NEW Orleans workers and their families are struggling to survive a desperate poverty crisis, five years after the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe, the AFL-CIO union said on Monday.
Poverty levels in the city are twice the US national levels despite better-than-average unemployment figures.
‘The problem is that nobody’s making a living off the work but the “chiefs and the thieves”,’ said Robert ‘Tiger’ Hammond, president of the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO.
‘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.
‘Even though the federal government just announced a $1.8 billion school construction grant to the city’, Hammond said, ‘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’, said 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.
‘It was hard enough to get a union job before Katrina. Now it’s even harder,’ Hammond added.
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 not working.
Responding to news of hundreds of shipyard redundancies, AFL-CIO Metal Trades Department President Ron Ault slammed both the company and the U.S. Navy, highlighting the economic repercussions for the Gulf region, still trying to recover from both Katrina and the BP oil spill.
He said: ‘To add insult to this tragedy, just over a month after it announced the closure of its shipyard in Avondale, Louisiana, Northrop Grumman said this week it plans to lay off 642 workers at its Pascagoula, Mississippi, shipyard by the end of the year.’
Ault continued: ‘Teachers aren’t faring well in New Orleans either.
‘The huge majority of the city’s schools are under state control or operating as charter schools 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.’
Hammond continued, ‘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.
‘My parish still has no hospital five years after it was destroyed.
‘The situation just sucks. 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,’ Hammond declared.
Workers, testifying before the New Orleans City Council in April, slammed the Sodexo company for illegal practices and failure to help with the city’s recovery.
Joined by a broad coalition of community and student supporters, the SEIU union members and Sodexo employees in New Orleans testified against the disturbing pattern of illegal behaviour at sites where Sodexo workers were fighting for the right to come together to raise standards in a city hungry for good jobs.
Official figures showed that 23.8 per cent of individuals in New Orleans existed below the Federal poverty line of $22,050 for a family of four.
Nationally, the poverty level was 13.2 per cent.
But Sodexo workers in New Orleans were making only $8.00 an hour, or $16,640 annually, over 15 per cent lower than the poverty line.
Anthony Thomas, a Sodexo worker at Tulane University, said: ‘After five years I received two raises, one for 24 cents and the other for 12 cents, and now I make $8.12 an hour which makes it hard even to pay my bills.
‘Just because my co-workers and I are trying to create better jobs for everyone, Sodexo has threatened and illegally questioned my co-workers and that isn’t right.
‘I hope Sodexo plays a part in creating good jobs too,’ he said.
As one of the largest food service management companies in the region of New Orleans, Sodexo set employment standards for thousands of workers in the market.
Portraying itself as a responsible employer, Sodexo pledged to help recovery efforts as the floodwaters receded in 2005.
But almost five years later, workers testified, Sodexo had failed to live up to its promises.
Zella Dase, a food service worker at Loyola University, said: ‘Before the storm, I worked for Sodexo at the school district.
‘In the aftermath, all Sodexo did was offer to give us a payout based on our vacation time.
‘I didn’t have any vacation and none of my co-workers that I know did either.
‘I can’t believe that they didn’t offer to help us at all.’
Although workers at Sodexo’s unionised Recovery School District generally fared better than their non-union counterparts, some of them also earned wages low enough to qualify them for public assistance.
Those workers were preparing to fight for a better contract with Sodexo in the coming months.
Zarassa Harris, a Sodexo custodian in the Recovery School District, said: ‘I’ve worked for Sodexo for nearly 3 years, but I’ve been on food stamps for over a year now.
‘For lunch, my kids eat free.
‘I think it’s sad that I work for a huge, profitable food service company, yet my kids have to rely on the federal government to get lunch at school.’
Those sorts of low-wage jobs exacerbated the problems in a city that is in desperate need of good jobs and lasting economic development. Nearly one in four New Orleanians lives below the poverty line – almost double the poverty rate for the country as a whole.
At the hearing, workers released a report on Sodexo’s track record in New Orleans entitled ‘Hardship in the Big Easy: How Sodexo’s practices leave New Orleans workers in poverty’.
The report revealed that Sodexo Facilities management erased overtime from weekly time reports from time clocks every Wednesday or Thursday, stealing a total of $22,000 from workers over the course of the previous year.
Sodexo eventually had to pay back the money after the workers put pressure on the company.
