coldhearted scientist وداد

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With thousands of new guest workers pouring into the Gulf Coast in the wake of Rita and Katrina, such conflicts have multiplied as the region has become a test case for the use of foreign temporary labor. If Congress passes an expanded guest-worker program, some labor experts believe, the patterns established here may spread to other states. Some already have. They include the rise of labor contractors like Redd–who import workers not for a specific job but to hire them out to other companies–and labor camps where employers exercise almost total control over workers’ daily lives.

Those workers come not only from Mexico but from countries around the globe. Three-quarters of guest workers nationwide are Mexican, but in a process similar to factory outsourcing, employers skip nimbly from country to country in search of workers with high skills and low salary requirements. At one Louisiana shipyard, Mexican welders on H-2 visas share cramped FEMA trailers with guest workers from Honduras and Romania. In the past five years, while the total number of H-2 workers grew by about two-thirds, the number from Asia more than tripled.

Such workers often risk everything in lengthy and uncertain journeys. P. Subramanian*, a pipefitter from southern India, worked for thirty years on oil rigs in the Middle East before deciding to take his chances in the United States to better support his eighteen family members. He took out high-interest loans to pay $20,000 in recruitment and travel costs for a job with Signal International, a marine and fabrication company with facilities in Texas and Mississippi. But Subramanian arrived in the country at precisely the wrong moment: Signal was locked in a high-profile labor dispute with a group of Indian welders, also guest workers. The workers had protested after the company cut their wages by a third and threatened to fire some, saying they were inexperienced. After one welder attempted suicide, Signal apparently decided it had had enough. So, Subramanian says, the company told him no new Indian workers were needed.

I meet Subramanian in New Orleans, where he is desperately trying to find work despite having no Social Security card, no transportation and only a few months left on his visa. He wears borrowed clothes, thick glasses and a stunned expression, and he carries a binder filled with certificates of merit from companies in Bahrain, Holland and Dubai.

“The companies can send us back, but they won’t pay our $20,000,” he says. If he can’t pay his debt, his creditors in India might go after his family, he adds, drawing his finger across his throat. “It’s the very worst condition in life. I cannot go back to India and I cannot stay legally. I feel like a street beggar.”

Like Subramanian, a growing number of guest workers are filling skilled blue-collar jobs traditionally held by native-born workers. In 2006 the Labor Department certified requests for temporary steelworkers, electricians, automobile detailers and bus drivers. Signal declined to comment on its hiring of H-2 workers, but Greg Kenefick, a spokesperson for the AFL-CIO Metal Trades Department, said American welders and pipefitters have become scarce on the Gulf Coast because of the lack of schools and affordable housing. Still, he says the council is concerned that companies have sought to fill the demand with “the cheapest wage possible.” “The exploitation factor is obvious,” he says. “They have a captive workforce, and [that] is the worst competition for union labor.”

In order to hire guest workers, an employer must prove that there is a shortage of domestic workers. In agriculture, farmers and unions agree that American workers often prefer low-wage jobs in service and construction to grueling field work. Yet labor experts say employers also deliberately use the program to avoid paying market wages. “To low-wage seasonal industries, a shortage of labor is a lack of surplus labor,” says David Griffith, an anthropologist who has studied guest-worker programs for thirty years. “They like a surplus because it keeps wages down.” Jill Foutz, a manager at an Ohio landscaping company, is clear about why her business uses H-2 workers: “They’re hardworking, they’re dependable and they will work for less.”

The Labor Department requires employers to document their efforts to recruit US workers, but department records reveal the lengths to which some employers go to deter them from applying. Farm labor contractors have ignored calls from US applicants or asked them to provide résumés–an unusual request in agriculture. And recruiting agencies sometimes help their clients find ways to sidestep the regulations. “We understand that you do not want to hire local workers,” reads the website for Head Honchos, a Texas-based recruiting firm. “Head Honchos can instruct you on what to say during interviews and how to handle any questions that you might have regarding this step.”

Not every guest worker has a bad experience. Every year, Alex González and his wife pack up their belongings and their two chihuahuas and travel from Mexico City to St. Louis, where they own a car and rent a two-bedroom house. There they spend eight months working side by side for the same landscaping company. González has learned English and says the $12 an hour he earns there has helped him afford a new house in Mexico and even a few luxuries like designer eyeglasses. “My life is worth too much to risk it in the desert,” he says. “When you go legally you have more opportunities.”

Some unions and immigrants’ rights groups point to stories like González’s as evidence that a reformed guest-worker program could ease pressures on migrants. The Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, which includes community groups and unions like the Service Employees International Union, has joined employers in supporting a revamped H-2 program that would allow workers to choose their jobs and eventually attain permanent residency.

Having a temporary-worker visa “means you can cross the border without spending four days in the desert,” says Harley Shaiken, a labor expert at the University of California, Berkeley. “If you run a stop sign, you don’t risk being deported. It’s a huge difference. But I suspect you’re paying for that with tougher conditions and less mobility.”

The typical guest-worker saga is probably not a nightmare like Rivera’s or a success story like González’s but a soft, slow bleed of resources from worker to employer. It begins with the worker paying visa and travel costs and continues through petty paycheck deductions for services like phone calls and van rides and labor law violations like the ones suffered by Miguel Angel Gómez, a landscape worker in Ohio. Gómez injured his chest at work and racked up $1,000 in hospital bills. Though the work offer he signed in Mexico said he would be covered by workers’ compensation–required by US law–his employer refused to honor it because it was in Spanish. So Gómez struggles to pay a little of the bill each month, even as his work hours have fallen to twenty per week, another breach of his contract. “I could try to find another boss,” he says. “But I would waste years going through all the paperwork. I just want to keep earning.”

Yet Gómez is lucky in one respect: He came to the United States under a portion of the guest-worker program known as H-2A, which covers farmworkers and a few landscapers. On paper at least, H-2A workers enjoy benefits beyond the wildest dreams of most undocumented workers. Farmers must provide free food, housing, tools and transportation. To encourage growers to hire domestic workers, the government requires them to pay visa holders a premium known as the “adverse effect wage rate,” which can reach $10 per hour in some states. Like low-income Americans, they are entitled by law to free legal representation.

By contrast, two-thirds of guest workers are hired under another subsection, H-2B, created in the small-government Reagan years to fill non-agricultural jobs. H-2B workers exist in a regulatory vacuum with few rights and no access to legal services. Program regulations state only that workers must be paid the prevailing wage in their industry, and the Labor Department claims it lacks authority to enforce even that. While the department doesn’t keep statistics on how many H-2B employers violate labor laws, public-interest lawyers point to several cases where companies were permitted to continue importing workers for years despite a pattern of abuse.

In a decades-long dispute that has become a symbol of the program’s shortcomings, the Labor Department and state agencies repeatedly fined labor contractor Evergreen Forestry Services for housing Central American workers in tents during the winter, denying them toilets and drinking water, and paying them less than the minimum wage. Yet even while one agency within the department was writing reports identifying a “woeful history” of labor law violations at Evergreen, another unit, the Employment Training Administration, was certifying the company to hire more and more guest workers. Labor lawyers and even state regulators begged the agency to deny the company’s petitions, to no avail. Their fears were confirmed in 2002, when fourteen Evergreen workers died after the van speeding them to their job thinning pine trees in the Maine woods plummeted off a bridge. The department fined Evergreen $17,000 but continued to approve its petitions for guest workers as recently as 2006.

Labor Department spokesperson Matthew Faraci did not respond to specific questions about Evergreen but said that investigations in “low-wage, high-violation industries” were a department priority. He noted that the department’s Wage and Hour division has pursued claims against H-2B employers under the Fair Labor Standards Act, in one case recovering $36,000 in back wages. But both worker advocates and labor contractors say such investigations are rare, and the agency has no investigators specifically assigned to monitor conditions for guest workers.

To be continued…