About 10 days ago, the AFL-CIO called for 1000 union volunteers to go help with the Katrina clean-up. I put my name in and was told they would get back to me.

A few days later the announcement mysteriously disappeared from the AFL-CIO website and I have heard nothing further.

It’s obvious that the Bush admin intends to use the Katrina Cleanup for the following:

1.Rewarding politically connected corporations with huge no-bid contracts.

2.Gutting environmental protection in the Gulf Coast region. This is especially ironic given that previous environmental destruction made the catastrophe far worse.

3.Driving down wages and working conditions for clean-up workers. They have already nullified the “prevailing wage” standards of the Davis-Bacon Act. Workers will be laboring in a toxic mess whose long-term health effects are unknown. Anyone in that situation should be receiving union wages and benefits plus a very generous bonus for hazardous duty. This attack on working class people has long term implications beyond the actual cleanup itself.

4.Positioning the GOP as the “Recovery Party” for the 2006 elections. This despite the fact that they refuse to rescind their “tax cuts for the rich” to help pay for Gulf Coast recovery-- a move that endangers the entire US economy.

Given what is going on now, the AFL-CIO should be sending 10,000 volunteers into the disaster zone to aid not only in cleanup, but in helping to organize an alternative recovery plan that actually mobilizes the working class people who were most affected by the disaster.

Sometimes I wonder if we even have a labor movement anymore...