Workers Confront Homebuilder

(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)

Bellowing “Where is the money…where are the jobs?!” through bullhorns as they burst through the JW Marriott’s Grand Ballroom doors, almost 200 residential construction workers interrupted a shocked crowd of bankers at yesterday’s Mortgage Bankers Association Summit. “What have you done with the $900 million you got from the public?” said Angel Rangel, a sheet metal worker from Phoenix, Arizona. “This is money from taxpayers – intended to create jobs. So where are the jobs?” Event organizers – led by the Sheet Metal Workers International Association and the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades – charge that the nation’s largest homebuilder, PulteGroup, is spending taxpayers’ money on “increasing the ranks of the unemployed.” They say that PulteGroup -- Pulte Mortgage CEO Debra Still was chairing the Mortgage Bankers Association Summit -- has received close to $900 million from the federal government to create jobs and extend benefits to the unemployed, but is instead using the money to lay off workers. “The company reported spending $8 million on employee severances,” say organizers, “then it announced plans to cut 350 jobs and close a plant in Tolleson, Arizona. PulteGroup has not indicated to its investors that it is spending money on creating jobs.” The demonstration was part of the national Building Justice Campaign, which aims to hold PulteGroup account-able “for its actions both in the financial arena and in the neighborhoods they build.”
– report/photos by Adam Wright