Posted on

Workers Deserve Reliable Transportation Now

After a full day of work, I begin the trek through the rain to find a way to get home. It’s the Saturday before Mardi Gras day and I am shuffling through the aftermath of the city’s and tourist’s elaborate celebration. There is so much garbage in the streets, so many beads littering the sidewalks as water builds up in the poorly pumped streets, that it is hard to walk through the Quarter.
I join my fellow workers waiting at the S. Rampart and Canal bus stop and lean against the building wall in hopes to find shelter from the rain. I am waiting for about 10 minutes while no bus arrives before I see city workers putting barricades on Canal. A woman comes over and laughs at us for thinking there would be bus service for us workers, despite the fact that we had just worked long days serving up the food, drink, and entertainment expected of Mardi Gras weekend. She points us a couple blocks over and says that “some” buses are waiting over there.

Since paying for a taxi or a Lyft/Uber would cost my day’s wages, I start swiftly walking. Random buses are scattered throughout Elk Pl. and Basin St., and from a distance I can almost make out the number 88 on one of them. Although the RTA’s timetable said the next bus (the previous never came) wasn’t due to leave for another 5 minutes, before I can get to it, the bus takes off. I am left stranded in the rain with my entire day’s cash earnings in my back pocket.

Tired, wet, and stranded, I feel so much frustration that this is not the first time the RTA has failed workers who hold up the city’s economy. Random detours, service disruptions, and buses or street cars that just never come are common.

On a typical day I wait up to 40 minutes for a street car on the St. Charles line, multiple times every month the Canal streetcar line has unwarranted service disruptions. Almost every day the 5 bus is 10-20 minutes late, resulting in me being late to work.

The feeling of anxiety and stress I felt when my feet couldn’t carry me fast enough to make the 88 at an unpredictable time is one I and thousands of workers feel everyday. Many buses don’t come often enough and if they decide to leave early, people are left stranded for another hour or more. In that hour’s time, you could be fired from your job, miss a class or an appointment, miss valuable time with your child, or be late to get home to cook a meal or help with homework.

This is not to mention that there are almost no shelters to cover us from the elements, and that there are less than half the amount of routes than we had pre-Katrina. We walk far distances at all hours of the day and night to get to a bus that just might not ever come. During hurricane warnings and floods, we are still expected to show up to work on time, without reliable transportation.
Yet the RTA funds $75 million streetcar projects like the Rampart Line that actually decrease bus service and access to jobs. They spend $20,000 on a ribbon-cutting ceremony and tell the workers that they don’t have money for more buses.

Hospitality workers generate $7.5 billion for the city, yet we spend hours every single day taking inefficient transit. We spend most of our time being exploited at our jobs where many of us cater to tourists, just to take “public” transportation that is not meant to serve the public. We are pushed out of the downtown area due to rising rents, yet we have no means of reliable transportation to-and-from our jobs. The workers of this city deserve free transportation. The time has come to organize and demand that the RTA serves the workers that hold up New Orleans.

Posted on

For-Profit Immigrant Prisons Add to Mass Incarceration, Thousands of Children Jailed

by Joseph Rosen

U.S. immigrant detention prisons hold captive more than 40,000 men, women, and children daily.

Though most have never been charged with a crime, detainees are bound by shackles or handcuffs and forced to endure inhumane conditions including cavity searches, solitary confinement, physical and sexual abuse. By law, undocumented immigrants are denied a public legal defender. On average, a person will spend nearly a month in detention. Many individuals, torn from their family and friends, spend months and years awaiting freedom.

More than 37,000 immigrants are detained each year at sites across Louisiana. As is the case nationally, for-profit prisons handle the vast majority of this awful “business.” The GEO Group, the world’s largest for-profit prison company, runs major detention centers in Jena, Pine Prairie, Basile, and Alexandria, LA. The deplorable conditions at prisons run by the GEO Group have been met with prisoner uprisings and hunger strikes across the world, from Louisiana to South Africa.

Tens of millions of dollars in bribes by for-profit prison companies have been lavished on Congress. In return they get laws that actually say that ICE must meet “bed quotas.” And compared with other capitalist enterprises, GEO Group enjoys extraordinary profits, largely due to the unpaid labor of its detainees, 60,000 of whom are seeking damages for having been forced to work for free under the threat of solitary confinement. Last October, at an annual leadership conference held at Trump’s Miami-area golf resort, GEO Group executives celebrated an annual revenue of $2.26 billion, double that “earned” ten years ago.

Workers should recognize these racist concentration camps for what they are and demand full legalization for every one of our immigrant brothers and sisters; history will pardon nothing less.

Posted on

Big Tourism Companies Steal Tax Dollars

HOSPITALITY WORKERS ORGANIZE TO DEMAND FULL SERVICE MEDICAL CLINIC

$140 MILLION IN TAX MONEY IS BEING GIVEN TO THE BIGGEST TOURISM CORPORATIONS A YEAR, NOT OUR CITY BUDGET, NOT LOCAL BUSINESS AND NOTHING FOR THE WORKERS!

STATE LEGISLATURE, MAYOR AND COUNCIL DID THIS WITHOUT VOTERS’ FULL CONSENT.

By Marie Torres, Restaurant Server, Organizer Hospitality Workers Committee

In New Orleans the rich ruling class calls all the shots and chooses profit over people while workers are consistently denied basic rights. While the wealthy feast, the very workers who serve them their meals starve. We are expected to work doubles, clopenings, through hurricanes, with a smile on our face to make the rich man’s pocket fatter in hopes that we’ll be able to make rent this month, or get our babies fed. There are over 88,000 of us and without our labor the city’s tourism economy would crumble in the blink of their eye, yet the wealthy business owners and corporations think of us as disposable.

Ever wonder just how much money you have generated from all those plates you fixed, all those smiles you served, all those tourists asking you “where’s Bourbon Street?” Where does it all go? $7.5 Billion dollars are generated every single year by the tourism industry. Ever wonder why you literally cannot afford to get sick?

 

You know the feeling, fellow worker. As soon as you or your children start coughing, understand the struggle: buying some Emergen-C and NyQuil and calling it healthcare, waiting until the fever is way too high before you make the trek to the Urgent Care, worried the entire time about the cost because you don’t have insurance. If you do have insurance, you have to worry about what isn’t covered: those cavities you’ve tried ignoring, how you squint to see words on a page, maybe you’ve got a weak knee giving you trouble or some back pain you’d love to get checked out. You hear about more serious illness and just hope it doesn’t happen to you, you might already have some medical debt. Because your job doesn’t offer insurance, the city doesn’t help provide affordable insurance, and despite how hard you work, all you can afford just doesn’t cover it. Why? Isn’t the money there? The answer is: of course.

In 2015 alone, hotel taxes were $165 Million.

Local tax on all food and beverages (without voter approval) $11.2 Million.
All these taxes were turned over to private corporations that are called commissions that have been put into the city charter along with taxes dedicated to go directly to them.

Yes, over $140 Million every year goes to the Convention and Visitors Bureau ($17 Million), the LA Stadium and Exposition District ($57 Million), the Exhibition Hall Authority ($58 Million), and the New Orleans Tourism and Marketing Corporation ($12 Million).

This is money that does not go into the general budget, does not go towards bettering our communities, healthcare, or education. With all this money floating around, shouldn’t the workers at least have access to healthcare?
Money goes to white businesses, not Black local businesses.

Despite income inequality between Black and white residents growing wider, a recent report called the Disparity Study stated that only 2% of revenue generated by business in New Orleans goes to Black Businesses
The people in charge of these commissions, work hand-in-hand with the city council and the mayor to do this dirty work. For example, the Board members of the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation are from the biggest hotel and casino chains, real estate developers, and from other commissions such as the Convention and Visitors Bureau, the LA Restaurant Associations, as well as city council members and future mayor Latoya Cantrell, Stacy Head, Nadine Ramsey and Jason Williams.

Big business and government are working closely together to profit while the workers suffer. In 2013, the city was denied by the state legislature a proposal to increase hotel tax by 1.75% for the general budget. One year later, in 2014, the state legislature passed an increased hotel tax (by you guessed it: 1.75%!) dedicated to the Convention and Visitors Bureau and Tourism Marketing Corporation. Police of the French Quarter also got a piece: 0.25%. The Convention and Visitors Bureau alone is sitting on a $300 million surplus – all from tax money that should be used for recreation, jobs and fixing streets.
(*All data can be found from the Bureau of Governmental Research*)

THE SCANDAL IS DEEPER. WORKERS VOICE IS INVESTIGATING ALL TAX EXEMPTIONS AND ABATEMENTS THE RICH GET.

Posted on

Immigrant Rights Benefit U.S. Born Workers, No Rights = Lower Wages for All

With the non-renewal of Temporary Protected Status for some 300,000 immigrants (from Haiti, El Salvador, and Nicaragua) and the cancellation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Trump opens the door to deporting 1 million immigrants. That means ripping apart a million families, putting children in prison, and sending some to a country they have never seen. Immigrants don’t want to leave their homes and relatives but are forced to to survive. They come here, pay taxes, get no benefits, are often unpaid, and live in constant threat of ICE.

U.S. government trade agreements, policies and wars are the main causes for the displacement of so many men, women, and children. Death squads funded and trained by the U.S. military have been used to maintain the rule of business oligarchs in Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Haiti while outright devastation has been wrought by US bombs in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria.

What then do the bosses hope to achieve by ratcheting up deportations and terror against immigrants to the U.S.? Their goal is to drive down the wages of all workers—immigrant and U.S. born. If any group of workers can be paid less, we all get paid less.

Undocumented immigrant workers live under the constant threat of detention or deportation and the devastating toll that this takes on their families. This insecurity is exploited by bosses who threaten to turn their workers in to immigration authorities if they bring attention to workplace safety violations or if workers decide to organize a union. Raids such as the one carried out by ICE at the Postville Agriprocessor Plant in 2008 (resulting in the arrest of 389 workers) have been instrumental in frustrating organizing efforts of unions such as the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. It is not the presence of immigrant workers in the workforce that drives down wages, it is that bosses can take advantage of their “illegal” status and fear to pay less. It’s bosses, not workers that bear the blame.

Likewise, it’s the legacy of legalized racial exclusion—Jim Crow—and current racism that’s to blame for low wages that prevail throughout the U.S. south. When Black and white workers unionized together both saw their wages rise. So, if immigrants had full rights, could no longer be threatened into accepting low wages, all workers wages would rise.

The very bosses and bankers who send run-away plants all over the world to pay pennies a day, who hoard their profits off shore, pay no taxes, oppose raising the minimum wage and all safety laws are telling us workers to blame immigrants. They scapegoat immigrants to disguise their greed and exploitation.

U.S.-born workers should call for the full legalization of the more than 11 million immigrants currently deprived of their full legal labor rights. As the central union, AFL-CIO writes, “history has shown, whenever one group of workers is denied access to workplace protections, all workers’ rights are in jeopardy.”

Workers of all nations must resist the global “race to the bottom” that the capitalists will never cease to egg on with their racist rhetoric. La lucha obrera no tiene fronteras: the workers struggle knows no borders!

Posted on

Conditions are Dismal for Louisiana Women

By Gavrielle Gemma

In New Orleans, tourists can hop between fancy restaurants, concerts, conventions and giant drinks in the French Quarter. Rarely do they ever see that women here and throughout the state are suffering.

According to a report on the “Status of Women in the States” issued by Institute for Women’s Policy Research, Louisiana’s score for employment & earnings and health & well-being was ‘F’. Poverty, reproductive rights and elected representation earned ‘D-‘.

Black women earn only 49% of white men’s earnings. It’s 68% for white women and 52% for Latinas. Black women are only 28% of managerial or professional jobs, yet have the highest percentage of women working.

Infant mortality and women’s mortality rate during childbirth are about the worst in the country. Louisiana ranks 49 out of 50 states for women’s health and well-being and 46th for reproductive rights.

Neither the state nor New Orleans has any laws giving workers paid sick leave or vacation. Most women have no pensions. Only one women was elected to a state executive office and women had no seats in Congress.

The good news is that women in unions earn $252 a week more than those who have no union.

Women in the city and state have potential power that has not yet been organized or exerted. We make up a large percentage of the work force and the bosses make billions in profits from our labor. We will soon make our power known.

Posted on

Baton Rouge Flooding

You bailed out the banks, now bail out the workers 100%!

By Alex Quintero

The natural disaster that struck Baton Rouge was a flashback of the cataclysmic events of Hurricane Katrina, and in much of the same way the government has reacted with little to no disaster relief at all.

The U.S. Spent close to $16 trillion of public money to bail out the banks in the 2008 market crash. One trillion dollars a year goes to our military budget profiting those in the business of making war. But when it comes to bailing out the people of Louisiana, especially in the Black community, FEMA gives very little. This was the case in New Orleans and now our sisters and brothers of the working class in many parishes in Louisiana are devastated.

110,000 homes were destroyed or damaged. Almost all applied for FEMA. But FEMA only gives a $33,000 max grant  (and usually much less) if the victim can provide paperwork that may have been lost in the floods, Only 12% had flood insurance because these areas were not known to flood before. Also, many people have already been denied, especially in the African American neighborhoods in Baton Rouge.

There has also been a loss of job income, businesses destroyed, and cars demolished. Immediate unemployment assistance is needed.

Disaster capitalists like contractors are “hiring” undocumented workers so they can under-pay or con them out of pay altogether. Meanwhile, thousands of workers are now out of jobs. There even was a fatal bus crash of an unlicensed immigrant driver as its consequence. While the driver was jailed, we say jail the contractor.

This is why workers need to be for legalizing immigrants so these workers, who are only trying to feed their families, cannot be taken advantage of and there is no incentive not to hire all workers where there is high unemployment like in the Black community.  Louisiana legislators should call an emergency session to cut corporate tax breaks and help the flood victims.