CPD IN THE NEWS

Truthout - March 31. 2015, by Danica Jorden - Monday morning, March 23, 2015, in Raleigh, North Carolina, was a mild and slightly overcast day. The first signs of spring were beginning to emerge after an uncharacteristically chilly winter for the capital of the Southern state. But the recent cold weather had hardly hampered the construction of several high-rise office and condo projects, unprecedented for the generally low-rise city.

The 12-story Charter Square was one such project, and on March 23, just before 11 am, workers were busy on its south wall, with two mast climbers attached to its all-glass surface. Mast climbers are a scaffolding device employing a thin, central steel column stuck to the side of a structure, along which a horizontal platform that ferries workers up and down, so that they can install the glass panels future occupants will gaze from when the building is finished. On this day, the mast climbers were to be dismantled, with the building scheduled for opening in May.

About halfway up, the mast suddenly peeled off the side of the building, sending José Erasmo Hernández, José Luis López Ramírez and Anderson Antones de Almeida to their deaths, and Elmer Guevara to the hospital in serious condition. The four men were working for a tangled web of contractors and subcontractors, and the Department of Labor's representative on the scene said that contractors themselves inspect mast climbers, which are not specifically regulated by the state.

North Carolina Occupational Safety and Health's Kevin Beauregard indicated that OSHA, the federal agency, also does not have specific guidelines regarding mast climbers. He added that he did not expect to find that the scaffolding had been previously inspected. "There's no possible way our inspectors can go to every site,"Beauregard said. "We have over 200,000 work sites in North Carolina. We have approximately 75 to 100 inspectors employed. So it's physically not possible to go to every single site."

(Photo: Danica Jorden)

2014 was the North Carolina construction industry's most deadly year, according todata from the state Department of Labor. Nineteen people lost their lives working in construction in 2014, or 43 percent of the 44 work-related deaths statewide. Falls accounted for 13 of those deaths. The death rate was nearly double that of 2013.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Latinos are overrepresented in the construction industry, holding 24 percent of all construction jobs. But visits to construction sites in North Carolina reveal that Latinos are far more present at the front lines: scaling walls, down in holes and operating dangerous equipment. A closer look at the statistics shows that Latinos make up only 14 percent of first-line supervisors and 9 percent of managerial positions. Furthermore, BLS statistics show that from 2010 to 2013, fatalities for Latino construction workers rose 20 percent, while during the same period, deaths for non-Latinos fell.

In 2013, the AFL-CIO published a report on Latinos in the construction industry in New York. "A disproportionate number of Latinos and immigrants are disproportionately killed in fall accidents in New York, according to a new study by the Center for Popular Democracy, because they work in construction in relatively high numbers; are concentrated in smaller, nonunion firms; and are over-represented in the contingent labor pool," according to the report.

In New York, skyscrapers have been around for more than a century, and laws were written to regulate the construction industry and protect workers high up in the sky. The longstanding Scaffold Law was enacted in 1885, but is recently under attack. Construction companies have been working hard to amend it, saying it is one-sided in not protecting the industry from workers' own negligence. According to a 2013New York Times article:

They argue that the law is antiquated and prejudicial against contractors and property owners, and essentially absolves employees of responsibility for their own accidents, leading to huge settlements. The payouts, they contend, have in turn led to skyrocketing insurance premiums that are hampering construction and the state's economic growth.

But also in 2013, industry publication Durability + Design conversely reported that the industry had just been successful in reducing its penalties regarding a significant 2009 mast climber accident that resulted in fatalities.

Nearly five years after three EIFS applicators fell to their deaths from a high-rise construction site in Austin, TX, a judge has ordered the scaffolding company in charge to pay $17,150 in fines. Mast Climber Manufacturing Inc. d/b/a American Mast Climbers, of Whitney, TX, contested the 2009 citations (eight serious, one willful) issued for safety hazards after the accident. The penalties originally totaled $86,800. In the Jan. 29 ruling, Administrative Law Judge Ken S. Welch affirmed the willful violation and two serious violations involving lift equipment set up at the site. The parties agreed to settle three serious violations, and the judge vacated the rest.

In right-to-work North Carolina, people in general have more limited recourse in the workplace and the courts, and immigrants may be at a distinct disadvantage when asserting their rights. A 2012 study entitled "Employer provision of personal protective equipment [PPE] to Latino workers in North Carolina residential construction" states its "results suggest that the residential construction subsector generally fails to provide [Latino] workers with PPE at no cost, as is required by regulation."

Working side by side on a narrow platform high above the street on March 23, the men who lost their lives and their injured companion worked for at least three different companies. Brazilian Anderson Almeida and Elmer Guevara from El Salvador worked for Associated Scaffolding and Equipment, while José Hernández of Honduras and José Luís López from Mexico worked for Juba Aluminum/ Janna Walls and Kea Contracting. These subcontractors were employed by the site's general contractor, Choate Construction. The property is owned by Dominion Realty.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), using multiple subcontractors is a way to hide worker abuse as well as shield companies from culpability.

[W]orkers who try to stand up for their rights often find themselves frustrated by multiple layers of subcontractors and middlemen - an arrangement that seems designed to insulate corporations at the top from accountability for the mistreatment of workers. The same phenomenon was seen repeatedly in New Orleans with contractors working to clean up the city after Hurricane Katrina.

In a federal ruling, the SPLC won a case against Del Monte on behalf of agricultural workers, successfully arguing that "... the labor contractor and the workers were really employees of the Del Monte subsidiary and that the company was indeed responsible for any wage abuses that could be proven. The federal ruling was an important milestone for workers, but the fact remains that most Latino farmworkers in the South have little or no access to legal representation."

Speaking to television news station Notícias 40 in Durham, Olvia López tearfully explained that her husband José Luís, father of their three children, had expressed fear about the conditions at his job, but felt he had no choice but to go to work. The station also indicated that José Hernández leaves behind a wife and two young children who depend upon him in Honduras, where he had intended to return in November, while Anderson Almeida had a partner, child and stepchild. The family of Elmer Guevara has instructed the hospital to withhold information about their loved one at this time.

In a growing memorial, a cardboard sign erected near the Charter Square buildingread, "While we run from a corrupt government, we put our lives on the line in the chase of the American dream. RIP fellow dreamers."

It may have been placed by the NC Dream Team, made up of Dreamers, like the brave Viridiana Martínez, Loida Silva and Rosario López, who held a hunger strike in 2010 not far from the site of the accident. After Viridiana qualified for the Dream Act, or DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), she went on to report from inside an immigration detention facility and helped identify and liberate women who were eligible for US residency. Dreamers are the children of immigrants who were born abroad but grew up in the United States and want to continue their education as Americans.

Source

A two-day long housing protest outside the Department of Justice this week has resulted in nearly 30 arrests and several instances of law enforcement unnecessarily using tasers on activists, according to eye-witnesses. The action – which was organized by a coalition of housing advocacy groups, including the Home Defenders League and Occupy Our Homes – called for Attorney General Eric Holder to begin prosecutions against the bankers who created the foreclosure crisis.

"Everyone here is fed up with Holder acknowledging big banks did really bad stuff but [saying] they're too big to jail," says Greg Basta, deputy director of New York Communities for Change, who helped organize the event. Holder has previously suggested that prosecuting large banks would be difficult because it could destabilize the economy. The attorney general recently tried to walk those comments back – but the conspicuous lack of criminal prosecutions of bankers tells another story, one that Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has written about extensively.

Alexis Goldstein, a former Wall Street employee and current Occupy Wall Street activist who was also at the event on Monday, agrees. "I want Eric Holder to uphold the rule of law, regardless of how much power the criminal has," says Goldstein. She says the lack of criminal prosecutions has created a "culture of immunity" that only gets further entrenched by the small settlements that banks now consider a cost of doing business. "There's no risk," she says, adding that the DOJ is effectively "incentivizing breaking the law."

Around 400 homeowners and 100 supporters took part in Monday's actions outside the DOJ, according to Basta. One of them was Vera Johnson, of Seattle. "I've been dealing with foreclosure issues for three years," says Johnson, just minutes after being released from the jail where she was held for over 24 hours for participating in this peaceful protest. Bank of America recently granted Johnson a loan modification after the media picked up on a Change.org petition that she started to save her home; this reprieve turned out to be a time bomb, as her rates were set to return to their original levels after four years. It's an all too common story, and Johnson went to Washington, D.C. to "join in solidarity" with others in similar situations.

Many of this week's protesters have been black and Latino homeowners, who were hit particularly hard by the foreclosure crisis. Mildred Garrison-Obi – a black woman from Stone Mountain, Georgia – was evicted from her home in 2012, though with the help of Occupy Our Homes she was able to return to it after four months of facing homelessness. "It was devastating," says Garrison-Obi, who was arrested today in a related action held outside of a law firm where Holder was once a partner. "But I'm not alone."

Activists note with dismay that the government has been significantly harder on people who stage nonviolent demonstrations against Wall Street than it has on the crooked bankers responsible for the housing crisis. Goldstein and Basta both say they witnessed law enforcement using tasers on multiple protesters this week. Johnson says that several hours before her arrest, as she and others sat on planter boxes outside the DOJ, a Department of Homeland Security officer asked, "Do you want to get arrested?" and then, "Do you want to get tased?" Later, when she refused to unlock her arms with another protester after three warnings – hardly a violent act or a threat to public safety – she says she was tased from behind on her left arm. She turned around to see the same officer, who she recalls telling her, "That's what you get."

Carmen Pittman, an activist with Occupy Our Homes in Atlanta, suffered similar treatment at this week's protests. In video footage of her arrest, Pittman appears to have her arms interlocked with another protester.

Lawyers familiar with police codes of conduct note that this kind of passive resistance generally does not meet the official standards for when an officer can use a taser. "In a study of regulations around tasers, the National Institute of Justice found that most police departments do not allow taser use against someone who 'nonviolently refuses' a police command," says NYU law professor Sarah Knuckey, who co-authored a report on the suppression of the rights of Occupy activists. "The incident needs to be thoroughly investigated, there must be a public accounting of what happened and why, and any wrong-doing must be punished." 

A spokesperson for the Washington, D.C. police department directed requests for comment to the Federal Protective Service, part of the Department of Homeland Security. Scott McConnell, an FPS spokesperson, said that "a number of individuals" had "breached a security barricade after repeated warnings to leave the area" and that there had been 27 arrests as of Tuesday morning; he declined to comment on the video of Pittman getting tased or on FPS's taser policy generally.

Monday and Tuesday's actions came as the DOJ falls under increasing criticism for its investigations of journalists – first seizing records that cover dozens of Associated Press reporters, and now targeting Fox News' James Rosen. Many media observers have found the Rosen case especially troubling, due to the fact that he was investigated under the theory that he engaged in a conspiracy with Stephen Kim – his source – to leak government information. This is the same theory that U.S. officials have used to go after Wikileaks, and if applied more widely, it would effectively criminalize the basic act of investigative reporting. Some see the Obama DOJ's war on whistleblowers and leakers – and now journalists – less as a means of protecting national security than a way to crack down on who controls information.

As journalists start to get the feeling that their profession is under attack by Obama's DOJ, that department is saying something entirely different – though just as clearly – to the nation's financial elite. "The message," says Goldstein, "is that you can get away with anything."

Soure:

“Jerome Powell’s most important qualification is that he served with Janet Yellen. His confirmation should depend on his willingness to follow in Yellen’s footsteps on both monetary and regulatory policy,” Shawn Sebastian, co-director of Fed Up, a campaign from the Center for Popular Democracy, told the Washington Post.

On Sept. 20, Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, turning my life upside down. At the time, my two daughters and I were living in Carolina, a town on the northeastern side of the island. In just a day, my clothes were turned to rags, my home was destroyed, and I lost the few belongings I had.

My mother lived in the same town but her house was still standing. For two months, we slept on a couch in her living room. But we couldn’t stay there forever. In December, the Federal Emergency Management Agency moved us to New York City. Since then, we’ve been staying in hotels provided by FEMA in the Bronx and Brooklyn, like hundreds of other families who were moved to New York after the storm. Read more here.