Slave Wages

Last week, Jeanne said,

Poor people can't get back to their lives on a promise of a job and a home. They need a guarantee and help getting back.

Today, she's got some of the reasons why. On the one hand she's found a rare instance of a local, NOLA company that got a contract to provide electricians for reconstruction work. The company, Knight Enterprises, hired local workers and paid union wages—and then lost the contract to other companies paying less and offering no benefits. The locals were replaced by out-of-state workers and were left with nowhere to go.

An electrician and foreman with Knight Enterprises cried as he recounted how his team of workers were kicked out of government tents by an out-of-state firm and forced to sleep in their cars.

What's worse, the local work force is competing with migrant Latino labor, mainly from Honduras and Mexico. The suspension of Davis Bacon that made Knight Enterprises unable to compete in the current market also turns undocumented workers into slave labor and leaves them vulnerable to physical abuse.

Housing for workers often lacks running water and contractors have failed to provide food, training and wage rates as promised, James Hale, vice president with the Laborers' International Union of North America, told a policy conference of opposition Democrats in the US Senate.

In one case, workers had not been paid for three weeks and at another site there were allegations that security guards were mistreating laborers, said Hale, who supported his allegations with photographs.

Once again, the post-Katrina landscape exposes and magnifies the injustices that were already there. The working conditions, described above, are not unique to migrant reconstruction workers in NOLA. And while we demonize and racially profile Latino workers, we also know that we need 'em and we need 'em bad:

Recognizing the demand for migrant labor, and to help speed reconstruction in the areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security temporarily suspended rules mandating employers to prove that workers they hire are citizens or have a legal right to work in the United States.

That's the same Dept. of Homeland Security whose Michael Chertoff was quoted today saying we need more jails for undocumented workers (via TalkLeft):

"Today, a non-Mexican illegal immigrant caught trying to enter the United States across the southwest border has an 80 percent chance of being released immediately because we lack the holding facilities," he added.

"Through a comprehensive approach, we are moving to end this 'catch and release' style of border enforcement by reengineering our detention and removal process."

We let the undocumented workers in or we "enforce" the law, as it suits the needs of the industries that exploit them. Either way, it's just another way that the US upholds the institution of slavery.

Many people have the mistaken impression that slavery was outlawed or abolished in the United States after the Civil War by the passage of the 13th Amendment. Unfortunately, that was not the case. The 13th Amendment reads, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." The effect of the 13th Amendment was not to abolish slavery, but to limit it to those who had been convicted of crimes.

This reality was made apparent following the Civil War when large numbers of newly freed black slaves found themselves "duly convicted" of crimes and thrown in state prisons where, once again, they labored without pay. This led the Virginia Supreme Court to remark in an 1871 case, Ruffin v. Commonwealth, that prisoners were "slaves of the state." Little has changed since then, except the states are less honest about their slaveholding practices. . . .

Until [the 1980s], most prisons produced goods for their own use or for sale to other state agencies, license plates being the most famous example. But in a 1986 study, former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger called for transforming prisons into "factories with fences." In essence, the report argued that prisons should once again become not only self-sustaining, but profit-producing entities requiring minimal financial input from the state. . . .

The slavery context and the history of racist ideology as a tool for upholding the economic conditions of slavery should be kept well in mind when we read how exploitation of migrant Latino workers demonizes local Hondurans in NOLA.

Local Hondurans, who comprise the city's largest Latino population, report being the object of the anger from blacks and whites, who fear losing their livelihoods to low-wage Latino workers. Zapotec-speaking Oaxacan Indians walk the streets of New Orleans and elsewhere throughout Louisiana and Mississippi after being threatened with deportation and kicked off local military bases, where they worked for local contractors without getting paid.

Latinos in the Gulf region are being racially profiled by local and federal authorities, says Victoria Cintra of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, one of the only organizations addressing Latino immigrant concerns in the region. Cintra believes the Bush administration's suspension of the Davis Bacon Act, which requires payment of prevailing wages, along with its temporary removal of documentation requirements on I-9 forms has strained race relations by lowering wages and fostering competition between groups.

Lerone Bennett, Jr. explains:

In order to preserve domestic tranquillity, the leading groups in the colonies made it a matter of public policy to destroy the solidarity of the laborers. Laws were passed requiring different groups to keep to themselves, and the seeds of dissension were artfully and systematically sown. Indians were offered bounties for betraying black runaways; blacks were given minor rewards for fighting Indians; and poor whites were used as fodder in the disciplining of both reds and blacks.

Malik Rahim gets the last word (transcribed from this):

The explosion that hit New Orleans wasn't no dynamite. It was something far worse than dynamite—or atomic bomb. It was greed, corruption and neglect. The neglect was they didn't care because Louisiana is a old Southern state and it's still ran by old Southern money. And one thing they was never able to forget is that they allowed that the major city in the South to become a city that is controlled by Blacks. And the effort has always been since Dutch Morial the first black mayor took office was how can they get this city back. And they have tried everything...