A protester outside St. Elizabeths prevents a truck from entering the construction site
LISTEN TO PATRICK WALKER:
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It’s blue collar [jobs] today. But when this project gets finished, it’s going to be white collar [jobs]. – Pastor Patrick Walker
“This is a peaceful demonstration,” said Rev. Patrick Walker, senior pastor at The New Macedonia Baptist Church and president of the Missionary Baptist Ministers’ Conference of Washington, DC and Vicinity. “But as members of the clergy… we’re saying that if we don’t do something about this, this kind of energy will boil over and be destructive.”
Aug. 31, more than two hundred District residents gathered outside St. Elizabeths in Anacostia, where the $3.4 billion Department of Homeland Security headquarters is being built. Standing shoulder to shoulder, protesters stopped one truck from leaving and prevented other trucks from entering the site, which is the largest federal construction project since the building of the Pentagon in the 1940s.
Pastor Patrick Walker speaks with NBC4's Tom Sherwood
“Every time a truck comes through here, that’s money that’s leaving the District of Columbia,” said Walker. “[The] unemployment rate is just staggering here in this community, when there are jobs. There are jobs. It’s not that there [are] not jobs. It’s not that there are no projects. This project is a multiyear project, multiple billions of dollars, and people who are less than footsteps away can’t get hired.”
A press release from LiUNA, a local labor union organizing in Anacostia, said, “Certified payroll data show that fewer than 14 percent of total work hours on the site have been performed by DC residents, based on an analysis of data obtained through a request under the Freedom of Information Act.” The figure is contested by Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and the General Services Administration, which is overseeing the project.
Walker said, “If they do this to us in the front end, in building this project, the same thing will happen when the clerks go in, and the same thing will happen when the analysts go in, and the same thing will happen when security goes in there. It won’t be people from this community and from the District of Columbia working these jobs. We want to get on the front end of this and say, ‘Listen, you start this project off this way, the next forty years it’ll be the same way. It’ll be the same way.'”
(Tom Sherwood of NBC4 was at the demonstration and filed this report.)
Related Links:
http://www.liuna.org/
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