Eric Bailey

“I knew there was going to be devastation,” Bailey says of the situation in New Orleans before arriving for the ILCA convention held there October 18-20. “You read stuff and you think you understand, but when you see the waterline on the houses, the garbage still in people’s back yard… ,” he breaks off, shaking his head at the incomprehensible results of Mother Nature, faulty engineering and man’s inhumanity to man.

On a partial tour of the devastation (a complete tour would be emotionally overwhelming and take days), Bailey was particularly moved by one scene in the St. Bernard public housing development- a health clinic, doctor’s office, and dentist’s office that remain untouched two years later. It was almost as if he could feel his throat constricting with the airborne pathogens that surely proliferated in such a place.

Bailey’s wife is a dental hygienist back home in Connecticut, so this really hit home. “I’m disappointed we didn’t make it to the lower ninth ward because we didn’t’ have time, but I realize it’s probably for the best,” Bailey says. “It was so emotionally draining.”

As communications director for AFT Connecticut, Bailey represents teachers, state employees, health care workers, higher education staff and faculty. His primary mission in visiting New Orleans was to relate health care needs to AFL-CIO folks back home. A concerned labor activist, Bailey had no idea the needs would be so overwhelming. Seeing things first-hand, he is motivated to tell the stories, not only of the situation in New Orleans, but of the tenuous existence of labor rights and inalienable human rights in a crisis situation

“The story I want to bring back is that if that can happen here, it can happen anywhere,” Bailey says. “If a Cat 5 hurricane hit Connecticut, we would have not just the physical devastation, but our labor rights could be taken away.” That was the case with UTNO-New Orleans. “UTNO just got their collective bargaining back,” Bailey says. “The government took it away because they said it’s an emergency situation. People think, that could never happen in Connecticut. But hey, have a disaster, the government steps in…. Look at how our government responded to what happened here. After seeing how they handled this, I don’t have faith that if there was any other kind of national disaster the government would step in.”