Hiring Local and Paying Property Taxes: Companies Must Be Held Accountable

Texas? My job as a Wage and Hour Investigator was to make sure you are paid properly, minimum wage and overtime. I investigated companies that weren’t paying the minimum wage.

Do people in Beaumont pay fair taxes? How many of you have ever gone to the Jefferson County Appraisal District website, JCAD.org? I would challenge you to go there. Type in ExxonMobil. Humor yourself. And find all the pieces of property they own in Beaumont: appraised value $4,500, $2,380, $1,068, $375. These are appraised values, okay? There are 264 properties ExxonMobil owns in Jefferson County.

going to look at your hair follicles and see if you took a toke of a joint 60 days ago, like the THC drug in marijuana is going to randomly go up to your brain after two months and it’s like “Reefer Madness,” the film that came out in the 30s, versus “Oh Boudreaux there, he drank half a case of beer last night and he’s here kind of you know something.” I’m not picking on Cajun people, I’m half Cajun and I’m half Southern white, so that makes me either coon neck or a red ass, you figure out which one it is. No, I am not advocating for drunk people or high people to work around heavy machinery and bombs-controlled explosions at these refineries and chemical plants.

What do unions mean in Southeast Texas?

The era of straight-ticket Democratic Party and union collaboration in Jefferson County is gone. The 1994 election destroyed that. And in spite of what former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill might have said, “All politics is local,” it is not. In the day of the 24-hour news cycle all politics is national. We’re now seeing it. I live in Nederland—the highest union density in the entire state of Texas. The AFL-CIO looks at union density by zip code; 77627 has more union members percentage-wise than any other zip code in the state of Texas. And I would argue the Southern US. The rate is almost 20 percent, number two is Groves, 77619. And these two cities voted 85 percent for Donald Trump. As union leaders, we have to be cognizant of that. We’re not going to change people’s minds because for 30 years they have heard talk radio, their favorite channel, websites, et cetera, et cetera. We’re not going to change that. All we can do is try to smooth off the rough edges, maybe, and concentrate on economics.

So what are we doing economically? What kind of economic inequalities do we face here in Southeast

They say that every dollar paid in wages is turned over nine times in a local economy. That’s why it’s so bad for all of these out-of-state contractors to come into Jefferson and Orange Counties, because they’re not spending much of that money here. They’re shipping it back home. Now don’t get me wrong. My daddy was on strike many times when I was a little kid. He had to work in Lima, Ohio, or Louisville, Kentucky, or Corpus Christi or wherever and I’m glad he sent the money home to mama and my sister and me. But these people in Jefferson and Orange Counties are working tax-abated jobs where their employer promised to have 80 percent of the people from Jefferson, Orange, Hardin Counties. These requirements are not enforced.

We’re looking at stupidity in the war on drugs, whole groups of people for generations now have become unemployable because the companies are

Thousands of products are made here in Southeast Texas because of the oil and chemical industry: your cell phone, the plastics, the rubber, your synthetic fibers that you might be wearing, the gasoline you burned to get here, the electricity that’s generated, most of it is generated from natural gas, okay? It’s a fact of life. We can’t solve all of those problems today. Should we look at alternate sources of energy? Of course. I believe in an all-of-theabove approach. And let’s face the fact: the internal combustion engine is 150-year-old technology, so it’s probably on the downward slope, but we’re still going to need diesel for as long as we can see right now, jet fuel for as long as we can see.

But take a look at the JCAD.org, take a look and see ExxonMobil, see Total, Indorama, what are they paying? We found in that lockout last year that ExxonMobil, some of their pieces of property are evaluated at 1 percent of the fair market value. And I’m not making this stuff up. It is on the JCAD.org website. And one of y’all was talking earlier about the community here: my second cousin’s wife is the director of the Jefferson County Appraisal District. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one of my relatives around here.

Jeff Darby is a lifelong resident of Jefferson County with 33 years’ experience enforcing labor laws in Southeast Texas. For the past 25 years, he has also been an officer in many labor organizations, notably President of the Sabine Area Central Labor Council (SACLC).

PAULA O’NEAL