Rebuilding After Katrina: A Population-Based Study of Labor and Human Rights in New Orleans

Summary

As clean up efforts after Hurricane Katrina began, reports rose of employers in the Gulf Coast failing to pay their workers or to provide them with adequate safety equipment and housing. The Southern Poverty Law Center filed lawsuits against two large contractors for failure to pay wages to migrant workers who were removing toxic mold from hospitals and schools in order to restore public services to New Orleans. Workers alleged their employers paid them so poorly that they could not afford to buy food. Reports of abuse — coupled with the easing of labor regulations, virtually no monitoring of construction sites, and the city’s lack of adequate housing and healthcare — suggested that unscrupulous contractors could easily be exploiting their workers. Against this background, the International Human Rights Law Clinic and the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley collaborated with the Payson Center for International Development and Technology Transfer at Tulane University to conduct a study of the situation of construction workers in New Orleans. The study took place in March 2006 and examined both documented and undocumented workers.