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Bush's plan leaves out the workers

By ROBYN E. BLUMNER
Published September 25, 2005

When President Bush looked out over the devastation of New Orleans' wet and moldy Lower Ninth Ward, he didn't see poor people who lost what little they had; he saw future owners.

Bush's "ownership society" agenda (also known as the "you're on your own" society) has been waylaid by falling poll numbers, a headache-inducing war and general snubbing of his idea to privatize part of Social Security. But Katrina has given Bush the opportunity to take the rhetoric out of dry dock.

In Bush's speech to the nation, promising billions in federal help for the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast, the president said he would address the intractable poverty in the region by creating "new businesses, including minority-owned businesses" and a new class of "entrepreneurs."

"It is entrepreneurship that creates jobs and opportunity; it is entrepreneurship that helps break the cycle of poverty; and we will take the side of entrepreneurs as they lead the economic revival of the Gulf region," Bush declared, pledging business incentives and tax breaks.

One has to wonder what is in this man's Kool-Aid.

It is a fantasy to think that the bulk of poverty-stricken African-Americans who landed in the fetid Superdome - men and women who didn't even own a car to get out of the hurricane's path - will return to their former communities, take out a government-guaranteed loan and start a company. Forty percent of Ninth Ward residents over 18 don't have a high school diploma.

What the returning evacuees will need is good jobs. Jobs with wages that allow them to buy a home. Jobs that provide health benefits and a retirement plan. For most people, it is a decent job, not a small business loan, that lights the path to the security of the middle class.

Before Katrina, there were plenty of jobs in New Orleans. More than 67 percent of households in the Ninth Ward lived at least in part on money made through wages and salaries. Their average household income was $27,500 (median income was not available) - a figure less than half the national average. These people were working, they were just badly paid.

Yes, Bush should use the federal Treasury to encourage investment and business development in the Gulf region (though he should pay for it by revoking his pricey tax cuts as opposed to borrowing the whole kitty, and I'd be more comfortable if Karl Rove were not reconstruction czar). But labor is the other part of this equation, and beyond a job-training program, Bush's initiatives offer little to workers. Sad-eyed hopelessness will return unless the jobs that are created from Bush's federal largess offer low-skilled workers a real foothold on America's economic ladder.

Bush should direct that all federal money flowing to businesses comes with a catch - the jobs created must pay a living wage and offer affordable health insurance.

Excuse me, I have to stop laughing before continuing.

"Workers' rights" is not part of Bush's vocabulary. One of his first acts on the Katrina recovery front was to use his emergency powers to suspend a Depression-era law protecting the wage rates of workers. The Davis-Bacon Act says that contractors seeking federal construction work must pay the local prevailing wage rate for each specialty.

The law has been a valuable tool over the decades, keeping contractors from low-bidding for a job by slashing worker pay. Now those protections are gone, and contractors will pay what they can get away with. (Affirmative action requirements have been pushed by the wayside as well.)

It is this kind of thinking that condemned the people of the Ninth Ward to lives of stultifying poverty. For eight years, Republican leaders in Congress have stood firmly against any increase in the $5.15-an-hour federal minimum wage. No one can afford decent shelter, food and health care, never mind a car, on such a pittance.

But there is a better way. Look at a town like Las Vegas, where low-skilled workers are largely unionized. There, even hotel maids get paid vacation and a pension; even food service workers can afford to buy a home. Yet Bush has been openly hostile to labor organizing and worker interests in general. Jobs fly overseas, the ones that remain dump their health insurance and pensions, poverty inches upward and Bush appoints antiunion hacks to key posts in the Labor Department.

So please, Mr. President, don't get all preachy and say you're going to confront the poverty of New Orleans "with bold action," when it is same old, same old. You are planning to pour government money into the hands of business owners and investors without providing for those who get their hands dirty. You are planning to strip workers of the few legal rights they have, to the cheers of your rich pals. You are planning to rebuild a society in a way that ensures that a large number of people are left behind. Again.

[Last modified September 23, 2005, 19:57:01]