9-25-05, 9:51 am

The devastation caused by hurricane Katrina has led millions of Americans to open our hearts to the helpless victims of the Gulf Coast communities. Donations by the millions have poured in. Volunteers by the thousands have rushed to disaster sites to help with rescue work and reconstruction. And the unions and union members of our country have been among those who have given generously.

AFL-CIO unions have already pledged more than $10 million towards relief efforts. The federation has opened seven Workers Centers to provide union as well as nonunion workers with assistance in job placement and other services. Unions have teams on the ground working with community groups and congregations to help survivors.

The nightmare of seeing more than a third of New Orleans’ citizens living in poverty—and then literally abandoned in their time of profound need—has done more than open our hearts. It has opened our eyes to the fact that our nation’s priorities are totally out of touch with our needs. And the fact that most of the victims all along the Gulf Coast were either young, old, disabled or black has confronted us with graphic evidence that our elected leaders have failed to hold up American values. And make no mistake, it’s a failure of historic magnitude.

Evidence of that failure is all around us. Poverty has risen again for the fifth straight year. Half of Americans living in poverty are working full time. The annual cost of health care now exceeds the income of full-time minimum wage workers. Even though corporate profits and productivity are up, real wages for the average worker have declined in all but two of the last 15 months.

At a time when corporate CEOs are making 431 times what the average worker earns, working families are drowning in personal debt and personal bankruptcies have reached a record high. And while giant oil companies are reaping windfall profits, seven of our nation’s largest airlines are in bankruptcy.

Yet our leaders maintain a blind faith in unregulated markets and unrelenting tax cuts for the wealthy—a faith that blinds them to the crumbling structures of our children’s schools, the decay of our community infrastructures and the decline of our nation’s transportation networks.

All of these realities were under our leaders’ noses right along—Katrina just swept them powerfully into public view. The killer hurricane showed us just how wrong the nation’s priorities have become. We need to invest in America’s real priorities.

We need to stop squandering our resources overseas and start shoring up communities here at home. We need to stop doling out billions of dollars in no-bid contracts—both here and abroad—and start investing in our children and their future. And we need to be secured in our efforts by regular armed forces and a national guard that are ready and equipped to respond to disasters right here at home as well as in other countries.

But above all, we need to forge a new spirit of cooperation, to nurture a stronger sense of community and make a renewed commitment to work in each other’s interests. And we need to start by paying workers wages that free them from debt and allow them to spend and save and contribute to our economy and to their communities.

Our top national priority must be restoring fair play to Americans in every walk of life, rather than catering to the privileged. That means we can’t allow the Bush administration to finance the reconstruction of Gulf Coast communities by making even more cuts to programs that serve other Americans because the most urgent deficits we need to address aren’t the ones in Washington. They’re the crying needs in our communities. The education deficit. The health care deficit. The job training deficit. The deficit in public services and preparedness in our communities that enable us to deal with infrequent catastrophes like Katrina, as well as everyday catastrophes like racism, hunger, disease, ignorance, joblessness and poverty.

If Katrina is used as an excuse for digging these deficits even deeper, we as a nation will have learned nothing from the broken levees and broken lives we’ve all witnessed.

Therefore, the AFL-CIO is committing our resources and the energies of our unions and their members to a campaign of organizing, legislative, community and political action to move our country in a new direction. By putting people before profits. By restoring the spirit and economic health of our communities. And by putting America’s common good ahead of narrow corporate and ideological interests.

Investing in the real priorities in Gulf Coast communities

Repairing the damage done by Katrina and lifting up the lives of Gulf Coast families can be a living laboratory for changing the priorities for America. But it is an opportunity already being perverted by a white-hot campaign by conservatives aimed at seizing this opportunity to profiteer and promote their ideological agenda. Exploiting workers by suspending prevailing wage standards. Awarding no-bid contracts to discredited giant contractors such as Halliburton. Politicizing what should be a professional effort through cronyism in appointments. Issuing vouchers and undermining public education. Privatizing services that should be provided through proven public programs and trustworthy public agencies.

The AFL-CIO will continue raising money, recruiting volunteers and assisting union members and nonunion workers alike with food, shelter and job-hunting. But we will also address the political and public policy realities of what will be the biggest rebuilding job in our nation’s history.

We will:

* Establish a Gulf Coast Worker Network to coordinate all union responses across the four states and fight for real support for families through unemployment compensation, public health services, quality education, job training and other professional and sufficiently funded public services.

* Convene a 'Coalition of Fairness in Federal Disaster Relief' made up of former Secretaries of Labor and HUD, as well as leaders from labor, religion and civil rights, to object to the suspension of prevailing wage standards and affirmative action requirements for federal contractors and to promote local hiring requirements. The Coalition will also insist that the priorities for reconstruction be hospitals, nursing homes, schools, roads, bridges, levees and affordable housing instead of the crackpot social engineering schemes of the far right.

* Guarantee that Gulf Coast communities are rebuilt with good jobs by insisting the U.S. Department of Labor and/or Congress over-ride President Bush’s Executive Order and restore the community prevailing wage provisions of the Davis-Bacon Act, and likewise restore affirmative action requirements for federal contractors.

* Form a union investment network to marshal the power of the more than $400 billion dollars in union-sponsored pension plans behind new capital investment in the communities in the region.

* Demand transparency and accountability in all contracts and work with our allies to expose corruption, windfall profits and attacks on workers’ rights.

* Reach out to working families in the area through our community affiliate Working America to build a membership base to speak out for working family priorities and worker protections in the rebuilding effort.

Investing in new priorities for America.

The conflict over how and in whose interests New Orleans and the Gulf Coast will be rebuilt can be a catalyst for a national discussion about America’s priorities that will define the direction of our country for years to come. The challenges facing working people and poor people in the Gulf Coast are not peculiar to the region—the same public policies and priorities that left working people and poor people to fend for themselves there can be found in every state.

The AFL-CIO will lead a renewed struggle for good jobs, a fair economy and a just society not just in the Gulf region, but in every community, and at the kitchen table of every working family and every poor family in America. To put the interest of people before the special interests of big business. To force our federal government to invest in programs that make our country stronger, our communities safer and our economy more equitable.

We will:

* Take the debate about priorities for a strong and secure America into communities and neighborhoods this fall and winter by hosting town hall meetings in dozens of cities.

* Sponsor a mass national 'Community Walk for Change' to move our message and generate support for our agenda, enlisting allied organizations to contact 1 million households.

* Generate immediate pressure on Congress to defeat attempts to finance the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast by cutting programs for working people and poor people while extending tax cuts for the rich.

* Lead a movement for a special windfall profits tax on oil companies and use the revenue to provide assistance to families suffering because of higher energy costs.

* Mobilize behind a federal agenda that’s headed up by a long-overdue increase in the minimum wage, the creation of good jobs, guaranteed, affordable health care for ALL and immediate financial assistance to families who are being victimized by skyrocketing insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays.

* Continue to advocate on behalf of new pension protections, the freedom of workers to form and join unions and adequate funding for infrastructure improvement, education, homeland security and other vital public services.

* Increase pressure on Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act and guarantee every worker the right to form or join a union without interference from his or her employer.

* Sponsor campaigns in 35 states to stop large, profitable corporations from forcing the taxpayers to pay the tab for health care for their employees….….in 10 states to raise the state minimum wage….in 15 states to pass legislation stopping the export of U.S. jobs….and to pass in 25 states the Worker Freedom Act prohibiting employers to break the cycle of fear that employers create on the job when they use the workplace to force their viewpoints on workers - including their views on politics, religion and labor organizing.

* Launch a multi-union Solidarity Campaign in which unions of the AFL-CIO join with and support each other large, strategic organizing drives, and make International Human Rights Day on Dec. 10 our biggest mobilization ever for workers’ rights.

From AFL-CIO