Katrina Victims are Not the Only Ones Losing

by Autumn Renshaw

Few Americans will forget the tragedy and catastrophe that struck New Orleans, Louisiana, a year and half ago. Many of us remember seeing the Katrina victims swimming through the streets, being rescued from their roofs, and their possessions, houses, and lives being washed away. Yes, these images, pictures, and people, we will not forget. However, hidden within this ongoing fight and struggle to rebuild one of America’s greatest and most famous cities, lies another struggle, one that is equal in injustice, but silent and unseen.

After Katrina, the city lying in ruins, many began the long road of rebuilding and recovery. However, since more than a million residents had been displaced with little money nor a home to return to, additional workers would need to be recruited if the rebuilding effort was going to be successful. Many companies looked outside America for these recruitments. These American companies made promises of paying immigrant workers 50 times what they would make at home for a period of three years; the recruiters pitch was hard to resist. The promises were so persuasive many Indian and South Americans put up their houses, farms, and family savings to pay the $15,000-$20,000 collateral that the recruiter stated was needed to become a guest-worker.

However, the promise of a better life was never delivered; many came over and found there was only about a month’s amount of work, which many still have not been paid for. What has resulted is what some call “modern day slavery.”

Today, Louisiana is housing thousands of immigrants who came over on H-2B visas, which establish a means for employers in any job sector with shortages to hire foreign workers to fill those vacancies. There are a limited number of visas for this program. These visas only allow the immigrant to work for a specific company, and if for any reason they stop working for that company, they will be deported.

Each year 120,000 foreign workers receive visas to do farm work or other low-skilled labor, usually for three to nine months. These programs grew out of the World War II bracero program, in which hundreds of thousands of Mexicans worked on farms and railroads, often in deplorable conditions. Labor experts say employers abuse guest workers far more than other workers because employers know they can ship them home the moment they complain. They also know these workers cannot seek other jobs if they are unhappy.

Many of these workers also cannot return home, because they have nothing to return to, and no money to support themselves if and when they do return. By some estimates, close to 100,000 new migrant workers — Latino, African-American, Asian, Native-American, and Anglo workers either recruited to the reconstruction zones or searching on their own for better economic opportunities — have arrived in the Gulf Coast region after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Tens of thousands have come to rebuild New Orleans. Instead of being validated and rewarded for their role in this city's renewal, they find themselves locked into states of marginalization and transience.

Across the city, workers are living in abandoned cars, working in toxic conditions, chasing after a web of subcontractors for their wages, and running from police and immigration authorities who have intensified their enforcement efforts, while labor law enforcement is lax.

Therefore, I am working with an organization called the New Orleans Worker’s Center for Racial Justice in which intense legal research on the issues of immigration, tax, and employment law has taken the vast majority of my time. The short-term goals for the center include organizing day laborers and other contingent migrant workers new to New Orleans, as well as hurricane survivors returning to New Orleans; developing worker leaders; and empowering workers to address wage claims, discrimination claims, police harassment, immigration raids, and dangerous working and living conditions.

The intermediate and long-term goals include building infrastructure; defending and expanding workers’ rights, both locally and statewide; developing worker leadership; and spearheading multi-racial and racial justice organizing in the reconstruction and hospitality/service industries, with worker-leadership and community support that will foster worker empowerment in New Orleans.

The infrastructure supporting worker justice was lacking in New Orleans and Louisiana before Katrina and has become a more urgent need since the storm, especially for day laborers.