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Guest Worker Bill in Congress will Expand Exploitation

[ Posted On: 2007-04-21 ]

House legislation introduced in March would expand the guest worker system under the guise of immigration reform. The legislation, if passed, would allow hundreds of thousands of new guest workers to come to the U.S.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) released a 48 page report on the U.S. guest worker program in March. The current guest worker program, the H-2 program, brought about 121,000 guest workers into the U.S. in 2005 alone. The SPLC report states that they are "systematically exploited and abused" by their employers.

The report listed a litany of abuses guest workers suffer, including being routinely cheated out of wages, paying high fees to work low-wage, temporary jobs, held virtual captives by employers who take their documents, forced to live in poor conditions, and denied medical treatment for on the job injuries.

Guest workers are first exploited in their home countries. U.S. employers use private agencies to recruit foreign workers. The SPLC report found that the agencies charge workers "thousands of dollars" to costs, including travel and visa. "The workers, most of whom live in poverty, frequently must obtain high-interest loans to come up with the money to pay the fees." In addition, the agencies sometimes require the workers to leave the deed to their house or car. The workers, therefore, start off in debt ranging from $500 to $10,000.

Proposals to expand the guest worker programs, including the House legislation, exclude "a substantial increase in the federal budget for the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration," the report noted.

The report also mentioned that the government has decreased its enforcement of labor protections for all Americans in the last couple of decades. Wage and hour investigators decreased by 14 percent from 1974 to 2004. The number of completed compliance actions had decreased by 36 percent. However, the number of American workers covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act has actually increased by over half. The Brennan Center for Justice discovered in 2005 that "these two trends indicate a significant reduction in the government’s capacity to ensure that employers are complying with the most basic workplace laws."

If the past is any indication, expanding the guest worker program would only increase exploitation. In 1942 the U.S. began a guest worker program called the Bracero Program. The Bracero Program allowed over four million Mexican farm workers to come to the U.S. beginning in August 1942, and ended in 1964. The Bracero contracts, written in English, were controlled by farmers’ associations and the Farm Bureau. The farm workers would sign the contracts without knowing what they were truly signing. When the contracts expired, the farm workers had to return to Mexico.

For over 20 years Mexican farm workers were exploited under the Bracero Program. Lee G. Williams, the U.S. Department of Labor officer in charge of the Program, called it, "legalized slavery." The remarks of Rep. Charles Rangel, House Ways and Means Committee Chair, sound strikingly similar, "This guest worker program's the closest thing I’ve ever seen to slavery."

True immigration reform would do two things. First, it would repeal the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the landmark trade pact between Canada, the U.S., and Mexico, and in its place enact a trade agreement that would ensure fair prices are paid to farmers and artisans. Second, an amnesty program would be enacted which would grant legal status to undocumented workers.

Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard

About The Author: Gina-Marie Cheeseman is a freelance writer with a passion for social justice. Growing up in a farming community in the San Joaquin Valley, she spent much time in the Fresno sun, but it did not fry her brain.

| View Profile & All Articles By: Gina-Marie Cheeseman |

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