Shawn Smith graduated from the Gulf Coast Construction Careers Center Pre-Apprenticeship Program.
Sharon Jasper is leading the former tenants of St. Bernard Development in their campaign to return to the homes from which they were displaced.
Tom O'Malley, left, of the AFL-CIO's Gulf Coast Revitalization Program, is helping former public housing tenants try to reclaim their homes.
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Shawn Smith: “The union is a blessing to me.”
The moods of post-Katrina New Orleans are many and oft-changing: Anger. Despair. Defiance . And, yes, optimism.
Shawn Smith has experienced this dizzying array of mood shifts. Right now, standing outside the Ironworkers Union Training Facility in New Orleans , he feels blessed.
You see, Shawn Smith is about to become a union man.
Smith and 12 fellow city residents are minutes away from graduating the Gulf Coast Construction Career Center ’s Pre-Apprenticeship Program. And he cannot hide his excitement.
“I feel so overjoyed. I’m happy to be part of something,” he reflected. “All my life I’ve been in and out of jail. I didn’t think there was any opportunity out there.”
The Gulf Coast Construction Career Center provides fast-track training to men and women like Smith so they can join the building and construction trades. In the aftermath of Katrina, labor unions are eager to work with responsible contractors to rebuild the Gulf Coast using trained workers and paying them a decent wage.
Smith will soon be employed as an apprentice boilermaker and eventually will move up the ladder to journeyman status. All of which translates into a living wage with health care and retirement security, along with continuous skill training.
Smith could not have envisioned such possibilities in August 2005, when Katrina forced him to retreat with thousands of displaced New Orleaneans to the Louisiana Superdome, where the air conditioning failed and the bathroom facilities were backed up.
But the future looks infinitely brighter for Smith and his fellow union apprentices.
“The union has been a blessing to me,” Smith says. “I’m just so overwhelmed. I have a real positive outlook on life right now. Nothing can deter me.”
Sharon Jasper: Mobilizing tenants for the right of return
It’s another white hot New Orleans afternoon and Sharon Jasper is throwing off some heat of her own.
The 58-year-old Jasper’s voice rises and falls with a biblical fervor as she stands outside a 75-year-old public housing project called the St. Bernard Housing Development.
“I am a former resident of St. Bernard. My mother and father moved here in 1949, when I was 6 months old,” she says, pointing to a row of solidly constructed brick homes and neatly manicured lawns.
When Katrina struck and the levees broke, Jasper and thousands of public housing dwellers were herded like cattle throughout Louisiana and neighboring states. Now they want their homes back.
But the politicians, the government agencies and the developers have other ideas. They want to demolish St. Bernard as part of a vast redevelopment vision that includes a PGA golf course – but no affordable housing.
So the politicians, the government agencies and the developers have surrounded St. Bernard with a chain link fence topped by barbed-wire. And they’ve told hard-working, God-fearing people like Sharon Jasper to stay the hell out.
“Our families have been displaced all over the United States. Bring them back, then let’s talk about redevelopment,” Jasper argues.
Jasper is fighting back. She spearheads a tenant association that is working with the AFL-CIO’s Gulf Coast Revitalization Program to convince local authorities to rehabilitate rather than annihilate public housing stock.
“We, the poor working class, are the people who helped build this city,” Jasper says, jabbing her finger into the air, as if she were about to pull down the menacing barbed wire barrier. “We have a right to return. This is our home.”
Tom O'Malley: Organizing labor to help rebuild the Gulf Coast
With his ruddy looks and thick Boston accent, Tom O'Malley is always prepared for the inevitable question.
“I always get asked, “Where's that accent from?” he quips. “So I say, 'It's the South, but it's South Boston .”
O'Malley is Vice President and Director of the Gulf Coast Revitalization Program (GCRP), an arm of the AFL-CIO Investment Trust Corporation. Married and the father of three, he spends three weeks out of four in the Gulf Coast states.
His mission is to invest roughly $600 million in union pension fund money to rebuild devastated areas like New Orleans using unionized labor while earning appropriate returns to guarantee the security of future retirees.
“Organizing the labor force to fix the [the destruction caused by Katrina] is what it's all about,” he explains to graduates of a pre-apprenticeship training program, rattling off a list of commercial, retail and residential projects on the union's radar screen.
“If you're going to give your labor to somebody, you want something in return,” O'Malley continues. “We want to make sure it's the best something in return you can get: a wage package that includes a decent hourly wage...health care and...a pension.”
The GCRP also provides assistance to a non-profit tenants organization dedicated to renovating and reopening desperately needed public housing stock for thousands of dislocated New Orleans residents.
But the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which became the receiver of the Housing Authority of New Orleans after the Katrina disaster, wants to privatize public housing.
Tenants and community activists are concerned that HUD-targeted private developers are more interested in demolition and upscale economic development than in guaranteeing the right of return and creating limited equity housing cooperatives for displaced tenants.
Public housing is a critical element of the housing continuum that should exist in any city, O'Malley maintains. “You just can't rip that out of the community and say, 'Oh, we're going to build a golf course.' It's not right. It's criminal.”
