Post by Bozur on Nov 12, 2005 22:06:07 GMT -5
Wooing Workers for New Orleans
By GARY RIVLIN
Published: November 11, 2005
BATON ROUGE, Nov. 4 - Burger King is offering a $6,000 signing bonus to anyone who agrees to work for a year at one of its New Orleans outlets. Rally's, a local restaurant chain, has nearly doubled its pay for new employees to $10 an hour.
Robert Caplin/The New York Times
Robert Caplin/The New York Times
Donald T. Bollinger Jr., who runs a large shipyard, says he turned away $700 million in contracts because he could not find enough workers.
On any given day, contractors and business owners pass out fliers in downtown New Orleans promising $17 to $20 an hour, plus benefits, for people willing to swing a sledgehammer or cart away stinking debris from homes and businesses devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Canal Street, once a crowded boulevard of commerce, now resembles a sparsely populated open-air job fair.
Ten weeks after Katrina, government officials and business leaders worry that a scarcity of able-bodied workers is hampering the area's recovery. In their desperation, they are using a variety of tactics to attract workers.
"I'd say I'm paying two to three times as much as I would in normal circumstances," said Iggie Perrin, the president of Southern Electronics, a supplier in New Orleans, who has offered as much as $30 an hour when seeking salvage workers on Canal Street.
Is it any wonder, then, that Donald T. Bollinger Jr. is jittery about the local economy as he peers into the future? Mr. Bollinger is the chief executive of Bollinger Shipyards, the country's third-largest shipbuilder, with 13 sites along the Gulf Coast.
Mr. Bollinger recently turned away $700 million in contracts, though he had devoted a good share of the previous two years trying to secure them. He says he just will not have the workers he needs to meet the deadlines. As it is, he says he is 600 employees short of the 2,500 he needs to meet contractual obligations on deals made before Katrina.
"This region is going to be going through a huge boom for the next three to five years rebuilding the coast," Mr. Bollinger said. "That's very good news for those who want work and really worrisome news for employers who have to compete with everyone else for labor."
Joseph C. Canizaro, a bank president and retired real estate developer, said: "I think we all believed there would be more happening than is happening right now. One of the key problems is jobs. You look at the housing situation, and the schools situation, and you wonder where businesses are going to find the people they desperately need to get things going."
For Mr. Bollinger, welders are just one of his labor headaches. His company pays welders $16 to $17 an hour. "When Sheetrock layers start paying $25 an hour," he said, "I'm either going to match it or I'm out of luck."
Virtually every New Orleans business confronts the same conundrum: In a city without a functioning school system and with vast stretches that are still uninhabitable, where will they find the employees they need to begin the long recovery? Everyone from bank presidents to restaurant owners to the Port of New Orleans are approaching the task like a nurse in an emergency room performing triage on patients based on the most immediate need.
"Employees are these precious commodities right now," said John Kallenborn, president of the New Orleans region for J. P. Morgan Chase. The state senator representing St. Bernard Parish, a working class suburb west of New Orleans demolished by Katrina, has lobbied Mr. Kallenborn to free up a few employees and set up a Chase branch in a trailer as a sign the county is back in business.
"I'd love to help out, but right now I can't afford to waste a single employee," Mr. Kallenborn said.
The Bollinger Shipyards were more or less at full staff before Katrina hit on Aug. 29. The shipyards sell a wide variety of vessels, including Coast Guard patrol boats, barges of all shapes and sizes and supply vessels that serve offshore oil rigs.
The company had more than $300 million in revenue last year. Roughly half was from orders on new vessels and the other half from repairs.
Only 2 of Mr. Bollinger's 13 shipyards suffered severe damage during Katrina or Hurricane Rita. One of them was a 400-employee repair yard in the Ninth Ward, an impoverished and heavily damaged area of New Orleans. Almost every building was destroyed. Much of one dry dock sat half collapsed in the water recently, while two others (with a barge being repaired at the site) sat in a cow pasture a quarter-mile away.
"I don't just need people to work in my facilities," Mr. Bollinger said. "I need people to rebuild some of them."
When the storm hit, Mr. Bollinger chose to keep every employee on the payroll, whether or not they were working. After a few weeks, though, he grew frustrated as many of them had not contacted the company.
"We threatened to terminate them as an incentive to get them back," he said.
He has decided to keep paying workers who have told him they are waiting for the local schools to re-open before they return.
Mr. Bollinger, 56, whom everyone calls Boysie, is a large, heavily jowled man with a ruddy complexion and wavy steel gray hair on the longish side. He describes himself as from "the swamp," is partial to black alligator skin boots and lists shrimp étouffée and grilled alligator among his culinary specialties. He is a man used to getting things done.
And he counts President Bush among his friends. The two have gone rabbit hunting. Mr. Bollinger served as the Louisiana chairman of the president's 2000 campaign. In 2004, he earned "Super Ranger" status when he rounded up more than $300,000 in individual contributions.
He inherited the family business from his father, who founded the Bollinger Shipyards in 1946. But through a series of acquisitions, the junior Mr. Bollinger, who took over as chief executive in 1985, has increased its size so substantially that only Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics are bigger.
"Boysie took a business worth in the millions," said J. Stephen Perry, Mr. Bollinger's former brother-in-law, "and turned it into a business worth in the hundreds of millions." Mr. Perry is chief executive of the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Like other businesses, Bollinger Shipyards has dispatched emissaries to shelters around the South, looking for displaced residents willing to return. For the moment, though, evacuees who are living free in a hotel or in a subsidized apartment while collecting a stipend from the Federal Emergency Management Agency may not have the same pressing need to return to the stricken city as they might otherwise. Bollinger employees made 20 or so trips, but they did not sign up a single evacuee. Mr. Bollinger has yet to bump up his pay scale but he said that raises were inevitable.
"My worry is that I've got an annual 3 percent inflation factor built into my costs," he said. "And if I have to go up 20 percent on one day, I've just blown the contract. I've gone over."
Still, Mr. Bollinger has certain advantages that most others do not, starting with his friendship with the president.
In early October, Mr. Bollinger found himself in a social setting with Mr. Bush. The shipyard chief was concerned about a FEMA policy to pay for only one housing unit per family. Mr. Bollinger explained that he had invited the relief agency to set up trailers on his grounds - but no evacuee could stay there if the rest of the family was living in FEMA-subsidized quarters.
Within 30 hours after his discussion with Mr. Bush, Mr. Bollinger said, the policy changed.
"I hate to waste the president's time talking about house trailers, but that's what we were discussing," Mr. Bollinger said.
Officials like C. Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, and Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, who is the Gulf Coast director of FEMA, have identified housing as the area's pre-eminent concern.
"Our No. 1 priority is housing, our No. 2 priority is housing, and after that, at No. 3, we'd put housing," Mr. Allen recently said.
FEMA has set up 70 trailers at four Bollinger locations, with the shipyards paying for setting up the utility lines and other structural costs. The company is only now starting to sketch out plans to convert warehouses and office buildings into housing for other employees.
And the lifting of a state moratorium on evictions means that landlords, for the first time since the storm, can start court proceedings against tenants who have not paid rent since Sept. 1. That will prove a hardship for evacuees who are stranded elsewhere, but it will also mean more apartments back on the rental market.
For Mr. Bollinger, this would come none too soon.
"If a guy doesn't have a place to sleep at night, you're not going to get him to work here, period, end of story," he said. "Forget what you're willing to pay. They're not coming back until we deal with the housing issue."
By GARY RIVLIN
Published: November 11, 2005
BATON ROUGE, Nov. 4 - Burger King is offering a $6,000 signing bonus to anyone who agrees to work for a year at one of its New Orleans outlets. Rally's, a local restaurant chain, has nearly doubled its pay for new employees to $10 an hour.
Robert Caplin/The New York Times
Robert Caplin/The New York Times
Donald T. Bollinger Jr., who runs a large shipyard, says he turned away $700 million in contracts because he could not find enough workers.
On any given day, contractors and business owners pass out fliers in downtown New Orleans promising $17 to $20 an hour, plus benefits, for people willing to swing a sledgehammer or cart away stinking debris from homes and businesses devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Canal Street, once a crowded boulevard of commerce, now resembles a sparsely populated open-air job fair.
Ten weeks after Katrina, government officials and business leaders worry that a scarcity of able-bodied workers is hampering the area's recovery. In their desperation, they are using a variety of tactics to attract workers.
"I'd say I'm paying two to three times as much as I would in normal circumstances," said Iggie Perrin, the president of Southern Electronics, a supplier in New Orleans, who has offered as much as $30 an hour when seeking salvage workers on Canal Street.
Is it any wonder, then, that Donald T. Bollinger Jr. is jittery about the local economy as he peers into the future? Mr. Bollinger is the chief executive of Bollinger Shipyards, the country's third-largest shipbuilder, with 13 sites along the Gulf Coast.
Mr. Bollinger recently turned away $700 million in contracts, though he had devoted a good share of the previous two years trying to secure them. He says he just will not have the workers he needs to meet the deadlines. As it is, he says he is 600 employees short of the 2,500 he needs to meet contractual obligations on deals made before Katrina.
"This region is going to be going through a huge boom for the next three to five years rebuilding the coast," Mr. Bollinger said. "That's very good news for those who want work and really worrisome news for employers who have to compete with everyone else for labor."
Joseph C. Canizaro, a bank president and retired real estate developer, said: "I think we all believed there would be more happening than is happening right now. One of the key problems is jobs. You look at the housing situation, and the schools situation, and you wonder where businesses are going to find the people they desperately need to get things going."
For Mr. Bollinger, welders are just one of his labor headaches. His company pays welders $16 to $17 an hour. "When Sheetrock layers start paying $25 an hour," he said, "I'm either going to match it or I'm out of luck."
Virtually every New Orleans business confronts the same conundrum: In a city without a functioning school system and with vast stretches that are still uninhabitable, where will they find the employees they need to begin the long recovery? Everyone from bank presidents to restaurant owners to the Port of New Orleans are approaching the task like a nurse in an emergency room performing triage on patients based on the most immediate need.
"Employees are these precious commodities right now," said John Kallenborn, president of the New Orleans region for J. P. Morgan Chase. The state senator representing St. Bernard Parish, a working class suburb west of New Orleans demolished by Katrina, has lobbied Mr. Kallenborn to free up a few employees and set up a Chase branch in a trailer as a sign the county is back in business.
"I'd love to help out, but right now I can't afford to waste a single employee," Mr. Kallenborn said.
The Bollinger Shipyards were more or less at full staff before Katrina hit on Aug. 29. The shipyards sell a wide variety of vessels, including Coast Guard patrol boats, barges of all shapes and sizes and supply vessels that serve offshore oil rigs.
The company had more than $300 million in revenue last year. Roughly half was from orders on new vessels and the other half from repairs.
Only 2 of Mr. Bollinger's 13 shipyards suffered severe damage during Katrina or Hurricane Rita. One of them was a 400-employee repair yard in the Ninth Ward, an impoverished and heavily damaged area of New Orleans. Almost every building was destroyed. Much of one dry dock sat half collapsed in the water recently, while two others (with a barge being repaired at the site) sat in a cow pasture a quarter-mile away.
"I don't just need people to work in my facilities," Mr. Bollinger said. "I need people to rebuild some of them."
When the storm hit, Mr. Bollinger chose to keep every employee on the payroll, whether or not they were working. After a few weeks, though, he grew frustrated as many of them had not contacted the company.
"We threatened to terminate them as an incentive to get them back," he said.
He has decided to keep paying workers who have told him they are waiting for the local schools to re-open before they return.
Mr. Bollinger, 56, whom everyone calls Boysie, is a large, heavily jowled man with a ruddy complexion and wavy steel gray hair on the longish side. He describes himself as from "the swamp," is partial to black alligator skin boots and lists shrimp étouffée and grilled alligator among his culinary specialties. He is a man used to getting things done.
And he counts President Bush among his friends. The two have gone rabbit hunting. Mr. Bollinger served as the Louisiana chairman of the president's 2000 campaign. In 2004, he earned "Super Ranger" status when he rounded up more than $300,000 in individual contributions.
He inherited the family business from his father, who founded the Bollinger Shipyards in 1946. But through a series of acquisitions, the junior Mr. Bollinger, who took over as chief executive in 1985, has increased its size so substantially that only Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics are bigger.
"Boysie took a business worth in the millions," said J. Stephen Perry, Mr. Bollinger's former brother-in-law, "and turned it into a business worth in the hundreds of millions." Mr. Perry is chief executive of the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Like other businesses, Bollinger Shipyards has dispatched emissaries to shelters around the South, looking for displaced residents willing to return. For the moment, though, evacuees who are living free in a hotel or in a subsidized apartment while collecting a stipend from the Federal Emergency Management Agency may not have the same pressing need to return to the stricken city as they might otherwise. Bollinger employees made 20 or so trips, but they did not sign up a single evacuee. Mr. Bollinger has yet to bump up his pay scale but he said that raises were inevitable.
"My worry is that I've got an annual 3 percent inflation factor built into my costs," he said. "And if I have to go up 20 percent on one day, I've just blown the contract. I've gone over."
Still, Mr. Bollinger has certain advantages that most others do not, starting with his friendship with the president.
In early October, Mr. Bollinger found himself in a social setting with Mr. Bush. The shipyard chief was concerned about a FEMA policy to pay for only one housing unit per family. Mr. Bollinger explained that he had invited the relief agency to set up trailers on his grounds - but no evacuee could stay there if the rest of the family was living in FEMA-subsidized quarters.
Within 30 hours after his discussion with Mr. Bush, Mr. Bollinger said, the policy changed.
"I hate to waste the president's time talking about house trailers, but that's what we were discussing," Mr. Bollinger said.
Officials like C. Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, and Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, who is the Gulf Coast director of FEMA, have identified housing as the area's pre-eminent concern.
"Our No. 1 priority is housing, our No. 2 priority is housing, and after that, at No. 3, we'd put housing," Mr. Allen recently said.
FEMA has set up 70 trailers at four Bollinger locations, with the shipyards paying for setting up the utility lines and other structural costs. The company is only now starting to sketch out plans to convert warehouses and office buildings into housing for other employees.
And the lifting of a state moratorium on evictions means that landlords, for the first time since the storm, can start court proceedings against tenants who have not paid rent since Sept. 1. That will prove a hardship for evacuees who are stranded elsewhere, but it will also mean more apartments back on the rental market.
For Mr. Bollinger, this would come none too soon.
"If a guy doesn't have a place to sleep at night, you're not going to get him to work here, period, end of story," he said. "Forget what you're willing to pay. They're not coming back until we deal with the housing issue."