Local 10 members load a container with Katrina relief supplies outside their dispatch hall. Photo by: John Showalter
By John Showalter
Kris Hillyer ran into her daughter’s bedroom and began packing clothes when she first saw the devastating images of Hurricane Katrina victims flashing across her television screen on the day after the Category Five storm crashed into New Orleans and communities along the Gulf Coast.
"I took all the new clothes I’d just bought her for school and packed them up to send to relatives in Jonesboro, Georgia. Their church is driving the goods to victims in Gulf Coastal communities," said Hillyer, an ILWU Local 52 marine clerk who works as an on-dock rail supervisor at the Port of Seattle. She is working with local Red Cross officials to let donors know which goods are most needed.
Hillyer’s actions are mirrored in the cash and material donations given by many ILWU local members coastwise in the weeks since Katrina robbed hundreds of thousands of working families of everything. The Coast Committee and the International have, together, donated $10,000 to the AFL-CIO’s hurricane relief fund, while a Seattle-based a relief fund established with the involvement of longshore Local 19’s Jack Block, Jr., Northwest Cares, has raised as much as $4,000 for storm victims.
Block—a City Councilman in Burien, Wash.—is coordinating hurricane relief donations and their shipment south with Hillyer, Gabriel Prawl of Local 19 and others from ILWU Puget Sound locals, regional churches and member organizations of the Million Worker March. The Burien City Council agreed to allow the ILWU to use an empty Gottchalk’s Department store and its parking lot as a drop-off point for donations, and steamship company NOL/APL has donated five empty 53-foot containers. Gordon Trucking loaned vehicles and Tacoma Local 23 members paid $2,900 for Teamsters Local 174 drivers to transport items like diapers, toiletries and clothes to a distribution center in one of several evacuee centers in San Antonio, Texas.
Block traveled with the five-truck relief convoy to San Antonio the week of Sept. 19. The trucks were unloaded by the Salvation Army and donated items were distributed by the Red Cross at three evacuation centers in the city where as many as 14,000 hurricane evacuees had been living. Block said that approximately 11,000 of the evacuees have found at least some form of temporary housing due to the generosity of real estate developers, families, churches or other public and private groups. More than 400 volunteers are still helping coordinate relief efforts on-site for the remaining 3,000 evacuees in San Antonio.
Other member-loaned vehicles have been driven south to towns in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana where relatives of union members and their churches have been driving goods on the final trip into the disaster areas. The combined donations of the Northwest locals are expected to help thousands of destitute individuals evacuated from the Gulf.
At Local 23, members joined with a military family relief effort called "Southern Comfort" at nearby Fort Lewis. As families from Gulf Coast military bases were relocated to Fort Lewis, the local pitched in to the donations in Burien, directed the needy families to the site to receive these goods and gave cash donations to these families. Members at other locals in California and the Columbia River region are giving through the AFL-CIO’s fund and coordinating with local churches, donors’ companies and distribution centers for evacuees in cities around the country.
At Local 10 in the San Francisco Bay Area, just days after Hurricane Katrina struck, retired longshoreman Reverend Joe Noble, Local 10 President Trent Willis, and Executive Board member Clarence Thomas met with U.S. Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA), member organizations of the Million Worker March and local NAACP officials to plan material donation efforts to the Gulf Coast. Mountains of community donations piled up in front of the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland were then loaded into containers donated by Maersk, Horizon and Matson shipping lines. On Sept. 8, longshore workers began packing the first San Francisco container in the Local 10 hiring hall parking lot with water, blankets and other necessities. At press time, eight containers in Oakland and two in San Leandro and one in San Francisco were shipped out.
Local 10 also passed a resolution opposing Bush’s repealing of the Davis-Bacon Act for the clean-up and rebuilding of New Orleans. That act requires contractors receiving federal money for construction projects to pay their workers at least the area prevailing wage. The resolution also supports the rights of New Orleans and Gulf community residents/victims to rebuild their own communities as part of a federally funded public works program, and not have outside contractors awarded the work.
In Southern California, volunteers from Local 13, building trades unions and other unions within the L.A. County Federation of Labor are working seven days a week to convert warehouse space belonging to the Salvation Army into a one-stop relief center that will house 100 families and serve over 1,000 people displaced by Katrina.
Dozens of Local 13 volunteers were among the first on the scene Sept. 8, as more than 500 County Fed activists literally swept clean the 120,000-square foot warehouse, clearing the way for carpenters, electricians, drywall laborers, plasterers and carpet layers to erect the maze of rooms that will house families and offer office space for agencies that will assist storm victims.
The Inlandboatmen’s Union, the ILWU’s Marine Division, has set up an "IBU Hurricane Relief Fund" with the Waterfront Credit Union in Seattle. Members are donating to that fund designed to help the dozen IBU members in the Gulf who have been affected by Katrina.
