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Shipwrecked Dreams |
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Living 20 to a squalid trailer, fighting for spoons and drinking water, daily threats of deportation—no, this isn’t a Dubai construction site, this is America where over 500 Indian dock workers seeking the American dream are trapped in a nightmare they can’t escape
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By Rakesh K. Simha
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 The
place: A trailer camp in a shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, United States.
The time: 3:00am, March 9, 2008.
A group of guest workers from India place a frantic phone call to Saket Soni, lead organiser for the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice. The workers tell Soni that armed security guards have burst into the camp and are holding some workers prisoner in the TV room of the Signal International Shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, where the company’s 290 welders and pipe fitters live. The men tell Soni that Signal International—a sub-contractor for defence contractor Northrop Grumman—had staged a pre-dawn raid and that six Indian workers had been detained in the TV room, flanked by armed security guards. About 200 other Indian employees at Signal are standing outside the room.
Soni makes a few desperate calls and soon American community groups get involved, leading to the release of the detained Indian workers. According to Signal they detained the guest workers at the advice of US immigration officials, in an attempt to forcibly deport them following a labour dispute.
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“If solving this situation does not come under the purview of Mr Ambassador, what is his real work and assignment?”
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The incident has shed light on a longstanding immigration problem—the vulnerability of guest workers who travel to the United States on H-2B visas, and their exploitation at the hands of so-called “recruiters” and the companies they work for.
 Among the workers staring down Signal’s gun is 39-year-old Sabulal
Vijayan, a father-of-two from Kerala. He says the raid was initiated as Signal’s reaction to worker complaints.
Vijayan, who paid the recruiter Rs 600,000, says he sold everything he had to come to the US to try to earn a better life for his family but had been left with nothing. “We need to change this system to one that helps the employees who are suffering. The experienced fitter says he was threatened with losing his job when he complained about the men’s treatment last year —at which point fear and despair led him to attempt suicide.
Vijayan said an earlier attempt at protest had been ruthlessly muzzled. He had been sacked and police had been called in to make them behave. “I slit my wrists because there is nothing left for me to go home to,” he said, adding that he had been treated in hospital for three days afterwards.
Vijayan says the men had been living in “slave-like conditions” with cramped accommodation, nowhere to keep their belongings and inadequate food. “We lived like pigs in a cage, in a work camp run by Signal International.”
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American Sweatshop
This is not the first time Indians coming to the US on temporary work permits have found their hopes of having a more secure economic future shattered. In California's rural Central Valley farmland, there are rumors that American farmers of Indian origin are, in an ironic twist, also abusing the temporary work visa programme.
In 2005, the case against a prominent Yuba City grower, Harbans Bath, was settled in favour of his workers. He had been accused of housing hundreds of temporary workers, including some of his own relatives, in trailers, pesticide storage sheds and other structures that didn’t meet housing safety and health standards. According to Lee Pliscou, a lead attorney at California Rural Legal Assistance, the workers weren’t provided with food—instead, they were made to eat the crops they picked. They were also told they wouldn’t be paid until the end of the harvest season. The workers from Punjab readily accepted this condition, since that is how payment has often worked on Punjabi farms.
Other injustices were harder to accept. One woman lost a finger in a machine harvester and never received medical treatment or workman’s compensation for the injury. She was part of the lawsuit brought against Bath, for which a judge ordered him to pay $52,923 in damages.
The temporary work visa programme is rife with abuse and heartache. Professional high-tech workers from India come to the United States on the so-called H-1B visa only to find they have to forego all that they have paid into Social Security when their visas expire after six years and the green cards they have applied for is still years away.
Critics of the programme say tech companies are overstating the scope of worker shortages to maintain a steady supply of foreign-born employees willing to work longer hours for lower wages. “Indentured servitude” is how the programme has been described. Indians account for about half of all H-1B visas given out. |
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The story how of they got into the Mississippi mess is the usual crooked agent-evil employer one. The protesters said they had been lured with promises of permanent US residency into a “human trafficking ring” run by Signal International.
Signal issued a statement denying the charges. It said 500 workers were recruited from India two years ago because of labour shortages caused by hurricane Katrina. The company said it had sponsored the workers for short-term H2B visas.
Vijayan accuses Signal of reducing the workers’ already meagre pay by almost a third, and described the conditions in which the Indians stayed at the “camp”. “Initially, we were paid $18 a day and it was later reduced to $13,” he says. “Twenty-four of us stayed in one cramped dormitory that included our beds, showers and water coolers. All of us had paid between Rs 6 lakh and Rs 10 lakh to a
Mumbai-based recruiter to get to the US. We were all promised green cards,” he adds.
The Indians, however, weren’t taking things lying down. They filed a class action suit, accusing their US employer, its agents and New Orleans immigration lawyer Malvern Burnett of forced
labour, trafficking, fraud and civil rights violations, and held a rally in New Orleans. Their litigation team includes attorneys from the Southern Poverty Law
Centre, the Asian American Legal Defence and Education Fund
(AALDEF), and the Louisiana Justice Institute.
“With this litigation, the workers have taken a major step forward in exposing the way prominent US recruiters and corporations use the guest worker programme as a legal sanction for worker abuse,” said Tushar Sheth of the
AALDEF.
Subsequent media outrage in India prompted Minister of Overseas Indian Affairs Vayalar Ravi to open an investigation into the matter, even as New Delhi suspended the licences of the two recruiting
agents—Dewan Consultants and S. Mansur and Company.
With time running out on their visas, the desperate workers undertook a
satyagraha—a nine-day, 1,500 km march by 100 workers from New Orleans to Washington DC. In the US capital they knocked on the doors of the Indian embassy, where in its central hall packed with major international news media and over a dozen of the workers’ advocates, they had a three-hour meeting with ambassador Ronen Sen.
Though the workers and the ambassador agreed that the meeting was “a conversation, not a confrontation”, the atmosphere was tense at times as the workers confronted Sen over comments in the press attributed to embassy officials that referred to “the stupidity of greedy and semi-literate workers”. They also pressed him for a commitment that Indian officials would always put the workers first in any future handling of the case, rather than the company that held them in forced
labour.
“We’re hoping that before any action is taken interfacing with company representatives, with government representatives, with any other representatives of any other interests...in this issue, either here or in India, you will communicate with us first. Do we have that assurance?” asked
Soni. “Yes. I have heard you and I have heard everyone here loud and clear,” Sen said.
But the marchers were not satisfied because the ambassador refused to advocate for the workers with the US Department of Justice and other US agencies, claiming that protocol forbade him from doing so. “The ambassador is locked in protocol, but human trafficking does not follow protocol,” said
Vijayan, who is now an organiser with the Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity.
Others are less...well...diplomatic. Extremely disappointed that Sen is doing nothing to get help from India, one of them said: “If solving this situation does not come under the purview of Mr Ambassador, what is his real work and assignment?”
Accusing New Delhi of “abandoning” them to their fate, they have now sought the help of the United Nations. The workers met the deputy director of New York office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights Craig G.
Mokhiber. After the meeting, Soni, who led the Indians, said Mokhiber had agreed that their alleged ill treatment constituted violation of international and humanitarian laws.
Such sustained lobbying is paying off. The US Department of Justice has opened a human trafficking investigation into the case, and Congressman George Miller has demanding detailed documentation from Secretary of Labor Elaine
Chao.
The ranks of the workers’ allies and supporters have surged after the nine-day
satyagraha, and include legendary civil rights leader Hollis Watkins, the National Immigration Law Center, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Louisiana Justice Institute, the Low-Wage Migrant Worker Coalition, the Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights, the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, Amnesty International, and numerous other groups.
But even the most optimistic are not expecting quick results. Certainly not the workers—most of them have been fired by Signal and are living in churches in New Orleans, many have quit and joined other companies, while several have simply disappeared, fearing deportation. With the US more pre-occupied with massive illegal immigration from Mexico, and the Indian government seemingly having no plan of action, the dock workers are clearly on their own. As an Indian government official said, “Realistically, how much protection can we give if employers thousands of miles away decide to exploit their workers?”
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June 2008
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