for a lunch break one day a week.
‘School officials told her that could be her “diet day”.’
Not only did Adams lose her job, she is being shortchanged on her retirement benefits.
At 54, Adams says she is too young to retire, so her benefits were reduced because she left early.
Adams and her husband, who is disabled, lived in the predominantly black Lower Ninth Ward, the hardest hit area of New Orleans, an area where nothing has been done to repair the neighbourhoods or lay the foundation for people to return.
The Bush administration – which in its Katrina one-year damage control PR-blitz is making a point of passing the buck to local and regional governments – has deserted the residents of New Orleans, especially the Lower Ninth Ward, Adams says.
‘Why leave us in this mess all this time? When is this administration going to realise it’s playing with people’s lives?
‘We want to come home. We want to rebuild. It’s like they’re trying to discourage us on every front. It’s sad.’
As ‘Think Progress’ reports, the state of New Orleans one year after Katrina is a disaster:
• Less than half of the city’s pre-storm population of 460,000 has returned, putting the population at roughly what it was in 1880.
• Nearly one-third of the refuse has yet to be picked up.
• Sixty per cent of homes still lack electricity.
• Just 17 per cent of the buses are operational.
• Half of the doctors have left, and there is a shortage of 1,000 nurses.
• Six of the city’s nine hospitals remain closed.
• Sixty-six per cent of public schools have reopened.
• There has been a 40 per cent hike in rental rates, disproportionately affecting black and low-income families.
• There has been a 300 per cent increase reported in the suicide rate.
Adams and her husband voluntarily evacuated to Mississippi, where they lived with family until December last year.
Adams recalls the sight that confronted her when she returned to her house in New Orleans:
‘Everything in the house had rotted or was molded. We couldn’t save our personal possessions. We lost everything.’
Film director Spike Lee, whose latest movie, ‘When the Levees Broke’, chronicles the destruction of the Lower Ninth Ward, says in an interview with the HBO cable TV network the area looks like a war zone.
‘Anyone who has been to New Orleans will automatically tell you that what you saw on television, the pictures, they can’t really describe the scale of the devastation.
‘When you go to the Lower Ninth Ward, it looks – Hiroshima must have looked like that. Nagasaki. Beirut. Berlin after it was bombed in World War Two.
‘That’s the way the Lower Ninth Ward looks like, and a lotta other places in New Orleans.
‘People in New Orleans are up in arms about progress. People wanna move back.
‘People wanna come home, but there’s nowhere for them to live. They wanna work. The thing is just all messed up.
‘Seems like the only thing happening in the Lower Ninth Ward is demolition of people’s homes.’
• In May, the New Orleans city council unanimously passed City Ordinance 26031, which sets a deadline for homeowners to gut their homes or potentially lose them.
By August 29, homeowners who have not been able to make the necessary repairs to their battered homes risk having their property seized and bulldozed by the city.
Many working-class families cannot return to New Orleans to prevent their homes from being seized.
Most are still waiting to receive payment from insurance claims and are unable to pay the roughly $10,000 charged by contractors to gut their homes.
Nor can they afford to take time off to gut their homes themselves.
Low-income families have also yet to receive a penny from the federal government’s $7.5 billion in community block grants to Louisiana’s ‘Road Home’ home repair grant programme for homeowners.
Those funds, despite being given to the state of Louisiana months ago, remain tied up in red tape.
Adams’ house was essentially seized weeks before the deadline, when it was bulldozed.
She says she doesn’t know why it was demolished and why she was not notified beforehand, even though the law requires it.
