The explosion and fire on an offshore petroleum platform in the Gulf of Mexico today shows “we need to make sure all these rigs in the Gulf are safe to operate before we put personnel back to work on them,” United  Steelworkers (USW) Vice President Gary Beevers said.

One person was injured in the explosion on a platform owned by Houston-based Mariner Energy Inc.

Beevers, who heads the union’s National Oil Bargaining division, said in a statement:

I would hate to see a worker killed in our haste to reopen the Gulf to drilling. We need to give the government adequate time to do its inspections and ensure adequate health and safety provisions are in place.

It’s ironic, Beevers said, the explosion happened one day after the American Petroleum Institute (API), the oil industry’s trade association, held rallies to lift the moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf.

Instead of holding political protests, the API and the industry should be helping the government ensure all the rigs are safe to operate so the moratorium can be removed sooner.

We want drilling to return to the Gulf just like everyone else in the industry, but we have to make sure these rigs are safe first. We don’t need another oil explosion and oil spill.

Meanwhile, Beevers adds, offshore workers and the businesses affected by the moratorium that came as a result of the BP explosion and oil spill, should be given “adequate assistance.”

This trumpet player is painted on a house still unrepaired five years after Hurricane Katrina.

Unemployment in New Orleans is below the national average, but the poverty level is twice the national rate. The reasons behind that stark contrast tell the real story of what is going on five years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Crescent City.

There’s lots of work that needs to be done in New Orleans. The problem is that nobody’s making a living off the work but the “chiefs and the thieves,” says Robert “Tiger” Hammond, president of the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO.

Even though the federal government just announced a $1.8 billion school construction grant to the city, Hammond says workers will be hard pressed to get good-paying jobs out of the grant. The money is coming to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and doesn’t include Davis-Bacon requirements that workers be paid the prevailing local wage. What’s happening, says Hammond, is that construction workers are being deliberately misclassified as independent contractors so employers can pay them less than if they had a union contract. He adds:

 It was hard enough to get a union job before Katrina. Now it’s even harder.

New Orleans is not alone. With many of the shipping lanes in the Gulf of Mexico closed after the BP oil spill, longshore workers across the area are now working. And to add insult to this tragedy, just over a month after it announced the closure of its shipyard in Avondale, La., Northrop Grumman said this week it plans to lay off 642 workers at its Pascagoula, Miss., shipyard by the end of the year. AFL-CIO Metal Trades Department President Ron Ault responded to the announcement by slamming both the company and the U.S. Navy and highlighting the economic repercussions for the Gulf region, still trying to recover from both Katrina and the BP oil spill.

Teachers aren’t faring well in New Orleans either. With the huge majority of the city’s schools under state control or operating as charter schools—and with a post-Katrina state law banning collective bargaining for many teachers—the United Teachers of New Orleans/AFT, which once had 4,500 members is down to fewer than 1,000 now after some 200 were laid off this summer.

About one-third of the families that evacuated New Orleans in 2005 have never returned, leaving fewer people to revive the culture and spirit the city is known for. Add to that the fact that many areas still have not been rebuilt—Hammond says his parish still has no hospital five years after it was destroyed—and the situation just sucks, he says.  Hammond adds:

 It’s frustrating. We are surviving but it could be much better. We ‘re not going anywhere. We’ll be here until we win or we die.