‘It wasn’t enough for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to leave thousands of trailers rotting for months unused in acres of swampy fields while Louisiana residents remained homeless,’ say a contributor to the AFL-CIO American trade union federation website.
‘FEMA now has come up with pod houses – big white boxes resembling cargo containers on stilts – except not as large.
‘And get this: The houses are an incentive to lure public school teachers back to New Orleans.
‘As reported on the AFT blog via the EdLog:
‘In an attempt to get the “best and the brightest teachers to return to New Orleans,” New Orleans is giving teachers . . . a large walk-in closet to live in.
‘Worse: . . . officials brag that these storage pods – at a cost of $56,000 a pop – show their “commitment to helping displaced teachers find their way home and encouraging others around the country to take a chance and join us.”
‘First the city fires or forces into retirement some 4,500 public school teachers, mostly members of the United Teachers of New Orleans/AFT.
‘Now, it’s creating pre-fab incentives to lure a new batch.
‘So what’s going on?
‘Before Katrina, New Orleans had 128 public schools. As of September, only 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.
‘We looked here at the real Katrina clean-up agenda of the Bush administration and its local lackeys – pushing legislative and other action that, under the guise of making room in the budget for rebuilding costs, actually cut social programs, undermine survivors’ chances of returning home and fail to support them in starting over elsewhere.
‘Twenty-five-year-veteran school teacher Gwen Adams was among the New Orleans teachers forced to retire.
‘She says the real motive behind slashing teacher jobs was to break the union: “They had been trying to break the union for years. 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’.”
‘A pod house and a diet day. The flush-government-down-the-toilet group at its finest,’ concludes the union member.
Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO has revealed President Bush’s latest attack on workers’ rights.
The Bush administration has declared itself exempt from nearly two decades of federal legal precedent that protects whistle-blowers under the Clean Water Act.
Now, federal employees who complain about unhealthful conditions at the workplace, environmental problems, public safety hazards and other situations, could face retaliation.
According to legal documents released by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), the Secretary of Labor’s Administrative Review Board last month used an unpublished opinion issued by a Justice Department office to take away the rights of federal workers to pursue whistle-blower claims under the Clean Water Act.
PEER obtained a copy of the opinion under the Freedom of Information Act.
The opinion invoked the ancient doctrine of sovereign immunity, which is based on the old English legal maxim that ‘The King Can Do No Wrong.’
It is an absolute defense to any legal action unless the sovereign, or in this case, the federal government agrees to be sued.
As if that were not bad enough, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has taken the even more extreme position that absolutely no laws protect its employees from reprisal.
Some 170,000 employees working in federal environmental agencies will be affected by the loss of whistle-blower rights.
Says PEER General Counsel Richard Condit: ‘The Bush administration is engineering the stealth repeal of whistle-blower protections.
‘The use of an unpublished opinion to change official interpretations is a giant step backward to the days of the secret Star Chamber.’
PEER Senior Counsel Paula Dinerstein adds: ‘It is astonishing for the Bush administration to now suddenly claim that it is above the law.
‘Congress could end this debate by simply declaring that it intends that the whistle-blower protections of these anti-pollution laws apply to the federal government.’
The Labor Department ruling comes just weeks after Cate Jenkins, a senior scientist at the EPA, accused the agency of relying on misleading data about the health hazards of World Trade Center dust.
Five years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, thousands of rescue and recovery workers have developed serious respiratory illnesses, even though then-EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman assured the public the site was safe.
The New York Daily News reports the Bush administration gave Whitman the right to bury embarrassing EPA documents about the chemicals and other hazards by classifying them as secret.
A study by doctors at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City finds nearly 70 per cent of firefighters, police officers, emergency medical crews, construction workers, utility workers and volunteers have suffered lung and other health problems.
Representative Jerrold Nadler (Democrat-New York), whose district includes Lower Manhattan, says he intends to look into Jenkins’ claims: ‘When a scientist who works for the EPA makes serious allegations about the aftermath of 9/11, they must be examined carefully.’