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...Contractors" by Engineering News Record, is completing a gleaming white 60,000 square foot warehouse and office space for CR Lawrence whose business is construction, industrial, architectural and automotive supplies. Ed Sorbel, superintendent for Carpenter's Local 630, says at the project's peak more than 70 men worked at the site. But the outlook is grim for commercial construction firms such as Oltmans and its union work force. Asked if business is picking up, Oltmans Project Manager James Wu, 37, says, "I have not seen it. It's not looking good ahead." (See TIME's cover story on unemployment...
General Foreman Javier Gonzalez, 50, wearing a red bandana and an orange Oltmans T-shirt, says, "I was only out of work for two months in '09." Other carpenters were not so lucky. Gonzalez says his laid-off colleagues are paying their bills in a variety of ways. "One guy is doing tattoos. Some guys are bartending. And there is a group who work for realtors cleaning out foreclosed homes. They empty everything that is left in the house, resell what that can salvage and do minor repairs. It's sad. There is no work right now. Here...
Local 630, based in Long Beach, has 400 carpenters in the field with Oltmans when business is strong, says Sorbel, the union's top man on the Vernon project. "We are trying to keep our core guys, 125 to 150 men, busy. But there is no work out there." Miles Davy, a burly asphalt subcontractor, says there have been massive layoffs across all sectors of the construction trades. "I've had to let go men I have known for years. Grown men crying in my office. It's the saddest thing I've ever done." (See pictures of the recession...
...downtown Los Angeles, just east of Little Tokyo, one of the only active construction sites is a 53-unit apartment building at Alameda and 4th Street. Valentin Marquez, 41, father of four, does foundation and concrete work. Before this job he says he was out of work for a year. He is now struggling to keep his house. "The company I worked for for 18 years went bankrupt," he says. His colleague, Alonzo Chavez, 34, worked for the same contractor and then took a job in a burrito factory at minimum wage. Both non-union men, hands gray with concrete...
AQIM has also carefully constructed religious and ideological arguments for its actions so local Muslim populations see kidnapping as part of the group's holy work, analysts say. "It's essential that jihadists believe they can credibly justify horrible criminal acts as righteous before they undertake them to both themselves, the victims and the world," says another French counter-terrorism official. "That has allowed AQIM to embrace something it had regarded as the lowly work of vulgar crooks and Mafia types before...