Why Violence?: Leading Questions Regarding the Conceptualization and Reality of Violence in Society, Second Edition by Harper Dee Wood & Barrile Leo G. & Thornton William E. & Voigt Lydia

Author:Harper, Dee Wood & Barrile, Leo G. & Thornton, William E. & Voigt, Lydia [Harper, Dee Wood]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Carolina Academic Press
Published: 2017-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

To wit, on September 8, 2005, President Bush temporarily suspended the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 in the hurricane-damaged areas of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The Davis-Bacon Act is a United States federal law, which established a minimum pay scale for workers on federal contracts, mandating that contractors pay the prevailing or average pay in the region. The rationale for the suspension was to expedite the reconstruction of the region by allowing contractors, many of whom received FEMA and other federal contracts for Katrina-related work on schools, hospitals, and thousands of public works projects, to save taxpayers' money by hiring employees at the lowest wages the depressed local conditions would bear. However, the suspension of the Davis-Bacon Act did not require contractors to pass on the savings they accrued as a result of cheap labor. In fact, the result of the suspension of the Act ensured that local native workers were forced to accept lower wages than before Katrina, affecting their ability to rebound from the disaster.

New Latino immigrant migrant workers, many who could not speak the language and were unaware of standard pay scales, became, according to many, virtual slave laborers, “routinely cheated out of their earnings and denied basic health and safety protections” (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2009, p. 4). The prevailing wage in Louisiana for laborers was already relatively low by U. S. standards, i.e., $9.26 per hour. However, even that rate was no longer the minimum standard. Contractors were free to pay the federal minimum wage of $5.15 per hour. They had the discretion to go lower. Some did. Corporate greed had a nicely packaged method, wage theft with no limits on profit-taking (Working on Faith, 2006, p. 9). “In addition, contractors were no longer required to maintain records on wage rates paid for specific work, thereby facilitating wage discrimination and fraud” (Browne-Dianis, et al., 2006, p. 33).

While the federal government did not require contractors to demand documentation from their workers, at their own request hundreds of Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were sent to New Orleans in 2006 and 2007 with the authority to deport undocumented workers. Corporate greed had another amoral method neatly packaged for it from the federal government. They could rip off undocumented migrant workers on payday by calling ICE. Corporations certainly had ICE in their veins, and “often called in ICE causing frightened workers to either scatter without pay or face deportation to their home countries.” According to Saket Soni, an organizer with the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice, “this ... was a routine practice” (Beutler, 2007).

Corporations added to the pot by scrimping on safety. And OSHA went along. The exigent circumstances of the cleanup trumped worker safety, and companies brazenly suspended safety regulations to increase their profits. Many contractors did not supply their workers with the necessary health and safety equipment (e.g., masks and contamination suits). Workers suffered significant health problems, particularly Latino workers (Aguilar, 2006). The majority of the migrant workers had no access to medical care, and those who did could not afford the services that were available to them in the local area.

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