Impoverished people were conned into coming to America by sleazy employers. And you won't believe what happened next!
http://t.co/XPvXtUbvz3
— Billmon (@billmon1) July 24, 2015
From the Buzzfeed article:
… Each year, more than 100,000 people from countries such as Mexico, Guatemala, the Philippines, and South Africa come to America on what is known as an H-2 visa to perform all kinds of menial labor across a wide spectrum of industries: cleaning rooms at luxury resorts and national parks, picking fruit, cutting lawns and manicuring golf courses, setting up carnival rides, trimming and planting trees, herding sheep, or, in the case of Valdez, Gonzalez, and about 20 other Mexican women in 2011, peeling crawfish at L.T. West Inc.
A BuzzFeed News investigation — based on government databases and investigative files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, thousands of court documents, as well as more than 80 interviews with workers and employers — shows that the program condemns thousands of employees each year to exploitation and mistreatment, often in plain view of government officials charged with protecting them. All across America, H-2 guest workers complain that they have been cheated out of their wages, threatened with guns, beaten, raped, starved, and imprisoned. Some have even died on the job. Yet employers rarely face any significant consequences.
Many of those employers have since been approved to bring in more guest workers. Some have even been rewarded with lucrative government contracts. Almost none have ever been charged with a crime.
In interview after interview, current and former guest workers — often on the verge of tears — used the same word to describe their experiences: slavery.
“We live where we work, and we can’t leave,” said Olivia Guzman Garfias, who has been coming to Louisiana as a guest worker from her small town in Mexico since 1997. “We are tied to the company. Our visas are in the company’s name. If the pay and working conditions aren’t as we wish, who can we complain to? We are like modern-day slaves.”
In a statement, the Department of Labor, which is charged with protecting workers and vetting employers seeking visas, said that the H-2 programs “are part of a wider immigration system that is widely acknowledged to be broken, contributing to an uneven playing field where employers who exploit vulnerable workers undermine those who do the right thing.”…
The world has become accustomed in recent years to hearing of guest worker abuse in countries such as Qatar or Thailand. But this is happening in the United States. And the problem is not just a few unscrupulous employers. The very structure of the visa program enables widespread abuse and exploitation….
@billmon1 That tweet sums up something like 70% of American history.
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) July 24, 2015
.@HeerJeet Seriously, though, this shit does go WAY back. I think someone showed my distant ancestor one of these–> pic.twitter.com/vAssDM2rhF
— Billmon (@billmon1) July 24, 2015
Linnaeus
But the Free Market(tm) protects workers. Rrrriiiight…
wilfred
An imperialist country importing slave labor to do work that it’s overfed, lazy population won’t do? See the Gracchi…
Or just refer to Capitalism 101 if you’re not so classically inclined.
Belafon
To tie this into illegal immigration hiring:
1. Every job should pay at least the prevailing wage for that position, no matter the status of the person working it.
2. A minimum wage should be paid to all positions, including restaurants.
3. An employee cannot be penalized for having a visa by doing things like charging them for “care.”
schrodinger's cat
Well, at least the inhabitants of the thirteen original colonies got rid of the British.
ETA: So all the gains, ill gotten and otherwise stayed here, instead of lining the pockets of the upper class English grandees.
boatboy_srq
To the Reichwing, every bit of the toxic stew in this report is what legal immigration looks like. And they have absolutely no problem with it.
schrodinger's cat
Well, at least the inhabitants of the thirteen original colonies got rid of the British.
ETA: So all the gains, ill gotten and otherwise stayed here, instead of lining the pockets of the upper class English grandees.
Tom Levenson
I’m speechless. Evil has a face, often of a neighbor.
OzarkHillbilly
@wilfred:
Maybe you are looking in the mirror, I don’t know, but I was neither lazy nor overfed during the 35 years plus I put in as a union carpenter. I worked my ass off making money for my boss. And I was fine with that. As long as I got my cut too. You want me to hang drywall for what an undocumented Guatemalan makes? With no insurance? No vacation benefits? No workers comp? Not even a ride to the hospital if I cut off a hand?
Forget it.
OzarkHillbilly
@Tom Levenson: Keep in mind, this is exactly the program the GOP has in mind when they speak of “guest worker permits” and exactly the benefits they want to reap from it..
Roger Moore
@Belafon:
Those are all great rules, but we don’t have the means to enforce them. It’s all part of the Republican approach to governance: inconvenient regulations can be avoided by starving regulatory agencies of the resources needed for enforcement.
wilfred
@OzarkHillbilly:
What I want you to do, since you asked, is to recognized that this isn’t a flaw in capitalism, it is capitalism. Pretending otherwise is what leads to stories like this – in the 21st fucking century. Thus the historical references that will flood the thread.
Mutatis mutandis. Workers, chains, etc., etc.
dedc79
Got into an argument with a wingnut today who said that the right to contract is a sacrosanct natural right that enhances personal freedom, and that the government has no business interfering with any contract. I pointed him back to the Lochner era when businesses had all the bargaining chips and could force workers into working seven day weeks for a pittance, asking how such contracts enhanced personal freedom. Little did I know that I needn’t have traveled back in time at all for a useful illustration.
Redshift
@wilfred: Capitalism 101 says that if people “won’t do” the work, it means you’re not paying enough, not that they’re lazy.
Funny how the supposed free-market absolutists never agree that there should be a free market for labor. I remember the time McCain tried to tell a room full of workers that they wouldn’t do the kind of back-breaking work immigrants did, no matter what the pay was.
Kay
I know that they don’t have enough enforcement at the US Dept of Labor, but how can they justify this?
Why are they giving them government contracts? I watched this the other night, Rape on the Night Shift, about janitorial workers. The Department of Defense is hiring these companies to clean office buildings.
Stop hiring these contractors. Now. Today. That would send a pretty damn strong message. There has to be something in these contracts that prohibits illegality. Rescind those that are in effect and don’t hire criminals.
Chris
@Kay:
DOD hires badly paid and badly treated immigrants to clean its office buildings?
I think I just figured out how to infiltrate the entire U.S. national security apparatus.
Iowa Old Lady
@OzarkHillbilly: Right. Without a path to citizenship, you wind up with a system in which some workers have no one representing their concerns. Not that minimum wage workers are well represented anyway, but guest workers are totally at the mercy of employers.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
And when that leaves you with 0 contractors left?
schrodinger's cat
@Kay: So even government department are contracting out everything.
Tom Levenson
@OzarkHillbilly: I know.
Kay
@Chris:
I know. The whole situation would be ridiculous if it weren’t so sad. Alert the minutemen at the border. They were in the offices of the Department of Defense all along, emptying wastebaskets.
The jobs used to be held by actual government employees with legal protections rather than temps, but then we decided to put a thick, creamy layer of profit in the middle by privatizing the whole works.
Kay
@Roger Moore:
Would that be so terrible? That’s a work stoppage. A crisis. That’s why people used to go on strike. They knew nothing would happen unless they withdrew their labor. The country survived, was better, even! They’ll get the toilets cleaned when they stop treating people like slaves. It seems like the US could draw the line at literally raping employees.
Linnaeus
@dedc79:
Not surprisingly, the wingnut seems to have not noticed the obvious error in that statement.
Chris
@Kay:
But privatizing makes everything more efficient!
catclub
@Kay:
Because it gets the headcount on NUMBER OF GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES down, down, down. Efficiency? Security?
Don’t matter.
JPL
Someone needs to ask every candidate how they feel about Guest workers, and they need to start with Trump.
schrodinger's cat
@Chris: What it does is make the quarterly earnings report when your fire your employees and hire contractors look good.
OzarkHillbilly
@wilfred:
The question I asked was a ‘yes or no question’. You did not answer my question. As to capitalism etc, I am at the very least a small ‘s’ socialist, as such I recognize that ‘capitalism’ is the worst system possible…. Except for all the others that have been tried. Therefor, like it or not, I accept the apparent fact that regulated capitalism is about the best we can do and we have to fight on where to draw the line.
Lastly, the thing in your comment that set me off was the ‘overfed lazy population’. Americans are not lazy or overfed… or at least not any of the guys I worked with, we sweat/freeze 8-10-12 hrs a day, 5-6-7 days a week, lifting/setting 100lb+ sheets of drywall all day long and far far worse (pile driving is the nastiest thing I ever did, all day long covered in grease and oil while maneuvering massive sheets of steel while the driver goes BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM all f’n day) …. What Americans are is knowledgeable of at least their basic rights. Like what their wages are supposed to be and that they have the right to get paid, and that they can’t be deported.
Even with that knowledge, there are plenty of stories of wage theft and worse for fear of losing their jobs. I know I had the advantage of a union standing behind me. It wasn’t perfect, I walked off more than a few jobs than put up with some of the BS that was getting dished out, but I always knew I could find another job, sometimes sooner, sometimes later.
Just don’t say, Americans are overfed and lazy. Maybe the ones you know are, but I can tell you otherwise.
Sherparick
@OzarkHillbilly: Yep. Further, this is the future for all workers once Scott Walker becomes CEO of the Koch Subsidiary formerly known as the United States and things like the Fair Labor Standards Act go into the ash bin of history as “unconstitutional laws” that take away the “freedom” of workers to put in 84 hour weeks with the hope that the employer might pay them.
schrodinger's cat
@JPL: The path to citizenship for guest workers is very long and arduous, if it exists at all. Plus it depends on your employers whims. Its a win-win, for the employer that is.
Kay
@catclub:
I’d love an analysis on that. Give me the private sector employment numbers set off against the public sector employment numbers over 20 years. In Ohio I think it would be one to one. You’re not “creating jobs” if you’re just converting public sector jobs to private sector jobs, and what does that say about our business geniuses that the best they can do is replacing a public sector service with a private sector service? They’re not “creating” anything. Are they bankrupt? Out of ideas on how to make money other than slicing up public funding and redirecting it? Rather than “reinventing” the public sector why don’t they start a real business?
schrodinger's cat
BTW we should be thankful that we have made some progress from the era of the British East India Company, at least WalMart doesn’t have a standing army, yet.
Mike in NC
Don’t worry, when Trump sees this story he’ll promise to abolish the H-2 visa program entirely.
ShadeTail
@Roger Moore:
That’s when you wake the fuck up, realize that using contractors is stupid, and start hiring people directly.
OzarkHillbilly
@Roger Moore: Oh I don’t know, maybe they would have to clean their sh!t stained toilets themselves? Oh Noooooossss…. Heaven forbid! :-0
Kay
@schrodinger’s cat:
I grow increasingly alarmed. And the disconnect! Really? We’re going to Vietnam and telling them about “our values” as far as treating workers? What values are those? We just fined a chemical company in Texas 99k for killing 4 temps. 25k a head. Is that the “gold standard” on labor protections we’re boasting about?
catclub
@Mike in NC: Promise, yes. Do it? Who knows?
kc
@wilfred:
Well, that’s bullshit. It’s not that American workers “won’t” do it in many cases, it’s that it’s a lot easier to abuse and exploit these foreign workers.
Linnaeus
@ShadeTail:
I’d say that using contractors isn’t always stupid, you just have to do it judiciously (full disclosure: I work for a consulting firm, so pretty much everything we do is as a contractor). Sometimes you don’t have the expertise or resources to do something in-house, and it make sense to hire someone else to do it.
Where it goes wrong is when contracting is deemed to always be better than hiring people directly, as if there’s some special magic that makes a contractor better in every case.
raven
@OzarkHillbilly: Tell the framers and cornice guys that just spent 10 hr days in 100 heat how overfed they are.
Linnaeus
@Kay:
With those kinds of penalties, you’re just enabling a company to make the perverse, yet rational calculation that it’s more cost effective to pay occasional penalties for safety and other violations than it is to spend the money to enact and maintain proper standards and practices.
schrodinger's cat
@Kay: The penalties should involve jail time in addition a much bigger fine.
boatboy_srq
@schrodinger’s cat: That’s been happening for decades, though the Shrubbery put special emphasis on it. Nothing like shaming gummint janitorial staff for their cushy jobs and their plush benefits, all at the taxpayers’ expense donchano. Contracting out the work saves gummint so much money. Pity the volk doing that never take into account the unfunded mandates of multiple military adventures, ridiculous spending boondoggles, tax cuts for the sake of tax cuts, etc etc.
wilfred
@kc:
I chose my words carefully, knowing that on one could possibly dispute the overfed part – has anyone else on actually spent time in a third world country, seeing what 50-60+ hours a week on a factory floor on 1200 calories does to the mind and body?
I fucking doubt it. Lazy – absolutely. Intellectually, morally and ethically so, convinced by capitalism that what is, must be and ever will be., tinkering with things but never questioning the criminality of the political economy itself that creates the situations that bring out the fainting couches. Substituting statues and procedures for real change, which depends on identifying with workers as workers, not as foreigners or racial or gender denominators.
That’s why in the year 2015 you can have a story like this. Progress? Spare me. There was infinitely more political consciousness in the 1930’s when a politicized labor movement came pretty fucking close to overturning capitalism itself. These days, not so much.
boatboy_srq
@Linnaeus: Welcome to the Libertarian fallacy normally known as “tort reform.” This is why that particular philosophy doesn’t stand up in practice: Libertarians preach individual responsibility and use of civil actions for redress against wrongdoers, and insist that businesses that don’t produce healthy/safe/whatever goods and services deserve to be put out of business by said civil actions because they failed their customers and their customers have a right to hold them accountable. But try to put that into practice, and immediately they fall back on “tort reform,” because without it businesses might [gasp] fail. It runs so contrary to their own stated standards, yet it’s the first fig leaf they reach for when “corporate responsibility” and “government regulation” enter the discussion.
Kay
@Linnaeus:
It happens all the time:
They send those female janitors into empty office buildings at night and they have to fan out and work alone. Even if the women tried to set up some kind of buddy system to protect themselves from the scumbag managers raping them they couldn’t. The contractor is afraid there will be chit chat or goofing off if they’re in the same area of the building so they have to work alone. They’re saving, what, 90 dollars a day or something in productivity if they risk employee socializing?
Linnaeus
@boatboy_srq:
Bingo. In the end, it’s all IGMFY.
JGabriel
Just like American laborers. Hey, maybe the problem isn’t the program – maybe it’s the employers?
Linnaeus
@Kay:
Oh, I know. And those workers talking to each other might get some funny ideas about, say, what they can do collectively to deal with their employer. Can’t have that, you know.
OzarkHillbilly
@wilfred:
Well, it’s nice to know you’re world is so safe and secure that you are immune to reality. I KNOW what 50-60 hrs and more a week does to the human body and the mind. I live with it every day. I haven’t been able to sleep a night thru in years because of the pain. And I am far, far from alone.
And for the record, I have spent more than a little time in 3rd world countries. So I know well enough to know how lucky I am that at the age of 57 starvation is NOT one of my options.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay: Heh. I was working a job once when an OSHA inspector drove by and saw a carpenter working at the edge of the 4th floor with out any fall protection. Foreman came thru telling everyone to “roll it up” and sit tight. Put all the tools away (if we aren’t using them, they can’t be fined for having us use defective tools)(IIRC not a single ext cord on the jobsite would pass even a cursory inspection) A # of guys had to leave cause they were wearing shorts and more than a few of us had our hard hats on backwards.
The funny thing was they thought they were being cute. Just have us sit on our hands for an hour or 2 until the OSHA inspector left then we’d all (50-60 carpenters, not sure about the other trades) go back to work.
That inspector took his jolly sweet time inspecting every single floor, passing the time in conversation with every one of us. He started just before 8 am and left after 2pm. They may not have been able to fine my boss much, but he cost him 50-60 x 45/hr x 6 and smiled the whole time and we all just smiled back even if it was the longest day of our lives.
We could appreciate a good fvckin’.
Starfish
@Kay: If only they could hire some H2-B workers at the Department of Labor…
boatboy_srq
@OzarkHillbilly: Just a reminder: this incident, to the Worshippers of the Great And Powerful Job Creators, is exactly what constitutes Costly Gummint Regulation.
kc
@wilfred:
Since you seem to hold people in general contempt, I’m not really understanding why you pretend to care what they do to stay alive.
Kay
@OzarkHillbilly:
I was watching the famous ENRON documentary the other night and the CA regulator said she told the governor to seize a power plant when they started screwing with rolling blackouts. She said “he only would have had to do it once and he has almost unlimited power to respond to a crisis”. Within his power. Take the plant. Do it.
He didn’t do it and 150 assholes at ENRON continued to treat California like a chew toy for another 2 years.
They just have to take 100 or so contractors out in handcuffs. It’ll stop.
rikyrah
@Kay:
Tell the truth.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
A local farm was charged with slavery a couple years ago in upstate NY. Took their papers and didn’t pay them.
J R in WV
@Chris:
Turn it on, and plug in a usb device with some special sauce in it.
done.
Another Holocene Human
@Kay: Everyone got outraged when they saw that janitors could retire.
How dare they.
Now they pay the janitor’s wages in contracts, and get far less for their money.
jonas
Yeah, but are any of them fetuses? ‘Cause if not, fuckem.
/republican_jesus
PIGL
@Kay: State power is overwhelming. None of the abuses practiced by the great and powerful could persist if this power were turned against them. The problem is, they own the state, and its power is turned against us, or at least pointed in out general direction.
Ruckus
@OzarkHillbilly:
This. Fucking this a thousand times.
Up until the last two yrs I’ve worked 50-60 hrs and sometimes much more my entire working life of 53 yrs. 42 yrs of that has been standing up and running machinery, machinery that cut metal and could take off body parts without slowing down one bit. I still do this 3 days a week. I hurt every damn day. But it is nice to eat regular. Fuck @wilfred: and his lazy, overfed bullshit. Yes there are some who are like that. But not the vast majority of people I’ve worked with, even in non mfg jobs. People who put up with bullshit for a crappy paycheck, people who work hard. I know far more of them than fat and lazy. Yes we as a nation are overweight, but that’s because we actually have food and depend on people being paid shit to grow, pick, slaughter and pack it. My parents once stopped on a trip to let us pick cotton when we were kids, to show us how hard that kind of work is. 15 minutes and I was far more than convinced. Wilfred is an asshole.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
What the employers are doing is definitely despicable and should be stopped. But…
I can see being fooled once, but being fooled for nearly 20 years? Is there someone on the other end forcing this woman to come to the U.S. on a H-2 visa? I suppose that’s possible. The alternative explanation is that even with all the abuse it’s better than where she’s from, which is pretty tragic.
boatboy_srq
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
Fairly accurate assessment. Definitely tragic. Also definitely predictable: the US has been fvcking Mexico since before La Republica de Tejas.
boatboy_srq
I realize this is a dead thread; HOWEVER…
I don’t know a lot about the H2-B program, but I have decent knowledge of the H1-B program. H1-B visas are restricted: by time (number of months/years), and by requestor – which latter is nearly always the employer offering the contract and not the employee seeking entrance. So the H1-B workers are hamstrung: they’re stuck with the job they’re offered, only for as long as the position remains, and leaving the job and taking something else in-country automatically voids the current visa and makes them start again from Square One, frequently immediately subject to deportation because their original visa was tied to the job and is no longer valid. Renewing an H1-B visa requires return home – which can require several weeks – which the employer may not allow, and will definitely string out as long as possible to wring optimal productivity from the employee. If H2-B operates on a similar model, the workers who hate their jobs, who are reporting all the abuses, may be legally as well as practically stuck – since the conditions are horrible and the pay lousy but each of those is still better than where they came from.
Theodore Wirth
Thanks to the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, we can continue to revel in the “hear no evil, see no evil” phenomena. Let’s see how the 2nd Amendment protects anybody who dares to shoot any of these modern-day slave owners.