Rebuilding New Orleans--One House at a Time, One Construction Worker at a Time
REBUILDING NEW ORLEANS : ONE HOUSE AND ONE CONSTRUCTION WORKER AT A TIME
RESERVE, La. (PAI)--Ray Taylor, Reuben Keating, Ryan Connerly and Clinton Gaylor make an unlikely foursome. But together they symbolize labor’s effort to help rebuild New Orleans from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina 26 months ago.
Taylor and Keating, who run the Housing International Gulfcoast, Inc., factory in Reserve, La., midway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, have silver hair and are aging white corporate leaders of the plant, which makes steel housing frames. Its workers are union members of the metal trades.
Connerly and Gaylor are African-Americans in their early 40s. Connerly has kids, Gaylor is single. Both graduated the pre-apprentice training program in the Gulf Coast Construction Career Center, established by the AFL-CIO’s building trades unions.
But the four share a common goal: To do everything they can to get New Orleans back on its feet.
Since the hurricane smashed the city in late August 2005, reconstruction has languished. There is literally not a single construction crane visible over the relatively flat landscape, when viewing it from a high expressway bridge just outside downtown.
Construction repairs were done initially by low-paid imported workers, some of them undocumented, brought in by contractors hired by the GOP Bush regime after Bush temporarily dumped prevailing wage standards. Some of those imported workers still gather in downtown New Orleans to seek day jobs.
But those workers were only a temporary fix for New Orleans, just like the tiny, tinny 250-square-foot trailers from Bush’s Federal Emergency Management Administration were supposed to be a temporary housing fix for New Orleans. The Gulf Coast Construction Career Center and Housing International are supposed to be more permanent--and more helpful to the stricken area.
The center has graduated 103 people--including half a dozen women--in six classes of 3-week courses each, says director Charles Weatherly. Those pre-apprentices will now go to apprentice work on construction jobs--well-paying construction jobs--and be future union members.
Many of the pre-apprentices will train as electricians and join IBEW, building the union in the future. There are also Sheet Metal Worker trainees, Boilermaker trainees, Plumber and Pipefitter trainees, quite a few Painters and even two Carpenter trainees. The factory, backed by the AFL-CIO’s housing and investment arms, has developed a technique to build steel frames for houses. It has 11 workers now and hopes to have 200, Taylor says. The steel frames can be erected quickly--in days rather than weeks--at a lower cost.
And the finished product, once construction workers add such things as wiring, drywall, artificial shingles made out of recycled materials and insulation, looks not like a FEMA tinny trailer, but like a classy smaller version of a classic New Orleans “shotgun” house. It has a combination bedroom/living room, dining room/kitchen, full bath, plenty of storage space, and a front porch.
It stands high off the ground, with its steel frame anchored by bolts to the cement foundation any house stands on, in New Orleans or elsewhere. That makes the steel-frame house not only reasonable to buy and cozy to live in, but virtually impossible to budge by hurricanes and floods, Taylor and Keating say. That’s unlike the traditional wood-framed houses Katrina pushed off their foundations or smashed to smithereens.
That’s one way labor, alone among major institutions in the U.S., is helping New Orleans recover from Katrina--if the others will let it. Taylor says he’s hit resistance from government officials in the Katrina area to allowing steel-framed houses.
But you can’t buy a house, even a reasonably priced house, without a decent-paying job, even in a city where $20,000 yearly was often considered a good income. Connerly and Gaylor are looking forward to much more than that now that they’ve finished their pre-apprentice courses, and are about to start their apprenticeships as an electrician and a boilermaker, respectively.
“Now I have to work that next step in my trade and take the knowledge” he got at the AFL-CIO-backed academy and put it to good use, says Connerly. He’s also going to pass the knowledge on to his son, he said in an interview before the Oct. 19 graduation ceremony in the small Ironworkers training hall the center now uses.
What were his jobs before Katrina? “I cut grass, I was a temporary sports umpire, an auto mechanic and I laid floors” since he was 14, Connerly replied. His last job was as a certified medical assistant--but the clinic where he worked was smashed to shreds by Katrina. Now the pre-apprenticeship “gives me an opportunity to become an electrician and also to work on heating, ventilation and air conditioning” projects with other union tradespeople--and to earn union wages.
Gaylor’s last job was white collar, but it disappeared when the health care plan he worked for merged into a larger organization. “I came to help rebuild New Orleans. I realized this”--the pre-apprenticeship training--“is where I need to be. This is where the road map was laid out,” Gaylor says, for himself and for his city. ###
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