Volume 147, No. 153 covering the 1st Session of the 107th Congress (2001 - 2002) was published by the Congressional Record.
The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“WORKING FAMILIES PLAY VITAL ROLE IN WAR AGAINST TERRORISM” mentioning the Environmental Protection Agency was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H7900-H7907 on Nov. 7, 2001.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
WORKING FAMILIES PLAY VITAL ROLE IN WAR AGAINST TERRORISM
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Shuster). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2001, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Owens) is recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I am disturbed by the fact that in this war against terrorism, which we all recognize is going to be a long-term war, we are not recognizing that working families in this struggle against terrorism are very important. Working families in the struggle against terrorism have a vital role to play. It is important that we all recognize that role that working families play.
I am disturbed because of the treatment that I see working families receiving. Since September 11, we have not behaved well toward working families. They are a vital component of our long-term mobilization to make certain that this Nation is never again subjected to the kind of attack that took place on September 11. They are a vital component of a war for the Nation, a war for the whole of civilization, really, because the kind of fanatics and zealots who attacked the World Trade Center are that kind of threat. So working families should be respected and considered a vital part of whatever we are going to do in the future.
I am also concerned about the fact that some immigrants who are Americans, working families and happen to be immigrants, are being unnecessarily harassed. Particularly in my congressional district there is a large contingent of Pakistani immigrants, Pakistani Americans. They have been subjected to all kinds of harassment by the INS and the FBI. In an overzealous attempt to demonstrate that they are working hard, the INS and the FBI have arrested large numbers of people, they say more than a thousand across the Nation, in the metropolitan area it is about 250; and I know from firsthand contact that a large number of these people are innocent Pakistanis. It is ironic that the one Muslim nation that has gone the farthest out to join us in the fight against terrorism, taken a great deal of risk as a nation, is Pakistan.
Why are Pakistani Americans being lumped into the whole threat to America that it is perceived immigrants represent? Why not recognize that the President of Pakistan is coming to this country this weekend. He will be at the United Nations. He is going to talk to President Bush. Pakistan again has not reneged on their offer to make some air base space available. They are way out there with us. I think that to subject Pakistani Americans to unnecessary harassment and intimidation, some which resulted in the death of one Pakistani man in a jerry-built detention center in New Jersey, large numbers of people were being detained by the INS in a facility that was being run by the local county, the county jail, and the man had a heart attack and died. There are large numbers of others who are in detention right now whose names we cannot get. There are an unusually large number of women also who are being detained, Pakistani women. These are all people who are basically working-class people. I am emphasizing this because no wealthy Pakistanis would be involved in this. No wealthy immigrants are going to be subjected to this, either.
It is very interesting that those who talk about immigration never talk about the fact that in our immigration laws, we actually have provisions which encourage rich, wealthy immigrants to come in. We have incentives for wealthy immigrants. We put them at the front of the line. The assumption is made in this present situation where we are unnecessarily harassing immigrants, the assumption is made, I guess, that only the poor immigrants are a threat.
Why the assumption is made, I do not know, because Osama bin Laden is a rich man. Osama bin Laden comes from a very rich class of Saudi Arabians. There are many Saudi Arabians and other people from the rich Arab world that are in this country who never get harassed and never have been harassed since September 11, I assure you. There are many who have contracts with lobbying firms here in Washington. There are some really very famous celebrities and ex-government officials who work in consultant firms for these same rich people. They are not immigrants, or in some cases immigrants. The children of these rich people are here on visas all the time. They are not subjected to this. It is another case of the mentality too much in America is a mentality which is weighed in a direction which makes working-class families suspect or second class.
I do not want to fall into the trap of fomenting a class war. The people who really believe in a class war are quick to accuse liberals and Democrats and progressives of wanting to start a class war. The class war is not even a war. The people who are in control in our country who have the greatest part of the wealth and the power, they are so overwhelming in their power that they dominate the working class. It is not a war. It is just a domination, the way they push the interests of the working families around.
There is no better example of that than what has occurred since September 11. Consider the fact that we passed a bill to bail out the airline industry, $5 billion in cash for them to divide up among themselves because of losses we say they suffered as a result of being grounded by the Federal Government after the September 11 attack. They were able to play with that, and they are going to get another $15 billion in loans. That is for the airline industry, the executives, et cetera. At the same time many of us pleaded that at least the airline employees should be taken care of in the same legislation, because, after all, when you grounded the airline industry, the planes, you also took away the employment of the people who work on those planes either in the base or in flight or the supporting services at the airports.
So why not have a relief package for them? Because of that traumatic economic blow to the airlines, they were already beginning to lay off large numbers of workers. So we said, the workers who are laid off, let us provide for them. We got from the Republican majority an insistent no, an ideological no. There was a lot of talk about ideologues. A blunt no, we will see about them later. We even got some half-hearted promise that next week. Well, next week has not come yet. There has been no particular special relief for the airline industry employees. We are now moving through the preparation of an economic stimulus package where the same ideologues are insisting that we should not have any great amount of relief for the unemployed in general. The unemployed people are at the very bottom who are suffering greatly from this economic slump that was given a great boost downward. It was pushed downward and made more serious by the September 11 attack.
We ought to stop and consider what our long-term mission is here. We have had forced upon us the need to consider what is the United States of America all about. Before September 11, we were the most powerful Nation in the world.
{time} 1945
We are the most powerful nation that ever existed on the face of the Earth. We were prosperous, very smug, and anybody who said we needed to stop and think about our relationship with the rest of the world and what our mission is as a nation and how our mission as a nation is important, because in defining that mission, we not only protect ourselves and defend ourselves and guarantee our children and our grandchildren will enjoy the same kind of liberty, prosperity and comfort that we enjoy. That is the dream I think every person has.
I am a grandfather, and I look at my grandchildren and say I want them to have a world as good as the world I am, and, if possible, better. So we want a better world. We cannot do that by acting in isolation as the United States of America.
A lot of us understood that before. Since September 11, most Americans are beginning to hear from the leadership that that is an impossibility, starting with the leadership in the White House. Appropriately, President Bush moved to establish a coalition, what is called a coalition, but the coalition is to deal with terrorism. The coalition spirit should be a permanent spirit.
In defending ourselves against terrorism, we are coming to grips with what our Nation is all about, what civilization is all about. Because the people who have perpetrated these terrorist acts are striking at the very jugular vein of our Nation and our civilization.
Our long-term mission has to be to understand that we stand for certain values, and those values are what bring about our enemies. The people who perpetrated the terrorist acts on September 11 do not like those values.
We should not cry about it or spend undue time worrying about whether we are liked or not. The question is, why are we not liked, who does not like us, and what do we think of the people who do not like us?
People hate our values, and we should not get into the trap of one religion being set up against another. Certainly Osama bin Laden wants to make it a conflict between Christianity and Islam. A lot of other people would enjoy having the real issue hidden under crosses and past history of crusades, et cetera. But we are not a country that accepts religion as a basis for our being. We are not a country that adopts one religion.
We have a certain value system, and the value system is really what upsets our enemies most. Whether we were Christian or Jewish or any other religion, they still do not like the value systems that are defined and set forth and promulgated by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Probably more so than the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence defines what America is all about. It is not a legal definition, because the Declaration of Independence, the preamble, is not a legal matter. You do not go to court on that. The Constitution is a legal document that we have a lot of wrangling about, back and forth in the court.
But Thomas Jefferson's declaration that all men are created equal and are endowed by certain inalienable rights, and among those are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, is the core of the spirit of what this Nation is all about, the core of our democracy and what it is all about, the core of what we carry about throughout the world, the core of what the world is responding to.
Anybody who says we are more hated in the world than we are liked in the world, I challenge them right away. I think we are more imitated, admired, and people would duplicate our system, if they could, ordinary people.
We have leaders out there, fanatics, zealots, who would like to see this belief in the equality of all men ended. And we should stop saying all men, but say all humans, because we clearly believe that women should be equal to men. That upsets a large number of people throughout the world. Equality of men and equality of women.
We do not subscribe to a system which says that you have got some people up here who can be ayatollahs or chiefs or kings or sultans or potentates that have a right to trample on the people underneath them, that the lives of the people at the bottom of the economic ladder are not as good as the lives of people at the top; that they do not deserve the same system of justice, the opportunity to improve themselves; that they do not deserve an education.
The spirit of America is what the enemies of America hate. That spirit is summed up in the statement about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and all human beings are created equal.
It does not matter what happens in our foreign policy today, tomorrow or the next day. If you do not back away from believing all men and women are created equal and we continue to have a democratic system, and we are going to have decisions made as fair as possible and keep trying to perfect it to make it real, we are going to offend large numbers of people throughout the world. Large numbers of zealots and fanatics are always going to be attacking us.
Do not worry about whether they like us or not. We have a mission to try to go throughout the world and make people understand how important this is.
We have succeeded greatly in expanding democracy in the 20th century. Just stop and think about two very sophisticated, powerful nations with influence stretching over large areas of the world who became definite democracies. Without question, Japan and Germany, after the defeat in World War II, became democracies. Whatever else they are, nobody challenges; nobody would question the fact that Germany is a great democracy now and will be tomorrow. There is no likelihood that they are going to sink into fascism, totalitarianism. Germany is clearly a democracy. We accomplished that.
The transformation of Germany, some people said, well, we do not engage in nation-building. That is bad. Call it what you want. We did not exactly nation-build in Germany. They had a nation, very rigid rules and social strata. All kinds of things are happening there, and it is still happening in many cases.
It is just as in the case of Japan. We did not knock down traditions in Japan. We did not turn around their religion. We did not turn around their deeply entrenched practices with respect to marriage and a number of other things. But Japan is a democracy. Germany is a democracy. Two great nations with a lot of influence are moving forward as democracies.
The Soviet Union, which most of us felt in our lifetime would never be called a democracy, is struggling and moving and has operated for a number of years now, 10 years, as a democracy, a struggling democracy. A huge nation, but a very large sphere of influence.
Democracy. Democracy moves on. We should not back away from that mission.
India, whatever problems India may have internally, India is a democracy. The untouchables in India probably feel like blacks felt in America 20 or 30 years ago, and there are still a lot of things to be done about the way untouchables are treated in certain regions. But India is basically committed to democratic rule. They have gone through a lot of tribulations and travails, social and political travails, but they have not yielded to any temptation to lapse back into something other than democracy.
So our way of life, our mission in the world, is to perpetrate that democracy. That may mean we need to go to war when it is necessary, when we are attacked. I must say that people who say that what is happening in Afghanistan is similar to what happened in Vietnam are starting out with the wrong premise. The Vietnamese never attacked us. Whatever you may think about the war in Vietnam, we were never attacked. They did not perpetrate 5,000 casualties on us in the first day of the war.
A war was declared upon us. Even the Japanese at Pearl Harbor did not hit as many casualties, and they did not hit the mainland of America. So war was declared upon us via an attack on the mainland of America. As a nation, there was no choice but to accept the challenge and go to war. The nature of that war and how we conduct it is something we can debate about, but war was necessary.
We are at war physically. Militarily we are at war. But we also are at war for the minds, and we understand the minds of the world, the minds of human beings all over the world are part of this war and effort.
So we must, as we conduct this war and understand our long-term mission, understand that working families are very vital in this struggle against terrorism. How working families are treated, how they are included, how they are allowed to participate, how we show concern for their problems is vital to the effort to win the war against terrorism and to win the war for a democratic world, where all men and women are seen as equal, where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the values of the people who are in charge of nations.
Barbarians are anyone choosing to define themselves as being against all this, who are our enemies. The barbarians are against equality, equal rights for all men and women. They are against life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as being a basic set of rights. They define themselves. We do not have to wrangle about their way of life or their religion, whatever. If you are against equality for all people, if you are against the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, you are our enemy. You define yourself, and we are committed.
We must maintain a mission to deal with that enemy. As long as the enemy believes that way and does not attack us, certainly we will not attack them. It is a battle of words. It is a battle of ideas. It is a battle of moral concepts. We would like to see it return to just a battle of words, ideas and moral concepts.
But since it is a hot war, a military war, engagement is taking place, working families and the sons and daughters of working families are very much involved in that war. If you look at percentages, I assure you the percentage of the people who are running the operation, whether it is the women in the rear, in the ships and the planning of the logistics or whatever, or the men who are in the Special Forces teams that landed already or are getting ready to land, you are going to find that large percentages of those people, overwhelming percentages, are from working families.
How dare we ignore the needs of working families when, if you did not understand how vitally important they are before, you certainly must acknowledge now how vitally important they are? Because this is nothing new. In all the wars that have ever been fought, there are always working families, people on the bottom who make the greatest sacrifices. Their sons and daughters have been the cannon fodder in every war since the Revolutionary War onwards.
Therefore, if we are wise and we want to continue the progress of our Nation and fulfill the vision of the Declaration of Independence, working families should be treated well. They are on the battlefields, wherever they are. They sacrifice, they take the great risks. They are on the battlefield domestically. They are needed very much as we try to shore up our home security.
There are a lot of problems that we have just because we do not have the personnel, quality personnel, to fill jobs. I have spoken about this before, but, since then, just last week, the Government Office of Personnel launched a major campaign to get young people to come into the government. We are trying to entice people in to fill the positions.
There are investigative positions, there are analyst positions, there are positions in the computer areas, and there are, of course, translators. I talked about that before. There is a great need for translators, people who can translate from Arabic, from Farsi, just as an example.
So we have a great need that cannot be filled by educating just the middle class and elite children. I have talked about this many times. Our public education system, which is an American invention, public education, which sets forth the credo that all children should be educated, it is one of the great contributions to civilization.
It is also one of the reasons that we are greatest Nation in the world. Step by step, when we need it, the brain power to go forward, the brain power has been there. Thomas Jefferson understood that we had to get away from educating people just to speak Greek and Latin and deal with philosophy and religion. They have to be educated in the arts of farming, engineering, et cetera. So he was the creator of the model for the land grant colleges which came later.
Of course, those land grant colleges established in every State were fed by a system of public education, which, in State by State, over the years, has been very much imperfect, and there are many problems. The problems did not just begin a few decades ago. We have always had problems.
But we must rush now to solve those problems by making certain that working class families, children of working class families, get a first-class education, because in addition to them being our first defenders on the battlefields of the world when there is a military conflict, they are also the ones that have to replenish the human resources that we need to run the CIA, to run the FBI, to run the INS, to take care of a very complex society.
{time} 2000
Even the airplanes and the aircraft carriers and the tanks and all of the weapons require educated people to operate them at this point. So it is imperative that we recognize the vital role of working families and we end what has happened this year in this country, this House of Representatives. What has happened this year is that since September 11 it has come out more than ever before that there is great contempt for people in the working class. Working-class families are being treated with great contempt. The majority of Republicans show again and again their great contempt for the working families of America. Minimum wage, they refuse to talk about it at all. We have not increased the minimum wage. We have not each even had a chance to discuss it.
Mr. Speaker, I am making a plea to my colleagues that we end the contempt, the class contempt and the class hostility that is reflected in the way we have treated working-class families in this Congress. We refuse to discuss minimum wage, so people are mired at the very bottom and have had no movement for the last 2 years. No discussion of it at all.
What has happened since September 11? There is an article that appeared in The New York Times on Tuesday, yesterday, which I think is a very thorough analysis in a very compact way of what has happened to working families. The article in The New York Times, Tuesday, November 6 is entitled: ``A Tax Hit Low Pay Jobs the Hardest. Many of the unemployed were in the service industry.'' It is by Leslie Eaton and Edward Wyatt. ``The terrorists,'' and I read a quote from the article,
``The terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center may have been trying to crush American capitalism and its masses of the universe on Wall Street, but the economic impact of the attack is felling a very different group of people: cooks, cab drivers, sales clerks, and seamstresses. Workers in traditionally low pay industries like restaurants and hotels, retailing and transportation, have been hit hard in the fallout from September 11, according to a new analysis from the New York State Department of Labor. A report released yesterday by the labor-backed Fiscal Policy Institute forecasts that almost 80,000 people will have lost their jobs by the end of the year, and that 60 percent of these positions paid an average of $23,000 a year.''
That is far below the citywide average salary of roughly $58,000 in New York City. New York City has a slightly higher salary scale and standard of living. If we want to know who I am defining as working families, I am not going to get into trying to deal with expert definitions, but let us just say anybody who has a family and they are making less than $50,000 a year can consider themselves in a working-
family situation. The working families income-wise. There are other features. People have to get up every day and go to work. There are some people who may get $50,000 a year from their investments in the stock market or various interest-bearing accounts or real estate, but the people have to get up and go to work every day and are making less than $50,000 a year are clearly people who belong to working families; and there are an overwhelming majority of people in America who fall into this category.
Continuing to read from the article that appeared in the New York Times on November 6: ``The spillover effect hit the retail and service industries very hard in New York City, said James Parrott, the chief economist for the institute, and those tend to be lower wage jobs. A sudden decline in these jobs marks a sea change in the economy since September 11. Earlier this year while the job market was softening, the losses were concentrated among white collar workers like dot-com programmers, stockbrokers, and advertising executives. Now they are concentrated among people like Kim Daily. A single mother of two, Ms. Daily worked her way up from a $6 an hour job picking up room service trays to a $15 an hour job stocking mini bars at the World Trade Center Marriott. When the hotel was destroyed on September 11, so was her job. She has not been able to find another job. It is not for lack of trying. She stood in line for 4 hours outside a city-sponsored job fair, but never even made it to the door. She has been talking to a union, but the only position available so far was so tip-dependent, that she wondered if it would cover her $700-a-month rent. A job bank had only a few hotel positions, and none of them paid anywhere near the
$25,000 that she earned at the Marriott last year. I do not want to go for less money, she said. But a changed job market raises huge challenges for the city at a time when hundreds of thousands of families have moved off the welfare rolls.''
Here is a welfare recipient who got a job for $6 an hour. She worked up to $15 an hour, and $15 an hour comes out to $25,000 a year in her pay, so we are certainly not talking about wealthy, well-to-do people. We are talking about people who are working ever day, but getting very low pay.
Continuing the article: ``The changing job market raises huge challenges for the city at a time when hundreds of thousands of families have moved off the welfare rolls. The most successful of these former welfare recipients, as well as many newcomers to the country, found jobs at the hotels and restaurants, as cleaners of office buildings, and as messengers in lower Manhattan. Now that the economy has exploded along with the World Trade Center, their prospects of staying in the world of work have diminished, said David R. Jones, the President of the Community Service Society of New York, which has been helping workers who lost their jobs after September 11. His group is recommending a government-financed jobs program, he said. Otherwise we will have people sitting on stoops, getting a little check and doing nothing, he said.''
That is David Jones of the Community Service Society talking. He is more optimistic than I am. Given welfare reform, there are a lot of these people who are very needy, desperately needy, who will never get a welfare check. They will never be sitting on a stoop doing nothing, because the way the system operates now, you can almost starve. Your family can go completely mad before you get any help.
Continuing the article: ``How many New Yorkers are unemployed is unclear. In a government survey taken in the week of September 11, which anyone who worked at all was counted as employed, 223,100 people in New York were looking for work. That was an increase of almost 20,000 people in a month. The unemployment rate hit 6.3 percent. The October survey will not be released for several weeks, but its results are included in Federal figures which were released on Friday. Those Federal figures show that a surge in national unemployment rose by half a percentage point to 5.4 percent,'' and we have all been reading about the fact that that surge to 5.4 percent represents the highest unemployment for the last 20 years. The unemployment rate is higher now than it has been in 20 years.
``Unemployment insurance covers only about a third of unemployed workers. The number of people applying for benefits in the city have soared. Last month, an average of 12,745 people a week had applied. A year ago, that figure was merely 5,616 a week. A special program, Disaster Unemployment Assistance, is supposed to help those who are not eligible for unemployment insurance because they work part-time or they were self-employed before. They are not eligible. But only 2,350 people are now getting those benefits.''
In other words, out of the 12,745, only 2,350 are getting those special disaster unemployment benefits in New York State.
``Almost 25,000 people told the New York State Department of Labor that they lost their jobs because of the Trade Center disaster. The analysis said that the first 22,000 of these claims found that about 16 percent worked at bars and restaurants, 14 percent worked in hotels, and 5 percent worked in air transportation. Only 4 percent at Wall Street brokerage firms.'' And many of them have been relocated to some other place. They have fared the best.
``The largest group of people, 21 percent, worked in a category called business services. Many of these were temporary workers like Lisa Mendes, a single mother who lost her job as an accounting clerk on September 12. In years past when one temporary job ended, she could pick and choose among the offerings of the agencies. Now there is just nothing there. Ms. Mendes is typical of the unemployed in another way: she lives in Brooklyn. The Labor Department analysis said that almost 26 percent of the people who said they were jobless because of the twin towers collapsed lived in Brooklyn.''
Brooklyn happens to be my home borough. The 11th Congressional District is located in the center of Brooklyn.
``Twenty-four percent of the people lived in Queens, 12 percent lived in the Bronx, and just 18 percent live in Manhattan where most of the jobs are located. Ms. Mendes, who is from Jamaica, is lucky of the many of the unemployed because she speaks English and she can use a computer. The Consortium for Worker Education, which runs a special program for people unemployed because of the disaster, and they have already counseled 3,200 people, they have 5,000 jobs in that special bank,'' for people who can handle that kind of need, I mean are familiar with computers. ``Most of them are back office jobs, data entry jobs, word processing jobs, administrative assistance, said Sal Rosen, the Associate Director of that group.
``Hotel and restaurant employment has been devastated by the destruction of the trade center and the steep drop in tourism that followed. Most restaurants are not unionized, but Local 100 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, which represents about 6,000 restaurant workers, say that 10 percent of its membership lost jobs immediately after September 11. About 200 of those, 600 have since found work, but not necessarily in restaurants.
``John Haynes has a short-term job at the Immigrant Workers Assistance Alliance helping undocumented workers. Until September 11, he cooked meals on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center for the 250 employees of Windows on the World. He said he earned $408 a week before taxes, about $25,400, and he lives in a public housing unit in the Bronx.'' Mr. Haynes is of course quite happy that he escaped death, first of all.
``The tourism and travel drought has hit many businesses in Queens, according to a new report by the Center for an Urban Future, a public policy group. Airline workers, freight forwarders, truckers and limousine drivers are all hurting.'' And on and on it goes.
They also included in the same article a chart which breaks out 10 occupations that were most affected by events of September 11, unemployed after the attack. The occupation: waiters and waitresses. The estimated layoffs were 4,225 as a result of September 11 events. The average hourly wage of those waitresses and workers was $7.08 an hour. Cleaning and maintenance workers about 3,365, have lost their jobs. Their average wage was $14.90 an hour.
{time} 2015
Sales representatives (retail), 2,843. Their average wage was $9.15 an hour; food preparation, 2,284, and they made $8.90 an hour; cashiers, 2,282 and $7.36 an hour they make; housekeeping workers, 1,840, and $13.42 they make; food preparation and fast food service, 1,718 have been laid off, and $7.09 was their average wage; general managers and top executives, 1,367 have lost their jobs. Their average wage per hour was $51.34; sales supervisors, 1,183, and $22.42 an hour; service supervisors, about 1,070 have lost their jobs, and they made
$16.46.
This chart is for ten occupations most affected by the events of September 11. It appears in the New York Times Tuesday, November 6.
I include for the Record the entire article.
The article referred to is as follows:
Attacks Hit Low-Pay Jobs The Hardest
Many of the Unemployed Were in Service Industry
(By Leslie Eaton and Edward Wyatt)
The terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center may have been trying to crush American capitalism and its masters of the universe on Wall Street. But the economic impact of the attack is felling a very different group of people: cooks, cabdrivers, sales clerks and seamstresses.
Workers in traditionally low-wage industries, like restaurants and hotels, retailing and transportation, have been hit hard in the fallout from Sept. 11, according to a new analysis from the New York State Department of Labor.
And a report released yesterday by the labor-backed Fiscal Policy Institute forecasts that almost 80,000 people will have lost their jobs by the end of the year and that 60 percent of these positions paid an average of $23,000 a year. That is far below the citywide average salary of roughly
$58,000.
``The spillover effects hit the retail and service industries very hard in New York City,'' said James Parrott, the chief economist for the institute. ``And those tend to be lower-wage jobs.''
The sudden decline in these jobs marks a sea change in the economy since Sept. 11. Earlier this year, while the job market was softening, the losses were concentrated among white-collar workers like dot-com programmers, stockbrokers and advertising executives.
Now, they are concentrated among people like Kim Daily. A single mother of two, Ms. Daily worked her way up from a $6-an-hour-job picking up room-service trays to a $15-an-hour job stocking minibars at the World Trade Center Marriott.
When the hotel was destroyed on Sept. 11, so was her job. And she has not been able to find another one.
It is not for lack of trying; she stood in line for four hours outside a city-sponsored job fair but never even made it in the door. She has been talking to her union, but the only position available so far was so tip-dependent that she worried it would not cover her $700-a-month rent. A job bank had only a few hotel positions, and none paid anywhere near the $25,000 she earned at the Marriott last year.
``I don't want to go for less money,'' she said.
The changed job market raises huge challenges for the city at a time when hundreds of thousands of families have moved off the welfare rolls. The most successful of these former welfare recipients, as well as many newcomers to this country, found jobs at hotels and restaurants, as cleaners at office buildings and as messengers in Lower Manhattan.
``Now that the economy has exploded along with the World Trade Center, their prospects of staying in the world of work have diminished,'' said David R. Jones, president of the Community Service Society of New York, which has been helping workers who lost their jobs after Sept. 11.
His group is recommending a government-financed jobs program, he said. ``Otherwise, we'll have people sitting on stoops, getting a little check and doing nothing,'' he said.
How many New Yorkers are unemployed is unclear. In a governmental survey taken in the week of Sept. 11, in which anymore who worked at all was counted as employed, 223,100 people in New York City were looking for work (after adjustments for seasonal factors). That was an increase of almost 20,000 people in a month. The unemployment rate hit 6.3 percent.
The October survey will not be released for several weeks, but its results are included in federal figures, released Friday, that showed a surge in national unemployment, which rose by half a percentage point, to 5.4 percent. Unemployment insurance covers only about a third of unemployed workers, but the number of people applying for benefits in the city was has soared. In the last month, an average of 12,745 people a week has applied; a year ago, that figure was 5,616.
A special program, Disaster Unemployment Assistance, is supposed to help those who are not eligible for unemployment insurance (usually because they worked part time or were self-employed). But only 2,350 people are now getting those benefits.
Almost 25,000 people told the New York State Department of Labor that they lost their jobs because of the trade center disaster. An analysis of the first 22,000 of those claims found that about 16 percent worked at bars and restaurants, 14 percent worked at hotels and 5 percent worked in air transportation. Only 4 percent worked at Wall Street brokerage firms (many of which simply relocated workers to Midtown or New Jersey).
The largest group of people--21 percent--worked in a category called business services. Many of them were temporary workers, like Lisa Mendes, a single mother who lost her job as an accounting clerk on Sept. 12. In years past, when one temporary job ended, she could pick and choose among the offerings at the agencies. Now, ``there's just nothing there,'' she said. ``It's scary.''
Ms. Mendes is typical of the unemployed in another way--she lives in Brooklyn. The Labor Department analysis found that almost 26 percent of those who said they were jobless because of the twin towers collapse live in Brooklyn; 24 percent live in Queens, and 12 percent live in the Bronx. Just 18 percent live in Manhattan.
But Ms. Mendes, who is from Jamaica, is luckier than many of the unemployed because she speaks English and can use a computer. The Consortium for Worker Education, which runs a special program for people unemployed because of the disaster
(and has already counseled more than 3,200 of them) has 5,000 jobs in its special job bank.
``Most of them are back-office jobs, data entry, word processing, administrative assistants,'' said Saul Rosen, associate executive director of the group.
Hotel and restaurant employment has been devastated by the destruction of the trade center and the steep drop in tourism that followed. Most restaurants are not unionized, but Local 100 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, which represents about 6,000 restaurant workers, says that 10 percent of its membership lost jobs immediately after Sept. 11. About 200 of those 600 have since found work, but not necessarily restaurant work.
John Haynes has a short-term job at the Immigrant Workers Assistance Alliance, helping undocumented workers. Until Sept. 11, he cooked meals on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center for the 250 employees of Windows on the World. He said he earned $488.80 a week before taxes, or about
$25,400 a year, and he lives in public housing in the Bronx.
He does not think he will be able to go back into restaurant work, he says. ``They are not hiring right now,'' he said. ``So I'm going to go for job training, either in computers or photo imaging.''
The tourist and travel drought has hit many businesses in Queens, according to a new report by the Center for an Urban Future, a public policy group. Airline workers, freight forwarders, truckers and limousine drivers are all hurting.
Listen to Greg Buttle, who operates valet parking lots at the three major New York area airports: You park at these lots and workers will shuttle you to and from the terminal for about $13 a day plus tax. (They will also wash your car, change the oil, rotate or replace the tires, even pick up your dry cleaning.) Before, he normally had more than 150 cars in the lots; now, there are about 50, he said.
Mr. Buttle said he employed 45 people before Sept. 11; now he employs 30. ``I tried to make sure that the part-timers who have come in most recently are the first ones to go,'' he said. ``But some of our employees have worked for us for eight or nine years.''
For more evidence of the spillover effect, look at Chinatown. Business has plunged at many of the more than 200 sewing shops below Houston Street and at least 20 went out of business in October, said May Chen, a vice president of Unite, the garment workers' union. At least a thousand of her 10,000 members have lost their jobs as stores and clothing companies have canceled orders. Others are working reduced hours.
Their job prospects are not good. ``Because of the language barrier, sewing is about the only skill they have,'' said Susan Cowell, another union official.
Unite also represents workers at commercial laundries; because of the declines at many restaurants, about 600 of these workers have also been laid off.
With the public's attention riveted to the sad stories of the dead and the heroism of the rescuers, some workers fear that their plights will be ignored.
``No one wants to hear our stories,'' said Asmat M. Ali, a former captain at Windows on the World. ``About a busboy or the dishwasher making $250 a week and raising three kids in an apartment in the Bronx or Brooklyn. But 80 percent of the people who worked in the World Trade Center fell in that category.''
Mr. Speaker, I think this is a landmark article which clearly sets forth the basic thesis of my discussion: Working families in the struggle against terrorism are suffering greatly already in New York City.
The domino effect of the World Trade Center catastrophe and the declining economy goes right across the whole country. Workers in New York City are not the only workers suffering. The pattern that I have just set forth applies right across the country in the big cities, and certainly places where tourism was important, places where the service industries are important, they are all suffering equally. These are the people who are vital to our winning the struggle against terrorism, to the saving of our civilization. They are suffering in a very direct way. We are not responding in this Congress to that suffering.
As I said before, we approved a bill for the airline industries, and at that time we would not approve a bill for the airline employees who were being laid off in large numbers. We said we would do it next week. It is 3 weeks later now, and we still have not done it. There seems to be no haste at all.
The airline employees, those who are unemployed, have been lumped with the other unemployed now. What does the Republican majority propose for the other people who are unemployed? Piddling, very tiny amounts of money were included in the stimulus package that has already passed this House of Representatives.
We passed the stimulus package in the House without any significant aid for the unemployed and for working families. The emphasis of the bill that passed the House by the Republican leadership, the Republican majority's bill, which passed by a two-vote margin, that bill places great emphasis on more tax cuts.
We are going to have more tax cuts because the ideologues say the tax cuts are necessary for investment. The ideologues say when we have tax cuts, people invest, the investment creates jobs, and it trickles down to people on the bottom.
But sometimes tax cuts are not invested, they are just hoarded. Sometimes tax cuts lead to people having money which they invest in other parts of the world where they get a higher return on their investment. Taking care of big business does not automatically lead to a benefit for people on the bottom, and that has been shown again and again.
The best way to help poor people, we know from social services practices, nonprofit services practices, the best way to help people is to put money in their hands. Unemployed people need money. Unemployed people, people who have working families, cannot save the money. They need the money now. They will spend the money now. It will turn over in our economy.
We recognize that the engine of capitalism is consumerism. Consumers make our economy go. Why do we hesitate, then, to make provisions for people who are the number one consumers? The working families are our number one consumers. It does not make sense.
Ideologues, people trapped in a vision of the world which says, no, government spending are always bad, tax cuts are always good, they have their heads in the sand in a dangerous way.
So we are stalled. Fortunately, yesterday the other body unveiled an economic stimulus package that sets up a situation where we will have another opportunity maybe in the conference to fight for the unemployed.
The other body's plan was drafted in close consultation with labor leaders who helped persuade key Senators to gear the package heavily to helping workers who have lost their jobs, but some elements sought by labor were trimmed back in the final hours, even though the plan is still far superior to the one that came through the House.
Democrats will be able to get the bill through the closely divided Senate Finance Committee. Tomorrow it is expected, but no Republican has signed onto the plan. It is even doubtful it could pass on the Senate floor unless it is agreed that they would not have a filibuster.
The House and Senate bills are almost mirror opposites of each other. The House bill devotes about 75 percent of its $99 billion first-year cost to business and individual tax cuts, while only about one-quarter of the $90 billion Senate bill would reduce tax revenue.
The Senate plan also includes $20 billion for additional spending on infrastructure and security. AFL President John Sweeney said that
``Congress took care of companies'' with airline rescue legislation, and ``they continued to lay off workers. Weeks have gone by and no action was taken and the unemployment numbers rise. It's about time they deal with the unfairness here.''
One of the tax provisions, allowing companies to speed up depreciation of newly-purchased assets, would cost States about $2 billion in revenue. With State budgets already under pressure, that could lead to layoffs of State workers, county workers, city workers.
We have contempt for the needs of the people on the very bottom at a time when it is pretty clear that they have to play a vital role in our war on terrorism.
I hope the message goes out and all of the Members of Congress who are listening would understand the need to communicate with their working families about the unfairness of this, and about the fact that this Congress is being managed in a way in which it is almost impossible to get up enough momentum to confront the party in control.
We spend a lot of time in recess. We spend a lot of time working back in the district. There is a plot, a scheme to minimize the amount of time spent on the floor of this House and people speaking in a way which might be picked up by the general public, and certainly working families.
So the message has to be gotten out there somehow that working families are being treated unfairly. Working families have a vital role to play in the struggle against terrorism, and they are not being recognized for their full worth. We demand that there be some definite changes made.
On another area, working families are being subjected to conditions which are going to create more unnecessary victims. We have a situation where we opened this Congress this year with a repeal of the ergonomics standards by OSHA. There was joy in the majority, great joy and celebration in taking away labor standards and standards to assist the safety of working people, working families, members who have to go out and work every day in the area of ergonomics.
There was a set of standards that would have helped make the workplace far safer, less dangerous, and less debilitating for key people. On all measures that relate to worker safety, we have tremendous opposition from the Republican majority. I know because I am the ranking member of the Subcommittee on WorkForce Protections. It is my job to deal with workforce protections, and we have bill after bill and effort after effort to cut down on the safety or the government's protection of the safety of workers.
Now this monster has raised its ugly head at ground zero in New York. At ground zero, we have a situation where rescue workers and other people in the area are not being protected properly, and we are going to have victims created unnecessarily.
Because of the contempt for workers, the hostility towards working families, nobody is paying attention to the need for protective gear. Recently, according to an article that appeared in the Daily News on October 26, ``A Federal agency has slammed the city for not taking steps to protect rescue workers from injuries immediately after the World Trade Center catastrophe. In a sharply worded report, consultants for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences said nearly 1,000 injuries, ranging from blisters and nausea to severe burns and fractures, could have been prevented if the city had made sure workers had basic safety training and adequate equipment such as hard hats, and respirators.''
The report was dealing with very basic, elementary kinds of things, but beyond that, the report gets into the discussion of toxic chemicals and metals: `` `Toxic chemicals and metals are being released into the environment around lower Manhattan by the collapse of the World Trade Center towers and by the fires that are still burning at ground zero,' according to internal government reports. Dioxins, PCBs, benzene, lead, and chromium are among the toxic substances detected in the air and soil around the World Trade Center site by Environmental Protection Agency equipment, sometimes at levels far exceeding Federal levels, the documents show.'' This is a report in the Daily News also on October 26, an article by Juan Gonzalez.
``EPA monitoring devices have also found considerable contaminants in the Hudson River and in the water and sediment, especially after it rains. Six weeks after the World Trade Center attack, benzene, a colorless liquid that evaporates quickly and can cause leukemia, bone marrow damage, and other diseases in long-term exposure, continues to be released into the air in plumes from the still burning fires at relatively high levels.''
On and on it goes to talk about the fact that the protective gear needed is not there. The highest level of benzene recorded was on October 11, 58 times higher than OSHA's permissible exposure limit. Other kinds of extremes have also occurred.
Workers' health and sometimes their lives are at stake in this kind of situation because later on these kinds of exposures lead to debilitating diseases and people die.
We have a situation that has now been revealed concerning the workers who worked on the spill at EXXON, the EXXON Valdez oil spill in 1989, when an oil tanker ran aground and spilled tremendous amounts of oil. The count was 250,000 dead birds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals. We know what the animal count was, but only now are we beginning to understand that when 11 million gallons of oil were spilled and people from all over the country went out to clean it up, they became victims, also.
No one talks about the workers who stood in the brown foam 18 hours a day, who came back to their sleeping barges with oil matted in their hair, ate sandwiches speckled with oil, steered boats through a brown, hydrocarbon haze that looked like the smog from hell, and after the summer, some found themselves with oil traces in their lungs, in their blood cells, in the fatty tissue of their buttocks.
They got treated for headaches, nausea, chemical burns, and breathing problems and went home, but some never got well.
The story appears in another newspaper that this goes on and on, and many years later workers are suffering dramatically, and some people are dying as a result of not paying attention to the health of the workers.
Another way the workers are being treated in a hostile and contemptuous manner relates to the contracting process at ground zero. We started off on the wrong foot. There was an article in the New York Times on October 19 which talks about the fact that they were employing people who were not being paid. Day laborers at ground zero say they are not being paid. The story as it goes here shows that illegal immigrants were brought in by a contractor from outside the city and they were not even bothering to pay the people who were working at very low wages.
The treatment of workers in this situation amounts to a lockout of legitimate workers who live in New York. New York has a high unemployment rate. A few minutes ago, I said it is presently at 6.3 percent for adults. Yet, most of these workers were brought in from outside the city.
Day laborers are frequently illegal immigrants who are promised payments in cash. They have no form of employment contracts. They know their employer only through a crew leader who hires them on a street corner.
Officials with a cleaning company, in this case Milrose Services, Incorporated, of Freeport New York, the usual racket in which certain people in city government contract with people outside the city, and these officials of this particular company say they are not responsible for hiring and paying the laborers. They have the contract, they are not responsible.
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The company hired a subcontractor to do that. What is unusual here is the setting. Ground zero has just been destroyed in an act which is attributed to illegal immigrants or undesirable immigrants. They are hunting all over the country for undesirable immigrants, but the contractor brings in illegal immigrants to do part of the cleaning work at the World Trade Center, and of course, the people are so crooked they do not even bother to pay the workers, and they make a mistake, and it becomes a matter in the paper.
One of the workers was named Cecilia Ramirez, but what is important here, and I would like to submit this entire article, is a documentation of the utter contempt they have for a working class that would go outside on a critical matter like cleanup work around ground zero and get illegal immigrants and bring them into New York City while other people are looking for work and these kinds of jobs.
I will include this article that appeared in the New York Times on October 19th in the Record.
Day Laborers at Ground Zero Say They Are Not Being Paid
(By Somini Sengupta)
The state attorney general's office is investigating complaints that day laborers hired to clear debris from office buildings surrounding the site of the World Trade Center have not been paid, some of them for up to two weeks of work.
The complaints here are hardly unusual. Day laborers are frequently illegal immigrants who are promised payment in cash. They have no formal employment contracts, and they know their employer only through a crew leader who hires them on a street corner.
Officials with the cleaning company in this case, Milro Services Inc., of Freeport, N.Y., say they are not responsible for hiring and paying laborers; the company hired a subcontractor to do that. (Late yesterday afternoon, the subcontractor said she was making arrangements to pay the workers.)
What is unusual here is the setting. In this case, the day laborers are at the center of the mammoth cleanup effort in Lower Manhattan. By 8 a.m. each morning, they are lined up, 100 deep, on the corner of Broadway and Fulton Street for a day's work. Escorted past barricades by police officers, they clear shards of glass, wipe soot off desks and sweep floors covered with ash and debris.
They are promised $60 for an 8 hour shift, $90 if they work 12 hours, and the buildings they clean include the offices of several city and federal agencies. But in interviews at the hiring site this week, several laborers, including some men and women freshly unemployed from shops and delis near the trade center, said they had not seen a dime for their work--some for a week, some for two.
One man, Gonzalo Carmona, opened his datebook and pointed to his nine days of work, starting on Oct. 1; by his calculations, he was owed $780. A woman, Cecilia Linares, said she had worked for seven days straight; when she asked about pay, the woman who hired her, whom she said she knew only by her first name, Lumi, told her, ``Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.''
Early Wednesday morning, Ms. Linares showed up again and looked, in vain, for the woman.
The complaints first surfaced when an organizer with the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health went to the hiring line to talk to workers about safety precautions; he heard an earful about how they were not being paid.
Yesterday morning, lawyers from the state attorney general's office came and the workers lodged their complaints.
``They gave us very specific information about where they worked, what they were promised, what they were paid, what they weren't paid,'' said Patricia Smith, the assistant attoney general in charge of the agency's labor bureau, whose offices are around the corner from the hiring site. ``We've talked to the employer, we are investigating and, hopefully, we'll be able to resolve it.''
Officials with Milro Services said yesterday that they were surprised and dismayed to learn of the charges. But they said hiring and paying the day laborers was not the company's responsibility, but that of a supervisor, Lumi Morel, who was acting as a subcontractor.
``I don't like that this is happening, if it is happening,'' said Tom Milici, the vice president of Milro. But, he added, ``that's out of my hands.''
Late yesterday afternoon, Ms. Morel, reached by telephone, said she had been delayed in paying the workers because of paperwork. She said that she owed money to about 80 workers, and that she planned to pay them by today.
Continuing in the same vein, suddenly beyond September 11 we had the crisis of anthrax. Anthrax is a very deadly substance, as we all know. I need not waste the time here to repeat what the Centers for Disease Control and the numerous press conferences over the last 2 weeks have told us about anthrax. We vacated the House of Representatives because of the anthrax possibilities, the scare. There is a Senate building which still remains vacant, the Hart Building, because of the anthrax scare.
What happened when it was discovered in the post office where working people work? What happened when it was clear that there was a danger to workers? We have two deaths, postal workers, two deaths that I consider to be totally unnecessary. If we had acted faster, if information had moved faster, if the people in charge of combating the anthrax problem had moved faster, with more purpose, these two men would not be dead, in my opinion.
I think triage was practiced. The intention was focused on the important people. We have Congressmen, Senators on Capitol Hill, and given the fact that we were not prepared, we have limited people who know how to handle this problem, which is most unfortunate and a little unforgivable because anthrax has been a clearly recognized problem since the Gulf War. They even, at one point, ordered all members of the Army to be vaccinated against anthrax.
If we became worried about anthrax during the Gulf War and we have had a situation where at one point all the members of the Army were ordered to be vaccinated against anthrax, why is there so little expertise in the country when an anthrax outbreak occurs in Washington, so little expertise that we do not have enough to take care of the situation at the post office, at the same time we take care of the situation on the Hill in Senate and House buildings? They did not move fast enough. Information did not flow fast enough.
Our hospital system has been under pressure for the last 20 years and certainly will see no relief because of the ideologues in this Congress who insist that we continue to cut local facilities, hospital facilities unnecessarily. Of course, in the Washington, D.C., area they closed down D.C. General Hospital.
We watched the spectacle of two postmen who went to a hospital and because the hospital was so badly informed, because of their own pressures, they were turned away, and when they went back the next day, they were already dying. Here is a triage setup, and here is a setup which flows out of the inadequacy of our basic health system.
We should have a health system which is not just prepared to combat terrorism, but one that makes certain everybody gets equal and rapid treatment. It did not happen. Joseph P. Curseen is dead as a result. Thomas Lee Morris is dead as a result.
Then we have the spectacle of the D.C. General Hospital being used as a major headquarters for the process of dispensing the antibiotic and giving out information. D.C. General Hospital has been closed. The same economic forces, the same pitch on our health care facilities that has gone on throughout the country has forced the closure of D.C. General Hospital. But because there was no other place, the emergency center had to be set up at the D.C. General Hospital. The working class had to do with a closed hospital, a jerry-built situation to take care of a major problem.
Joseph P. Curseen is dead. Thomas Lee Morris is dead. They were postal workers at the bottom of the heap, and we are not taking care of our working families when we allow that kind of system to take place. When decisions are made, triage decisions, some people are more important than others.
It is important we go forward with a health care system that serves everybody. That health care system would certainly be ready for any kind of bioterrorism in the future, and workers' families would be treated in the same manner as any other families. There would be no priority set for anybody. Everyone would have the same service.
I conclude by saying that working families in the struggle against terrorism are as important as any other component. They may be the most important component in our struggle against terrorism.
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