Low income working people are locked out from housing developments that could be repaired. Many parts of the city look as if the flood happened last week.

On a rainy night flight we descend into the flat bowl of New Orleans wedged between the Mississippi River and the Lake Pontchartrain with the impression that we are going under water, which is not far from the truth. A large part of the city, as became painfully obvious during hurricanes Katrina and Rita, is below sea level. During my first twenty-four hours in the Crescent City, rain alternately fell, poured, drizzled, and spit from the sky. Puddles formed and turned into flooded streets while locals looked up at the clouds with trepidation. The residents I talked to told me that every major storm brings back the trauma and the agonizing question: will the levees hold? I couldn’t help thinking of my new friends when, the day after I returned from my trip, I read a news story saying that over eight inches of rain had fallen on the city since I left, flooding streets and causing many schools and businesses to close early.

I had made the journey to New Orleans to attend the biennial convention of the International Labor Communications Association (ILCA), entitled “Seeking Higher Ground: Telling Workers’ Stories After Katrina,” October 18-20. Along with fellow AFT 2121 member and CFT Communications Director, Fred Glass, I participated in a great experiment, designed by the ILCA leadership and inspired by Glass, to take this year’s conference out of the meeting rooms and into the streets. We are, after all, journalists and what better mission could we pursue than to put ourselves at the service of the largely unheard voices of fellow union members and the ordinary people of New Orleans still suffering more than two years after the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States? Despite two plus years of promises from politicians and governmental organizations, large parts of the city, albeit the parts tourists never see, look like ghost towns, as if the storm occurred last week rather than the end of August 2005. And for many of those who have returned—the population stands at 50-60% of what it was before Katrina—the struggle for decent housing, schools, and employment continues. It was our job to go out into the community, talk to the people, and report on the unions and the organizations making a difference.

With the images of Spike Lee’s documentary, “When the Levees Broke,” still fresh in my mind, we set out on a bus tour of the areas of the city that captured the world’s attention during the week following Katrina, and which were so graphically portrayed in Lee’s film. When the waters receded, as did the attention of the media, left behind was a devastation that is still very much evident today. The statistics were appalling enough: 80,000 homes still uninhabitable and countless others in various states of repair; of the 27,000 destroyed homes (every home except one) in St. Bernard Parish only a fraction have been repaired; and of the 125,000 small businesses damaged or laid waste more than 50% are struggling or have called it quits. But seeing the gutted homes and businesses, smelling the garbage, and feeling the frustration of the people we talked to was a visceral experience far more powerful than the numbers.

We saw whole neighborhoods where people had not returned and others where one or two houses on a block would be lived in. We saw FEMA trailers parked in front of ravaged homes and others parked next to concrete steps, all that was left of their homes. Whole families have been crammed into these mobile homes while public housing units that suffered minimal damage sit empty behind chain link fences with barbed wire on the top. Margaret Trotter, a former resident of the St. Bernard Housing Development, gave us a tour around the grounds where low-income families before the storm had occupied 960 units. In a colorful, down home style she harangued the politicians accusing them of abandoning the mostly African-American poor of the city. “They don’t want us to come back. Well, guess what? They’re going to need us. A city needs poor folk, working class or whatever.”

Over and over we heard the same message from the black community, that the powers-that-be would be just as happy if the poor, largely African-American former residents that are scattered all over the country didn’t return. In a plan that echoes the neo-con dream, developers, wealthy businessmen and some politicians saw the catastrophe as an opportunity to attack working people, white and black, to break the back of unions, privatize public education, and get rid of public housing. Shortly after the storm, when electricians were desperately needed to get the power back on, 85 members of the local IBEW were told that their “services were no longer needed.” The Bush White House had suspended the Davis-Bacon prevailing wage rules, opening up the door for subcontractors to import workers from outside the area and pay lower wages.

Saket Soni of the Workers Center for Racial Justice reported to us that many reconstruction jobs were filled by foreign workers who paid recruiters thousands of dollars for visas to work in New Orleans. The promises of decent housing, high wages and even citizenship proved false, and many of the workers were not even paid.

Once the largest unions in Louisiana, the 4700 members of United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO) were summarily fired with a stroke of Governor Kathleen Blanco’s pen. Dr. Brenda Mitchell, President of UTNO, says that her fellow members were insulted when it was time to hire some of the teachers back as they were required to reapply and pass a test. Nevertheless, the teacher’s union is slowly coming back as are other unions that have received a great deal of support from unions around the country.

Part Two: A fractured education system emerges from the flood (Coming)