Thread: Katrina's Next Victim - American labor

http://www.phxnews.com/fullstory.php?article=25536

Katrina's Next Victim - American labor
Posted by Rob on Thursday September 15, 2005 at 1:45 am MST

JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER by Rob Sanchez September 12, 2005 No. 1328

Natural disasters such as hurricane Katrina create the need for reconstruction, and wherever there are lucrative construction contracts there will be fat profits for corporations and jobs created in a variety contruction related industries. We know who is going to win the contracts but much less has been said about who is going to do the actual work, and at what price.

To understand who is going to get those jobs we need to look at several seemingly unrelated events. Once these events are put in chronological order, the puzzle starts to fit together, and the answer becomes quite obvious.

*** Jul 2004 *** Kellogg, Brown & Root Services Inc. won a competitive bid contract to provide debris removal and other emergency work associated with natural disasters. In a real sense KBR was sitting atop a gold mine that they could only tap if a major disaster like Katrina occurred. KBR is a subsidiary of Haliburton, the company that Vice President Dick Cheney used to head as CEO.

*** Oct 29, 2005 *** Hurricane Katrina makes landfall

*** Sept 4, 2005 *** KBR wasn't the only big-buck corporation to win rebuilding contracts. Other companies with close ties to the Bush administration to win lucrative projects include the Shaw Group and Bechtel.

*** Sept 6, 2005 *** The DHS announced that it will not require employers to use I-9 forms. The I-9 form is used by employers to verify that their employees are eligible to work in the United States. Without the I-9 requirement employers will be able to hire illegal aliens without the fear they could be sanctioned. As we all know the I-9 form doesn't do much to deter unscrupulous employers from hiring illegal aliens, but now even that tiny amount of regulation is gone.

*** Sept 8, 2005 *** U.S. President George W. Bush issued an executive order allowing federal contractors rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to pay below the prevailing wage.

If the pieces of this puzzle don't quite fit together for you yet, allow me complete the picture: According to B. Lindsay Lowell, director of research at the Pew Hispanic Center, there are about 600,000 to 800,000 illegal aliens that are currently employed in the US construction industry. The large majority of them are Mexicans, and Mexicans are dominating the industry throughout the entire U.S.

So let me spell out what's going on: President Bush has authorized the robber barons to use illegal aliens to rebuild the damage done by Katrina. Bush Inc. won't have to worry about breaking immigration laws because they exempted themselves. NO LAW, NO WORRY! Companies such as Haliburton will reap immense profits from their contracts while low paid illegal aliens toil in the disease infested flood waters of New Orleans.

The Lou Dobbs show on the 9th had an interesting interview with Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO. He recognizes that Bush's repeal of the Davis-Bacon act is going to nuke any vestige of unions that are left in the South, but Trumka chose to ignore the fact that the illegal aliens the unions covet are going to used as agents to destroy wages and wreak havoc on all attempts to organize near the hurricane damage zone. We all know that Bush and his cronies want to destroy organized labor, and Katrina was the perfect storm that they needed.

RICHARD TRUMKA, AFL-CIO: Suspension of Davis-Bacon is a shameful government-sponsored wage race to the bottom for workers. It will allow workers to be exploited at a time whenever they need their government's help the most.

All of you have seen the pictures of the homeless and dispossessed that have been forced into shelters such as the Superdome. It's an undeniable fact that most of them are poor African Americans that are in desperate need of those construction jobs. While the evacuees sleep on cots in the Superdome and spend their $2,000 debit cards to survive, the illegal aliens, who are mostly Mexican, will go to work to rebuild New Orleans. Bush and Cheney will probably call this "competitive bidding", but I think a better name for this behavior would be "ethnic cleansing".

This is actually wrong what they are doing is reuiring I-9s but not requiring documentatin to back it up. It would be possible to request DHS Basic Pilot and Social Security checks in the absence of physical documentation but they are not doing that.