Ground zero outrage
Cleanup workers denied pay & safety
By G. Dunkel
New York
Hundreds of undocumented and non-unionized workers, mainly
Latinos, who did the first cleanups of lower Manhattan after
Sept. 11, are currently fighting to get all the pay they were
promised but have not yet received. They are also demanding
treatment of health problems created by working in a dangerous
environment without proper protection.
The workers were paid $7.50 an hour--$90 for a 12-hour
day--by contractors who stiffed them as often as they paid
them. Most were not told about the risks and were not given
respirators or other protective gear. Some workers who brought
their own protection were forced to hand it over to the bosses.
(Daily News, Jan. 11)
The original cleanup crews have now been replaced by
unionized workers. Members of Asbestos Workers Local 12A, they
get $23 an hour when they work, but must be licensed. To get
the license, they have to pay $550 to the city and attend a
training course.
According to a report in Newsday on Jan. 13, 80 percent of
these union workers may also be undocumented. It has been
difficult to get other workers to do these dangerous, dirty and
intermittent jobs.
Since the need for such workers in New York is currently so
high--only 40 percent of the stores, offices and apartments in
Lower Manhattan have been professionally cleaned--the
immigration system winks at their status. But if they get into
trouble with a supervisor, the threat is always there.
Extent of danger still not clear
While unionized workers generally have protective gear, they
often find that they need to take off such paraphernalia as
masks to get the work done in the time allotted. Furthermore,
some of the equipment appears not to be effective against the
fine dust created by the collapse of the World Trade Center
buildings.
Joel Shufro, executive director of the New York Committee
for Occupational Safety and Health, which represents more than
250 unions, said, "The agencies have made it a priority to get
the lower Manhattan financial and stock markets up and running
at any cost. In so doing, they have allowed thousands of people
to be exposed to substances that haven't even all been
identified, let alone quantified."
The ombudsperson of the Environmental Protection Agency has
opened up an investigation of charges that the head of the
agency, Christine Whitman, and other top officials lied about
the extent and risks of contamination at the WTC disaster site.
According to the ombudsperson's office, the evidence
"demonstrates that there is and was a substantial health risk
that EPA had documented in its testing. There's enough evidence
to demonstrate that Mrs. Whitman's statement to the brave
rescue workers and the people who live there was false."
Whitman, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, is
former governor of New Jersey and a major figure in the
Republican Party.
Even though the EPA's data on the dust plume that covered
most of lower Manhattan was so scary that large portions of it
weren't reported, it now appears that even that data might have
severely underestimated the hazards.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Jan. 13 on the results
of two widely respected asbestos researchers, Eric Chatfield
and John Kominsky, who tested apartments and condos near the
collapse that either had not been cleaned or were cleaned
improperly.
Using modern, up-to-date methods, the researchers found nine
asbestos fibers for every one that had been detected by the
EPA. Cate Jenkins, a senior chemist in the EPA's hazardous
materials division, said, "If people continue living and
working in places that still have dust in the carpets,
furniture, drapes and heating and cooling system, these fibers
will continue to be re-suspended. The elevated risk could be
from around one-in-a-thousand extra cancers to maybe as high as
one in 10."
Jenkins has worked for the EPA for 22 years. She went on to
say about the difference between their results and the EPA's:
"This is too important ... to be ignored if you really care
about the health of the public."
Four other federal health experts from the EPA and Centers
for Disease Control agreed with the findings of Chatfield,
Kominsky and a team headed by Hugh Granger of HP Environmental
in Virginia. They are all experts frequently used by the
government for special studies. Their research was funded by a
coalition of labor unions, tenant groups, contractors and New
York political leaders.
There is no dispute that the dust has been making thousands
of New Yorkers ill with sinus infections, asthma attacks,
nausea, headaches, rashes and coughing. Then there are possible
cancerous effects from asbestos exposure, which can take 18 to
30 years to show up.
Some 300 firefighters who spent time at ground zero are on
light duty or at home on disability. Another 600 or so have
filed notice that they feel impaired. Their union has also
demanded that the fire department remove all the asbestos from
fire equipment that responded to the collapse.
NYCOSH, the Latin American Workers' Project and Queens
College Center for the Biology of Natural Systems are setting
up a mobile health clinic near City Hall, starting Monday, Jan.
14. It will test day laborers, unionized cleanup workers and
anybody else who is having problems from the dust. It will help
fit respirators and protective gear and gather data like blood
samples and lung capacity.
The National Employment Law Project has been examining the
abuses. "The most outrageous thing is that these are the
workers who enabled lower Manhattan to go back to work," said
Luna Yasui, a lawyer there.
Groups such as the Latin American Workers Project and the
Tepeyac Association are helping workers with their pay claims,
urging that any worker, documented or not, must be properly
paid and protected. So much pressure has been generated that
the attorney general of New York has opened an
investigation.
Reprinted from the Jan. 24, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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