57:34 minutes (52.7 MB)

This one hour show was produced by Judy Ancel, Jeff Humfeld and Molly Madden for The Heartland Labor Forum, labor's radio show in Kansas City on KKFI 90.1FM Communty Radio. We cover three stories:

• The new disposable workforce: a visit to the Workers Center
• The housing failure: from St. Bernard Housing Project to the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust
• How to destroy a transit system: a visit with public transit drivers

1) An interview with a woman whose home in the 9th Ward was completely destroyed by Katrina's flood. She now faces eviction, having to leave her FEMA trailer.

2) The Gulf Coast Construction Career Center has been training New Orleans Residents to enter building trades apprenticeship programs to improve their families lives and to rebuild their city.

Meet three individuals -- a building trade apprentice, a public housing tenant and a labor investment officers -- who exemplify the spirit of rebuilding, renewal and tenacity that characterize the Gulf Coast rebuilding efforts.

 

Chief Steward Larry Warner had weathered a lot since he began driving for Greyhound in 1978. And then came Katrina.

 

[video] 1) An interview with a woman whose home in the 9th Ward was completely destroyed by Katrina's flood. She now faces eviction, having to leave her FEMA trailer.

2) The Gulf Coast Construction Career Center has been training New Orleans Residents to enter building trades apprenticeship programs to improve their families lives and to rebuild their city.

Pilot program introduces urban residents to careers in the construction trades

There was at least one employer who was working for the workers in their time of need.

A small sliver of downtown New Orleans has bounced back as a neighborhood of gleaming corporate office towers and a playground for the rich. Its a longshoreman, however, who is waging the real fight to rebuild the real city outside the downtown "isle of denial."

It took the federal Marshall Plan to help a devastated Europe recover after World War II. They’re not holding their breath in St. Bernard Parish. Two years after Katrina, the community Chet Held once called home remains largely a ghost town.