Structurally Unemployed Workers Deliver Juneteenth Proclamation to City of New Orleans

From our friends at the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice:

Stand with Dignity Commemorated Juneteenth by delivering a proclamation to New Orleans City Council and Mayor.

"The 20 people who arrived at City Hall today with Stand were there to deliver a message to our city that we are going to continue fighting for full and fair employment until we see the changes that we need to see in our communities."  Said Alfred Marshall, Organizer of Stand with Dignity.

Representatives of all City Councilpersons and the Mayors office accepted the proclamation which calls for real career ladders in the Post-Katrina Reconstruction.  The group challenged city officials:

"We challenge you to work with us to fundamentally shift New Orleans’ dependency on the penal system to a system of opportunities for our community which will prevent the driving forces behind crime.  We challenge you to use the mass reconstruction of New Orleans to finally shift from a system of slavery and oppression to a system which drives toward full and fair employment.  We will all be free when we can be safe to live in our communities- to us safety is not just freedom from physical violence, but freedom from the violence of homelessness, poverty, mass incarceration that divides families, and the freedom that comes when you know you are doing what is right for you, your family, and your community."

"We are here to make sure that our elected officials understand that when we are locked out of work that not only hurts us and our families but it hurts our communities.  I understand that the Mayor is trying to take steps to deal with violence in our community- my message to Mayor Landrieu is you should work with what you got, right now what you got is a lot of construction work here- don't throw good money after bad, just make sure you get the most out of what you have to work with." said Chase Smith who was there with his young daughter.

New Report on Employment in Louisiana's Coastal Communities

Greater New Orleans Community Data Center (GNOCDC), always a crucial resource for information about our region, has released an important new report on the state of jobs on Louisiana's southern coast before BP's Drilling Disaster. According to the folks at GNOCDC:

"Measure. Measure. Measure.” That’s what our new friends from Prince William Sound have counseled their Gulf Coast colleagues. And we take their experience-based counsel quite seriously.

Today we’re releasing a brief on the number of jobs and workers living in coastal parishes prior to the oil disaster. This data is meant to serve as a baseline against which the impact of the oil spill can eventually be measured.

In addition, it provides much needed information on residential patterns along the coast, many months before the Census 2010 headcounts are to be released. This data can be useful for nonprofits and state agencies planning services for coastal populations.

The GNOCDC report provides the following background:

Millions of barrels of oil have idled commercial and sport fishing operations throughout southeastern Louisiana coastal waters since the Deepwater Horizon rig disaster of April 20, 2010. Businesses that serve the fishing industry, or buy their harvests, have similarly been affected. Among them are tackle shops, net makers, gas stations, restaurants, truckers, and seafood processors and distributors. Such is also the case for the travel and tourism sector, particularly in places such as Grand Isle which depends on summertime recreationists, although clean–up–related travel may partially offset such losses.

A moratorium on deepwater oil drilling will likely have an even greater economic impact throughout coastal Louisiana. Rig workers and oil–service operations will see fewer and smaller paychecks, and thus will inject less money into coastal economies. It is safe to say that nearly every business in coastal southeastern Louisiana will feel some effect of the oil disaster.

What impact will the oil disaster have on coastal Louisiana’s jobs? It is too soon to answer that question. We can, however, investigate the geography and nature of coastal employment prior to 2010 to create a baseline against which this unfurling situation and its eventual impacts on jobs may be compared.

This brief examines where jobs were located prior to the oil disaster in 2008 (the most recent available data) and what economic sectors they represented throughout the coastal region. While some maps cover from the Texas border all the way to Alabama, the brief primarily focuses on the coastal southeastern Louisiana parishes closest to the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil well.

Among the findings from the report:

*High concentrations of jobs appeared in many coastal areas prior to the oil disaster. In fact, the coastal periphery was second only to urban areas as employment nodes.
*Plaquemines Parish was home to 11,687 jobs but only 6,950 resident workers in 2008, indicating that people in neighboring parishes rely on this especially vulnerable parish for their livelihood. Oil-related impacts on the economy of Plaquemines parish, therefore, could reverberate region-wide.
*In Lafourche Parish, worker residences were more clustered in northern and central areas, while jobs tended to locate at the southern end—namely Port Fourchon, a key node in the regional petroleum and offshore economy.
*Among southeast Louisiana parishes, Terrebonne had the highest absolute number (6,089) and percent (11.5) of jobs in the oil and gas industry, far more than even the urbanized New Orleans metro parishes with much-larger populations. These jobs were particularly concentrated in two Houma zip codes that together are home to over 5,500 such jobs—more than double the number of oil and gas jobs in downtown New Orleans.

This report "Is based on 2008 Census Bureau data from company payrolls. As such it does not capture the thousands of self-employed fishermen not included in company payroll data—indicating that coastal Louisiana is even more important to job creation than our numbers suggest."

See the full report at the GNOCDC website.