Pascagoula, Mississippi March 5, 2008
The New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice asked Global Workers to support a case of Indian H-2b guest workers trafficked to work for Signal International, a large shipyard in Mississippi. Specifically, they wanted to bring legal actions in India against the recruiter and to explore international legal actions in addition to the domestic actions they were about to pursue.
The case of the Indian workers highlights once again the serious problems of the USA guest worker program. On the one hand the US is a strong advocate against trafficking of humans. On the other hand, the government itself is facilitating a program that has resulted in more than one instance of human trafficking.
Signal hired a recruiter in India to bring over 600 welders to the gulf coast, due to an alleged lack of American welders available after Hurricane Katrina. The recruiter charged the Indians $20,000 a piece with the promise that they would receive green cards and be able to bring their families to live with them permanently in the USA. Since many of these workers had spent their entire adult lives holding jobs all over the world as guest workers on short contracts, the opportunity to hold good jobs and live with their families seemed well worth going into deep debt. Once they arrived in the USA they realized that they were terribly deceived. The workers were on H-2b visas, which offer no possibility of converting to green cards (i.e. permanent residency). Their families would never be able to join them and there was no way to pay off the debt with a six month job. To their further humiliation, they were housed in “man camps” with 24 persons to a room with one bathroom. The conditions, they claim, were worse than any country in the middle east where they had previously worked. In response, the workers started to organize. The company reacted by illegally detaining several of the workers with the threat to deport them. The fear of deportation while having a crushing debt drove one worker to attempt suicide. In solidarity, the rest of the workers spontaneously struck to demand their release. Over the course of the next year, the workers continued to organize while the Workers Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center laid the ground work for a massive law suit alleging, amongst other claims, human trafficking.