Jobs are plentiful in New Orleans
Home for Chuck Wonycott these days is a cramped metal bunk with a thin foam mattress deep in the bowels of an old merchant marine ship docked at the Port of New Orleans. His closet is a narrow locker. His dining room is the ship’s mess hall. His bathroom resembles a bus station’s.
It’s a long way from the comfortable home he used to share with his aunt in eastern New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina filled it with 5 feet of water. But Wonycott, 42, a waiter at Antoine’s Restaurant who spent four terrifying days with his 83-year-old grandmother waiting to be rescued from the New Orleans Convention Center before ending up in Florida, figures things could be worse.
He still could be stranded far from New Orleans, like an estimated 300,000 residents scattered across the country nearly five months after the Aug. 29 storm because there’s nowhere in their former city for them to live. And he could be unemployed: Fewer than 1,800 New Orleans businesses have reopened so far, out of more than 15,000 operating in the city before the hurricane.
“At least this is something - a place I can stay so I can go back to work,” Wonycott said one morning this month, ushering a visitor through the chilly bunk room where the beds were stacked three high in rows just a few feet apart. “Compared to the convention center, with dead bodies all around, this is an improvement.”
This is company housing, Katrina-style. Ships, campers, trailer parks, hotel rooms, dormitories and factory floors - all are being pressed into service as makeshift housing by New Orleans-area employers desperate to crack a vicious post-Katrina circle that is hobbling the city’s recovery.
The economy can’t rebound until more businesses can reopen. But businesses can’t reopen until workers can return. And workers can’t return until they have places to live in a city where 80 percent of the land area flooded when Katrina burst the floodwalls and ruined 110,000 houses.
It all adds up to a labor paradox: The New Orleans unemployment rate rose to 17.5 percent in November even as clothing stores, fast food restaurants and delivery companies are offering thousands of dollars in signing bonuses to fill vacant positions. So scrambled are the region’s demographics that the available workers and the open jobs just don’t match up.
“You have a lack of housing in the New Orleans area, utilities out in a good portion of the city, people looking for schools for their children, you don’t have day care or transportation,” said Ed Pratt, spokesman for the Louisiana Labor Department. “Those are just some of the reasons why people are staying put where they are and not going home.”
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