[migrawatch-public] The ugly truth about guest-worker programs

http://www.socialistworker.org/2007-1/624/624_06_GuestWorkers.shtml

The ugly truth about guest-worker programs
March 23, 2007 | Pages 6 and 7

LEE SUSTAR looks at the reality for guest workers in the
U.S. today.

A PROTEST by guest workers shut down a Gulf Coast oil rig
repair company just days after a new report likened the
conditions of guest workers in the U.S. to slavery.

The March 16 walkout by workers at the Signal
International marine fabrication company--along with a
detailed study by the Southern Poverty Law Center
(SPLC)--highlighted the stakes in the upcoming
congressional debate over the vast expansion of
guest-worker programs.

The protest by the Signal workers in Pascagoula, Miss.,
took place following a pre-dawn raid by company security
guards on the workers� living quarters--in which six
workers were seized and locked in a room, until pressure
from immigrant rights and labor activists forced their
release.

�The Signal case is not unlike hundreds of other shipyards
in the Gulf Coast,� Saket Soni of the Alliance of Guest
Workers for Dignity said in an interview. �The Signal
workers, however, were treated with such decisive cruelty
that they just couldn�t take it anymore. �Signal held its
own workers captive for hours before threatening to deport
them. It conducted a pre-dawn raid on own employees,
pulled workers out of bed at four in the morning and
locked them up in their pajamas.�

The company told the men--who were among 300 guest workers
brought to the shipyard in December by the company on H-2B
guest-worker visas--that they were terminated and would be
transported out of the U.S.

The firings took place after workers complained about
their living conditions. The workers say that 24 men were
packed into 12-by-18-foot metal barracks, with only two
toilets and four sinks. For this, the men were forced to
pay $35 a day in rent. When the workers responded by
organizing Signal H-2B Workers United, the company cut
several of their $18.50 an hour pay in half--and fired six
men who were at the center of the organizing.

The workers have gotten support from churches and labor
groups--including striking workers at the Northrop
Grumman�s shipyard, also in Pascagoula.

But the six who were imprisoned by the company remain
terminated. �They still have debts of $14,000 to $20,000
at home�--owed to labor recruiters who brought them to the
U.S.--�and they�re desperate to repay them,� Soni said.

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THIS COMBINATION of debt and the requirement to work for a
single employer makes guest workers easy prey for
employers.
Workers in the H-2B program, which covers non-agricultural
labor, are especially likely to face abuse, according to
the SPLC report, Close to Slavery: Guest-Worker Programs
in the United States, written by Mary Bauer, an attorney
and activist.

Created under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act
of 1986, the H-2B program is supposed to peg workers� pay
to the prevailing wage in a particular industry. But since
the U.S. Department of Labor claims that it lacks the
authority to enforce prevailing wage standards, employers
routinely pay much less.

Moreover, H-2B workers lack even the minimal protections
that exist--on paper at least--for agricultural workers on
the H-2A guest-worker program. �There is no free housing,�
Bauer wrote. �There is no access to legal services. There
is no �three-quarters guarantee� [of hours to be worked].�
And the H-2B regulations �do not require an employer to
pay the workers� transportation to the United States.�

As a result, H-2B workers typically arrive in the U.S. in
debt to recruiters for their visas and airfare.

�The entirely unregulated recruiting business can be quite
lucrative,� Bauer observed. �With more than 121,000 such
workers recruited in 2005 alone, tens of millions of
dollars in recruiting fees are at stake. This financial
bonanza provides a powerful incentive for recruiters and
agencies to import as many workers as possible--with
little or no regard to the impact on individual workers
and their families.�

Employers gain additional leverage over workers by
illegally taking their passports and locking them in
isolated labor camps, the report found.

Companies have used all these tactics and more in
post-Katrina Gulf Coast reconstruction, hiring guest
workers to replace evacuees--at much lower wages.

In one high-profile case, Decatur Hotels, which owns 15
luxury hotels in New Orleans, used recruiters to hire 290
workers from the Dominican Republic, Peru and Bolivia. The
workers paid between $3,500 and $5,000 for their visas.
But when the company offered them 25 hours a week rather
than the 40 hours promised by recruiters, they realized
they�d never be able to repay their debts.

Last year, with the help of Bauer, the SPLC and New
Orleans activists like Saket Soni, the workers sued the
company. �In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina,
corporations have used the guest-worker program as a
state-sponsored method of importing cheap labor,� Soni
said. �They were sold American dreams by recruiters,
tricked into buying a visa, brought to the United States,
and then trapped.�

For workers in rural areas, the situation is even worse.
Poor Guatemalans hired on H-2B visas to work in the
forestry industry often handed over the deeds to their
homes to labor recruiters as collateral on debts they
incurred to obtain visas.

The work is brutal. Instead of being paid the $6- to
$10-an-hour prevailing wage, the workers are often paid
according to seedlings planted--and are expected to empty
two bags of 1,000 seedlings each in a single day. Many are
paid less than $25 a day, despite eight to 12 hours on the
job.

Bauer cites the example of �lvaro Hernandez-L�pez, a guest
worker from Guatemala, who came to the U.S. in 2001 at the
age of 45 to work for Express Forestry Research in the
Southeast.

�It was really hard for us to get to the States and not
earn any money,� he told interviewers. �We were told that
we had to leave our deeds to get the job. On a blank
paper, we had to sign our name and hand over our deeds.
They said that if we didn�t sign this paper, they wouldn�t
bring us to the States to work.�

According to Bauer, �this tactic is enormously effective
in suppressing complaints about pay, working conditions or
housing. U.S.-based companies deny knowledge of this
abuse, but there is little doubt that they derive
substantial benefit from their agents� actions. It is
almost inconceivable that a worker would complain in any
substantial way while a company agent holds the deed to
the home where his wife and children reside.�

For the farmworkers on the H-2A program--supposedly
protected from the worst abuses of past--the picture is
little different. In 2005--the last year for which data
are available--the U.S. issued 32,000 H-2A visas. About
three quarters were for Mexicans; most of the rest were
from Jamaica and Guatemala.

In one case, about 20 guest workers from Thailand arrived
in North Carolina in 2005 after paying recruiters $11,000
for jobs in the H-2A program. They were promised three
years of work at $8.24 an hour. Instead, a labor broker
seized their passports, visas and return airplane tickets,
and kept them virtually imprisoned in a building owned by
the labor broker. They filed suit in February 2007.

While H-2A guest workers do have more rights than their
H-2B counterparts--such as representation from federally
funded Legal Services attorneys--they are, in fact,
excluded from the protections of the 1983 Agricultural
Worker Protection Act.

Moreover, the U.S. Department of Labor maintains that it
has no authority to prevent routine abuses of H-2A
workers, such as seizure of passports and the employers�
failure to pay workers� transportation costs. Even when
the department does get involved, it imposes a two-year
limit on investigating claims.

Bauer noted one result: In charges filed by Kentucky H-2A
tobacco workers in 2005, the department�s own six-month
delay in processing a claim over the employer�s wages and
hours violations forced the case beyond this arbitrary
deadline.

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ALONG WITH guest workers� low pay comes dangerous working
conditions. If the families of workers killed on the job
live outside the United States, several states pay only
about 50 percent of what U.S. citizens would receive.
Alabama pays nothing.
Guest workers injured on the job must contend with
language barriers, complex state bureaucracies and
employer blacklists if they miss work. �Those who are
seriously injured face enormous, often insurmountable
obstacles,� Bauer notes.

Women workers on the H-2 programs must bear the additional
burden of sexual harassment and rape, her report found.
�[I]t is hard to imagine how a guest worker facing
harassment on the job could alleviate her situation,� she
wrote. �Assuming that she, like most workers, had taken
out substantial debt to obtain the job and given that she
would not be permitted to work for any employer other than
her offender, her options would be severely limited.�

�Limited options� is the essence of guest-worker programs.
By tying workers to a single employer, it
institutionalizes a kind of indentured servitude.

This is true even of the H-1B guest-worker program for
professional workers, widely used in the technology
industry, said Colin Rajah, coordinator of the
International Migrant Rights Program at the National
Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

�It�s true that there�s a small window in which H-1B
workers can seek another employer,� said Rajah, himself a
former H-1B worker. �But when the dot-com bubble exploded,
there were 500 H-1B workers losing their jobs a
week�--leaving them without the possibility of remaining
legal residents and forcing most to return to their home
countries.

These days, Microsoft�s Bill Gates is demanding a big
expansion of H-1B visas, expected to total about 50,000
next year, according to the Web-based Immigration Daily
News.

While Gates wants white-collar workers and professionals
for high-tech industries, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is
pressing for an expansion of the blue-collar H-2A and H-2B
visas into a millions-strong guest-worker system that
would be the biggest expansion of unfree labor in the U.S.
since slavery.

�The current guest-worker proposal is another weapon in
corporate America's arsenal to institutionalize
segregation in the workplace,� said Justin Akers Chac�n,
co-author, with Mike Davis, of the book No One Is Illegal.
�It�s akin to other �two-tier� strategies that have
decimated union power in the last few decades and reduced
the whole of agricultural labor to Dickensian servitude.�

As an alternative, a coalition of immigrant rights groups
and unions are expected demand legislation that would
allow immigrant workers to gain green cards--work
permits--in order to eliminate the single-employer
stipulation of guest-worker plans. According to this
proposal, workers would be able to self-petition for
citizenship, regardless of their employer.

While some in the pro-immigrant camp have proposed an
improved guest-worker program--including the National
Council of La Raza and the Service Employees International
Union--many immigrant rights activists reject any efforts
to put a new face on a system that inherently violates
workers� rights.

�A humane guest-worker program is a contradiction,� said
Saket Soni of the Alliance of Guest Workers. �The
guest-worker program is being sold to the American public
as a solution to America�s so-called immigration problem.
In reality, we don�t have an immigration problem. What the
U.S. has is an economic situation in which the U.S. is so
dependent on cheap labor--cheap, exploitable labor--that
it can�t see a way out.�

What else to read
To support the fired workers at Signal International, call
the company�s Pascagoula general manager Ron Schnoor at
228-762-0010 and demand that the fired workers be
reinstated, that workers be repaid for payments to labor
recruiters, and that they be paid the promised wage of
$18.50 per hour.

The Southern Poverty Law Center report �Close to Slavery:
Guest-Worker Programs in the United States� is a damning
indictment of guest-worker programs today.

David Bacon�s article �Workers, Not Guests,� in the
February 17 edition of the Nation, outlines the current
debate in Washington over the expansion of such programs.

The history of guest programs--and the politics behind
them--is laid out in No One Is Illegal by Justin Akers
Chac�n and Mike Davis, published by Haymarket Books last
year.