Guest Workers Fired After Protesting Slave-Like Conditions

http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/03/15/guest-workers-fired-after-protesting-slave-like-conditions/

Guest Workers Fired After Protesting Slave-Like Conditions

Photojournalist and trade unionist David Bacon is author of Communities Without Borders: Images and Voices from the World of Migration.

Hundreds of guest workers from India are protesting conditions in a Pascagoula shipyard that immigrant rights activists compare to slavery. Many gathered in a church on March 11 in this Gulf Coast port, after their employer, Signal International, threatened to send some of the workers home. Signal is a large corporation that repairs and services oil drilling platforms in the Gulf.

According to Bill Chandler, executive director of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, “They were hired in India by a labor recruiter sent by Signal. They had to pay exorbitant amounts to the company, to the recruiter and to the attorney who did the labor certification for them.”

Signal brought about 300 workers from India in December to work in its Mississippi yard, and another group to work in two yards in Texas. The workers are part of the H-2B visa program, in which the U.S. government allows companies to recruit workers outside the country and bring them here under contract. The visas are good for 10 months, but the company can renew them for those it wants to keep longer. The workers must remain employed. If they lose their jobs, they must go home.

Workers say they were promised jobs as welders and fitters and had to pay as much as $20,000 each to the recruiting contractor, Global Industry, Signal’s caterer. Workers also say they were promised their money would be refunded by Signal.

“I had to pay $14,000,” said one of those workers, Joseph Jacob. ”I worked for years in Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia, and I spent all the money I had to get the visa, which the recruiter promised would be a permanent residence visa. But that visa never came, and finally he said they could get us a H-2B visa. That would give us 10 months of work, and if the company renewed it, we might get as much as 30 months. I thought that was the only way I’d ever be able to get back the money they’d taken.”

Signal CEO Dick Marler said the company sent observers to oversee recruitment and testing in India, but that they were unaware of how much workers were paying for visas. “We weren’t in that part of the loop,” he said, “but the workers paid that money with their eyes wide open, and our recruiters tell us that’s perfectly normal for people in India.”

FULL story at link.

...companies who hire on such cheap and vulnerable labor