post Hurrican Katrina/Rita reconstruction, guest workers and exploitation

Indian guest workers have been on a hunger strike since May 14th in Washington DC to protest the injustice that Signal International, a subcontractor of Northrop Gruman, has committed against them.

According to an article in Foreign Policy in Focus:

"The workers were promised [by an Indian recruiter hired by Signal International] the ability to bring over their families, permanent residency and green cards (the magic word) if they agreed to work for Signal International in its shipyards in Mississippi and Texas. In exchange for this bonanza, the workers need only pay the “paltry” sum of $20,000 U.S. up front and in cash.

These workers were not spring chickens and they knew enough to get such guarantees written down and to get receipts for every dollar they paid. Even then, some began to suspect that these dealings may not be above board and demanded their money back. The response of Sachin Dewan and others was that they had entered into a legal process that could not be revoked and so unless the remaining money was paid, their passports (which were with the recruiter to expedite the visa application process) would not be returned. In some cases, Dewan even threatened to burn their passports.

To raise the money needed to participate in this scheme, workers mortgaged their houses, sold family heirlooms, and took out high-interest loans."

The workers were brought in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and Rita to do reconstruction work in shipyards of the Gulf Coast by corporations already lavished with government contracts and incentives in the region.

The conditions at the labor camps that these skilled welders worked at were atrocious:

" Workers were living 24 to a room with only two toilets and one bathroom between them. They were given poor quality food in the morning, and by the time they took their lunch break in the evening, the food had already started to spoil.

For the lodging and food services, Signal charged each worker $1,050 per month.

Furthermore workers were under constant threat of deportation; often deportation was used as an incentive to get the workers to work harder. They were already doing more welding every day than they ever had (a tactic that may have been used to reduce their hours and hence their wages). The threat of deportation often made them pick up that already brisk pace. Phrases like, 'we know what life is like back in India, and this is better than that so you better not complain' were common."

When these Indian guest workers tried to organize for better conditions, Signal "hired a security company to send in armed guards to intimidate the workers and took aside four of the key organizers and threatened them with deportation." One of the intimidated organizers even tried to commit suicide as a result.

Finally the workers walked out of the labor camp and , with the assistance of the New Orleans Worker Center for racial justice, reported that they were a victim a labor trafficking ring and formed. They have continued to publicize their cause, adopting tactics and rhetoric of the civil rights movement. Eventually these workers traveled to Washington DC to pursue their case through a subsequent hunger strike. The New Orleans Worker Center is profiling their struggle through an online blog and In January 2007 organized Alliance of Guest Workers for Dignity for others in the Gulf Region facing similar exploitation through the Hurrican Katrina reconstruction effort.

Its not surprising that one of the Indian guest worker organizers has called the American guest worker program H2B that gave them temporary visas to enter the country a "modern-day form of slavery"Unfortunately this case is just a microcosm of worker exploitation takes place under this system. As the non-profit organization Farm Worker Justice puts it, H2B ( for nonagricultural workers) and H2A (for agricultural workers) are "rife with exploitation and abuse." Under both programs guest workers "suffer from an imbalance of power with their employers because their temporary, non-immigrant status ties them to particular employers and makes their ability to obtain a visa dependent on the willingness of the employer to make a request to the U.S. government." But the H2B program unlike H2A provides minimum protections for workers such as the 3/4 minimum work guarantee, free housing, the special adverse effect wage rate, and eligibility for federally funded legal services.