Lured to the Big Easy with promise of Katrina cleanup jobs, bands of workers face ...

BY TINA SUSMAN | STAFF CORRESPONDENT

December 20, 2005

NEW ORLEANS - Gary Wiggins was down on his luck and living in an Atlanta homeless shelter when a man named Harrison Braddy made an appealing offer - a job in New Orleans with a company cleaning up the hurricane-battered city, along with cheap housing.

Wiggins, 38, jumped at the chance. So did dozens of other Atlanta men, like Southern Brooks, 48, and Thomas Upshaw, 44. In subsequent weeks, they boarded the battered yellow school bus that Braddy provided and traveled to New Orleans. There, they encountered the harsh reality of doing business in the post-Katrina environment - subcontracting and the problems it presents bit players like Braddy's recruits, who went from being penniless in Atlanta to being penniless in New Orleans after working weeks without pay.

Braddy said he has not been paid by the companies that hired him to recruit workers, so he can't pay the men. They were at the bottom of a convoluted chain of subcontractors, all of whom say they are blameless in what labor advocates call an epidemic of abuse along the Gulf Coast as businesses look to profit from hurricane cleanup jobs.

'Rife with abuse'

"When you have a situation where there's this much money flowing and it's this unsupervised, it's just rife with abuses and with opportunities for people to exploit workers," said Bill Beardall, executive director of the Equal Justice Center, a Texas group that monitors labor violations.

Beardall said it's not unusual for the homeless, casual day laborers and undocumented workers to be cheated out of their pay. "But in the Gulf Coast, it's intensified about 10 times over by the amount of work being done, the amount of cleanup and recovery money flowing into the area, and the sudden and intense need for labor," he said.

The Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance has filed complaints against five subcontractors in Mississippi on behalf of about 150 workers who say they haven't been paid. Dozens of workers from North Carolina, South Carolina and Pennsylvania, in addition to those recruited by Braddy, say they have not been paid.

Advocates say the workers chances of getting their money are slim because such workers rarely have the wherewithal to pursue abusive employers. If the workers are in the country illegally, they fear complaining to authorities. If they are homeless, they rarely are able to organize themselves to wage a legal battle.

"What recourse do they have?" said Brenda Muniz of the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic legal rights organization, which has investigated complaints of workers not being paid in Mississippi. Many cases stem from subcontractors who, like Braddy, complain that they have been stiffed by another company.

With so many subcontractors involved in the cleanup, it is virtually impossible for low-tier workers to trace the money trail from the prime contractor - the large company hired by the federal government - through the subs working below it.

Bob Anderson, of the Army Corps of Engineers, which has several multimillion-dollar contracts with prime contractors in the region, said it's not unusual for each prime contractor to have 50 subcontractors. "I've seen one organizational chart for one contractor, and it looked like there were 150 subs in about five or six layers beneath the prime contractor," Anderson said.

It just takes one company

All it takes is one company to be late paying, or one unscrupulous subcontractor to pocket more than its share, and the effects are felt by everyone down the chain.

"A lot of them don't know who the ultimate source of their money is supposed to be," Muniz said of the workers on the bottom rung. "They just know who hired them."

Wiggins, Brooks and Upshaw blamed Braddy for their predicament, because he hired them. "He said he would house us, feed us and pay us $10 an hour. He said we didn't have to worry about a thing," said Wiggins, who arrived in New Orleans in late October.

By mid-November, he was living in a tent in a New Orleans park and relying on a charity for meals. He and Brooks said they had worked clearing hurricane debris and that each week, they were told their money was coming the following week.

A rock and a hard place

Upshaw, another Atlanta recruit, never went to work after seeing that others weren't being paid and were being put in a house with about 30 other men. "I saw the conditions in that house, and that was enough for me," said Upshaw, who ended up with Wiggins and Brooks living in the park.

At the house in the Algiers neighborhood, where a yellow school bus with Georgia license plates was parked at the curb, several men told similar stories of either not being paid or receiving portions of what they were owed. Most were torn between cutting their losses and leaving, or staying and hoping to get some money.

"As far as I'm concerned, we've been ripped off," said one, Anthony Bracley. "I'm trying to make some Christmas money and then go back, but I don't want to come all this way and leave empty-handed."