America’s heart aches for the people of the Gulf Coast. So many lives lost, so many traumatized by days amid death and decay, days and days and days without the basic necessities for survival.
Brothers and sisters in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama experienced the worst a furious Mother Nature can dish out. And the pain and loss of tens of thousands were multiplied by a total failure of the federal government to respond.
Four years after Sept. 11, 2001, we learned two dreadful lessons watching the desperate fight for survival in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina passed and the levees gave way: First, we’ve put tens of billions of dollars and our national trust in a homeland security system that failed when we needed it. And second, being poor can kill.
While our urgent attention is on rescue efforts, we cannot ignore the unforgivable neglect of people who were poor or sick, left behind as those who had cars and funds drove away, flew to safety, checked into hotels. We can’t ignore the years of wrong-headed federal priorities—placing special interests above human needs—that made this disaster worse. We’ve got to ask the cutting questions: Why did the Bush administration refuse to fund repairs for those levees? Why did it take five days to deliver some hope to New Orleans? Why was a president who says America can afford to give the rich permanent tax cuts unable to give the poor of New Orleans a way out before the corpses began piling up?
It was a shameful display of corrupted values.
In contrast, the union movement is putting our union values to work. Our mobilization to help is growing hour by hour. State federations and local labor councils are setting up assistance centers, collecting supplies, moving them where they are needed and opening arms and homes to evacuees. Affiliate unions have established aid funds for their members. First responders are heading south.
At the federation, we have created a special Hurricane Relief Fund within the AFL-CIO’s Union Community Fund to target help where its most needed by working families. Within 24 hours after we alerted online working family activists about the fund, $100,000 had poured in, and we intend to increase that to $500,000 over the next week. (Click this link to make a tax-deductible contribution now.)
Within hours of posting a notice on this website that the union movement needs 1,000 recruits to provide hands-on help in the devastated region, dozens of e-mails came in from working people not just ready but eager to do whatever is needed of them in unimaginable conditions. (Click here to volunteer.)
Together, union men and women are doing all they can to meet the immediate needs of Katrina’s victims. But we know the needs will go on and on—not for days or weeks but for months and years. Our commitment to our brothers and sisters in the Gulf Coast will endure as well. We will be there at the forefront of rebuilding efforts. We will be here in Washington, D.C., demanding that Congress and the White House do what is needed to restore the lives and livelihoods of the working families who have lost everything, including their workplaces. We will be in corporate boardrooms to demand that every job replacing those lost is a good job, a family-sustaining job that allows families to receive the medical care they need.
And we will be here to demand that never again—never again—can America allow the most vulnerable to be left behind.
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