We finished our first day with the Workers' Rights Project. WRP is an outgrowth of the Advancement Project of the Grassroots Legal Network which is affiliated with the People's Hurricane Relief Fund. Its collaborators also include the Loyola Law Clinic, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and others. We are specifically working on the Labor Conditions Documentation Project which attempts to document the experiences of workers in New Orleans and the surrounding communities. The project seeks to identify who the low-wage workers are, what kinds of conditions are they working and living under, and how might these conditions be improved. The project will culminate in a Labor Conditions Investigation and Report. These workers face enormous hurdles. Many of them are immigrant laborers. It's estimated that 30,000 immigrant workers have come to New Orleans since Katrina. Others are local New Orleanians who are survivors of the storm.

After a morning orientation, we toured the lower ninth ward. I won't try to describe the utter devastation we saw there.

We returned to Hope House which currently lends space to the WRP. It is a Catholic center that has operated in the Irish Channel New Orleans' community for many, many years, providing job training, meals, and other services to residents of the St. Thomas houses. (Sister Helen Prejean of "Dead Man Walking" fame once worked in this community center.)

We had a brief review of the federal fair wage and hour laws and a detailed description of the documentation survey. At 4pm we were ready to hit the streets. Our team made up of Chris and I, two UConn students, Paula and Marty, and one University of Wisconsin student, Dan was designated as the "City Roving" team. Our job was to scope out places around the city and in the neighboring parishes where workers might be living. Jennifer Lai, the staff attorney with WRP, wanted us to check out places where workers had been living in tent cities, in particular under bridges and along the Mississippi River. The tent cities under the bridges and along the river seem to have disappeared so we headed to Gretna and Algiers in St. Bernards Parish. (If Gretna rings a bell, perhaps because you might remember that evacuees of New Orleans tried to cross the bridge into Gretna but were turned away by police with guns and dogs.)

We spoke to a handful of workers in Gretna and then found ourselves at a camp in Algiers where asbestos clean up workers were camped. These workers work 7/days a week, 10/hours a day. These particular workers have come from around the country and live in camps with no running water. The idea is to reach workers before and after work so we work early mornings and in the evenings. Tomorrow morning we meet at 5:30am. Buenas noches.