Guest Workers
The current US guestworker program is a descendant of the Bracero program, and imports workers to perform work on agricultural (H-2A) and non-agricultural (H-2B) visas.
Guestworkers do not have the ability to organize or the power to bargain—and lose it many times over at each step in the international labor-supply chain. When they arrive for work in the United States, guestworkers experience severe labor exploitation that routinely rises to the level of forced labor, trafficking, peonage and involuntary servitude. Guestworkers cannot transform their workplace, and do not have the right to quit.
The legal structure of the visa binds workers to one employer. Workers plunge their families into debt to buy their visas; if they organize to demand their rights, they are fired in retaliation and deported back into debt servitude. In the current framework for labor migration—in the United States and worldwide—guestworkers are reduced to commodities for lease and sale on an international worker-supply chain.
Demographics. In fiscal year 2009, the United States issued about 105,000 H2-A and H2-B visas, primarily to Mexicans, though the number of guest workers from other, non-Spanish-speaking countries is on the rise.
Slavery, Forced Labor and Indentured Servitude. Worker-experts and grassroots labor leaders have testified as to how the elements of the guestworker system—including tying workers to a single employer, mandating that workers must return to their home country as a result of losing their job, and tolerating insurmountable debts—lead to indentured servitude, labor trafficking, debt peonage and forced labor. Many domestic experts and the International Labour Organization have agreed with these workers.
"Recruitment Fees." Among the most significant wage and hour problems for guestworkers are the astronomical "recruitment fees" that many must pay before they ever leave home, and that set the stage for a system of indentured servitude. As worker-experts have testified, labor contractors and recruiters have imposed significant fees, ranging from $500 to well over $10,000, on workers as a condition of gaining access to the job-applicant pool in the foreign country. For those working in the H2-B non-agricultural guestworker program, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that these fees, which deprive workers of minimum wages, are lawful.
Forms of Work. Guestworker programs have taken subcontracting to an international level. Virtually no employers hire workers directly. Employers can shop for workers worldwide and online: With the advent of the Internet, they can order up their guestworkers from international labor contractors who advertise on a dozen websites. Guestworkers arrive in the United States to find themselves being leased for profit from one employer to another.
Projected Growth. Guestworker programs are a much-discussed element of comprehensive immigration reform. In the last year that a bill was considered, estimates of the potential increase in these temporary-worker programs were as high as 400,000 per year.
Photo Courtesy of Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity
Daniel's Story
Daniel was among the first guestworkers to arrive in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. He is a founding member of the Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity.
Just after Katrina, I saw an ad in a Peruvian newspaper. An employer in New Orleans was looking for workers. Recruiters for a New Orleans hotel giant, Patrick Quinn, promised us good jobs, fair pay, and comfortable accommodations. They asked for $3,000 for the visa. I plunged my family into debt to pay the fees.
When I came to the United States I found that all the promises they made were false.
Patrick Quinn had brought about 300 workers from Peru, Bolivia and the Dominican Republic on H-2B visas. We were living in atrocious conditions and were subjected to humiliating treatment. When we raised our voices, we were threatened with deportation. And because of the terms of the H-2B visa, we did not have the right to quit. We could not work for anyone else.
In order to receive H-2B visas, Patrick Quinn had to convince the Department of Labor that he could not find a single US worker willing or able to do the work he was offering. When I arrived in New Orleans, I found that his hotels were full of displaced African-Americans — survivors of Hurricane Katrina who were desperately looking for work.
If Quinn had needed workers, all he had to do was to go to his own hotel and offer people work. Instead of hiring workers from the African-American community, he sent recruiters to hire us. At around $6 an hour we were cheaper. As temporary workers, we were more exploitable. We were hostage to the debt in our home countries; we were terrified of deportation; and we were bound to Quinn and could not work for anyone else. We were Patrick Quinn's captive workforce.
But Patrick Quinn underestimated us. We built an organization and filed a major federal lawsuit against him.
Meanwhile, we heard stories — some much worse than our own — of other guestworkers who were being stripped of their dignity by employers across the Gulf Coast. Employers were holding workers captive in labor camps; confiscating their passports; subjecting them to surveillance; leasing workers for a profit in violation of morality and the law; and trafficking workers into conditions of imprisonment. We decided to fight. We founded a membership organization called the Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity.
Since our founding, we have fought publicly to defend the rights of guestworkers. We have protested employers who exploit us. We have confronted recruiters, subcontractors, and the police — the white power structure of the racist South. We have conducted citizens' arrests, triggered federal investigations, and freed guestworkers from conditions of involuntary servitude in labor camps and plantations. We have traveled on foot to Washington, and held hunger strikes to force members of Congress and the US Department of Justice to confront the exploitative realities of the H-2B program.
