Remembering 9/11's Low-Wage Victims

I came to my work in the post-Katrina Gulf Coast in part because I worked with survivors of the terrorist attacks in Lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001.  I worked for a non-profit, Seedco, that ran the Lower Manhattan Small Business Recovery Program - providing grants, loans and technical assistance to small businesses around Ground Zero.  We were intimately and intensely involved with assisting commercial residents rebuild their livelihoods and their futures.

Frequently covered in the press since that horrific day 8 years ago are the families of the financial titans or workhorses who were killed in the building fires and collapse.  Less frequently heard from are the survivors of the thousands of low-wage workers who supported the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) industry most associated with the World Trade Center.  As we remember and grieve, I ask us to honor the restaurant workers, livery drivers, janitors and other low-wage workers who were disproportionately economically devastated by the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

According to the Fiscal Policy Institute in NY, 9/11 triggered more than 100,000 job losses, about 3/4 due to layoffs from the subsequent recession.  60% of those layoffs were in low-wage industries - the average wage of a laid-off worker had been about $11/hour.  When we first began offering small grants and loans to businesses with fewer than 50 employees, we found an overwhelming need among livery drivers, who had relied on long hours and late nights at the finance companies in the WTC for their livelihood.  Our partners in Chinatown, Asian-Americans for Equality, created special assistance programs for low-wage garment workers there, who were facing reduced hours across the board rather than mass layoffs, creating economic hardship nonetheless.

Perhaps most famous were the restaurant workers who lost colleagues from the Windows on the World bar and restaurant on top of the WTC, who organized and opened their own restaurant in the years following 9/11.  Today, the Restaurant Opportunities Center of NY is an advocacy organization with 2,200 members and offices in New Orleans and other cities nationwide.

But how many other workers have we lost track of, how struggled through that recession, who looked for new work as garment jobs and finance jobs moved out of NYC, into NJ, overseas?  How many had to cope with mental trauma on top of figuring out how to make ends meet, how to care for their families, how to earn enough to send back home?

Poverty has a cumulative effect, meaning a shock to the system like 9/11 can have a reverberating impact for years to come.  Wages lost in those months and years after the attacks set back families immeasurably; communities change (Lower Manhattan is now a thriving, expensive, residential district); households break up; people become homeless.

They also recover, grow stronger, and move on and hopefully, up.  Eight years out, with a new Presidential Administration and the fight of our generation for health care and equal economic opportunity, let's pay tribute in our thoughts and actions to those low-wage workers and households who lost their lives, loved ones, and for some, their hope of a better life in the US.  And let's also work with them to improve their lives and their life chances in our post-9/11 world.

(Photo of a 9/11 memorial at a restaurant in Queens, home to thousands of low-wage workers, taken by Tony the Misfit)