MEGA-RANT ALERT
I think many people missed the point of this thread. It's about ordinary people -- civil service workers -- losing their jobs, isn't it? I think the Nagin/Blanco bashing appears on enough other threads that there's plenty of room for everyone on FR to differ.
I don't live in New Orleans; I'm about 230 miles northwest near Alexandria, Louisiana. I didn't vote for Mayor Nagin or any of the Black politicians in the New Orleans government. Still, I'm also badly impacted by this situation just because I'm a resident of this state. What is happening down in New Orleans right now affects the state government as a whole, like a spreading cancer.
When I came here two years ago, I discovered that job opportunities were limited and mostly in fields I had no previous experience in, and that a shocking number of people were working for only $5.15 per hour. Worse yet was the all-pervasive "plantation" mentality that this was as good as it's ever gonna get, and no one should ever dare raise their head or open their mouth to challenge the status quo.
So, after a great deal of swimming against the tide trying to find employment compatible with my experience (let's not even talk about salary history), I realized that the best thing for me to do was take the Louisiana civil service exam and point myself toward a new career that allegedly offered a good, secure future.
I took all the tests, but somehow it never dawned on me until I got my scores just how much of a fish-out-of-water I am in this place. Everything came back with percentile scores in the high 90's, which means that thousands of people scored lower than I did in areas of basic literacy, customer service and management skills.
On top of everything else, the job requirements are incredibly dumbed-down. A supervisory-level word processing specialist, for example, only has to type 40 wpm to get the job. My own score was 91 wpm, but I remember looking around the testing room at the screens of the other applicants and noticed most of them were well below 40 wpm.
Does it sound like I'm bragging? I certainly hope not, because here's the punchline. Despite my education, experience and exam scores, time after time I did *not* get hired...and I never knew why. I went on about 20 civil service interviews, sometimes interviewing 5 different times at one facility, before I got hired for a position notorious for being at the bottom of the barrel. Everyone knew it was an extremely unpleasant high-turnover job with miserable conditions, but I was encouraged at every turn to take the offer "just to get your foot in the door and move onto something else in six months."
I bravely forged ahead and gave it my very best effort. My co-workers instantly disliked me because I had nothing in common with them. They were all young Black single mothers about half my age who were fond of blasting explicit rap music at deafening volumes until customers started writing letters of complaint about it. None of them could spell or type to save their lives, so I guess they felt threatened by me. I had no hard feelings against them, though. I realized that they were too illiterate to cut it anywhere else, and they were doing the very best they could to support their children. I also realized that these workers were in it for the long haul, that they paid their money into the LASERS retirement system (you stop paying into Social Security when you work for the State of Louisiana; they have their own plan, which at the moment is a pretty scary thought) and expected to be set for life.
To make an already long story shorter, I'll tell you that I was wrongfully terminated from this job two weeks before Katrina hit. I filed for unemployment and didn't hear anything for well over a month. I assumed that I had been disqualified, but didn't push it because I didn't want to stand in line behind the hundreds of hurricane victims lined up trying to file new claims. If anything, I was extremely grateful that I'd been let go before Katrina, because if that job had been hell before, I shuddered to think what it would have been like dealing with a surge of thousands of evacuees to process. It turned out, however, that they had thoroughly investigated the circumstances behind my claim and found that the state agency I had worked for had indeed wrongfully terminated me and that I was entitled to benefits. They were paid to me in a retroactive lump sum and have continued weekly since then.
Now, can you imagine a worse time to be unemployed, than when thousands of evacuees suddenly come streaming into your town -- many deciding to settle there permanently -- and they start pounding the pavement right alongside of you to compete for the same handful of job openings?
But I've been trudging along in my diligent job search, keeping records of contacts, only to be rewarded with form letters saying basically the same thing: Governor Blanco has declared a hiring freeze in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, so we can no longer fill the position for which you have interviewed.
Now here's the icing on the cake. I've probably collected about half the benefits in my unemployment account so far -- I've earned so little money living in Louisiana that there wasn't much to begin with -- when suddenly I get a letter from the Appeals Tribunal. It seems that the state agency I worked for is taking *me* in front of an Administrative Law Judge to appeal the decision in my favor.
Talk about adding insult to injury. First they terminated me when they weren't supposed to, and now they want to take away my unemployment benefits? And, hello, why wait over two months? I've got so many cliches running through my head over this -- the horse has left the barn, you can't unring a bell, etc. etc. I am only assuming that the agency instituted this appeal because the state has no money and that they are fighting tooth and nail for every nickel.
Now I'm just one employee being impacted by the collapse of the state government, so let's bring this full circle to the point of the thread. Multiply this by the 3,000 people just terminated in New Orleans, and think of the real tragedy here. All these people who really aren't qualified to do much of anything else have suddenly lost their livelihoods on top of their homes and personal possessions. These workers trusted the state and even paid into their mandatory retirement plan for years, and now all the state wants to do is yank the rug out from under them and kick them when they're already down.
It's a domino effect that has far-reaching consequences; we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg -- trust me!!