Teaming Up to Help Residents Find Work

Oct. 4, 2005 — -- When Dwayne Carter left New Orleans the day before Hurricane Katrina hit, he never imagined that five weeks later, he would still be without a home and forced to look for a way to earn a living in an unfamiliar city.

"Normally, when they say a hurricane's coming through New Orleans, we leave for a day or two and then come back, but obviously that didn't happen this time," said the lifelong resident of the Big Easy. "We left with just the clothes on our back."

Carter, 44, worked two jobs in New Orleans before the hurricane -- a full-time position as a handyman at a storage company during the week, and weekend shifts cooking at a restaurant. When he left town ahead of the hurricane, the only money he had was a paycheck for the last two weeks at the handyman job.

He is still unable to see the damage to his second-story apartment and has accepted the reality that it may be months before he can go home.

Carter and his fiancée, Jeane Horton, were able to move in with Jeane's daughter temporarily at her home in Shreveport, La. They bought a few new clothes, chipped in for some household supplies, and spent every day trying to find jobs.

"I'm not the type that can sit around all day, and when you're at somebody else's house, you have to help out. We were out every day looking for work," Carter said.

The government has not released any estimates on how many people lost their jobs as a result of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita, but some early assessments have put the number at more than 400,000. Many of those people, like Carter, are trying to find work in new cities, making the mass unemployment and displacement of so many at one time an unprecedented problem.

The Labor Department and various nonprofit organizations have pooled resources with local business communities to find available jobs in new cities and make job searching easier. A series of job fairs across the country, focused in major relocation sites like Houston, Atlanta and Shreveport, have been organized to benefit Katrina survivors, and the Labor Department assembled an online job bank aimed directly at displaced workers.