Slave Next Door (16 page)

costs and lost wages, but the moment he gets sick or hurt on the job he

finds this is a lie. Ignorant of the system and the language, he has no clue

how to seek medical help, and his employer, far from being solicitous in

the face of losing a laborer, pushes him to keep working.

To enforce control, the employer confiscates or destroys the guest

worker’s passport and visa, making him an illegal alien. In this way, he

faces the threat of arrest and deportation should he attempt to leave or

refuse to work. If he manages to escape and find his way to the local

police, the likelihood of the authorities taking the word of an undocu-

mented migrant worker, with little or no English, over that of an estab-

lished local grower is slim to none. Without his papers, the worker is at

considerably greater risk than his employer. And once he has made

waves, he runs the risk of being blacklisted and destroys any chance of

coming back in the future for a decent job.75 The Carnegie Endowment

for International Peace reported in 1999, “Blacklisting of H-2A workers

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appears to be widespread, is highly organized, and occurs at all stages

of the recruitment and employment process.”76 The large North

Carolina Growers Association has blatantly kept a blacklist, which in

1997 was titled “NCGA Ineligible for Rehire Report,” listing over a

thousand workers’ names.77

All in all, there is little about this that doesn’t fall under the definition

of slavery. Workers are often kept against their will, held by the threat of

violence, paid as little as their employers wish, and denied every basic

right guaranteed by law. In fact, there is little to distinguish these thou-

sands of guest workers from the crews held in slavery by Miguel

Flores—except for the stunning fact that this particular form of bondage

occurs within a government-sponsored program. Admittedly, this sce-

nario doesn’t play itself out in every instance: many employers honor the

conditions of the H-2A laws, providing the work promised at the

agreed-upon wage. Nonetheless, this doesn’t change the fact that

because of the program’s lack of oversight the result can be coercion and

peonage.

Flying in New Victims for Katrina

In 2005, a small, fly-by-night labor contracting company calling itself

“Million Express Manpower, Inc.” brought thirty Thais to the United

States on agricultural guest worker visas. Two of the three owners of

Million Express Manpower were Laotian; the third was an American

who worked for the state job service and was “familiar with the process

of licensing farm labor contractors.”78 The three planned to use the

Thais—all from small villages, with no knowledge of English—as cheap

labor with which to compete with the larger, established labor brokers,

such as the North Carolina Growers Association.79 The contractors’

associates in Thailand promised the workers steady work for three years

and charged them a fee of $11,000 each “to secure the promised

employment.”80 By putting up their houses and bits of farmland as secu-

rity, the Thais borrowed enough to pay the fee. But as case records show,

the guest workers “were victims of trafficking. When they arrived in

North Carolina, Defendant Million Express Manpower, Inc. confis-

cated their passports and visas. Defendants did not provide plaintiffs

with the promised work, and kept plaintiffs in seriously substandard

housing. Defendants warned plaintiffs they would be arrested if they left

their employment, monitored their movements constantly, and showed

plaintiffs they possessed guns. Plaintiffs were fearful of leaving . . . and

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also were bound to continue working to pay off the massive recruitment

fees they had [incurred].”81

Although they were initially put to work in the potato and tobacco

fields around Benson, North Carolina, the work quickly ran out. Shortly

after Hurricane Katrina, the contractors drove them to a flooded New

Orleans and lodged them—several to a room—in a condemned motel.

There were no lights or heat, and the water was polluted. Far from the

crops of North Carolina, they forced the Thais to “work in atrocious

conditions, and failed to pay them for their work. Plaintiffs eventually

sought help and escaped.”82

This is the sanitized version of the horrors these guest workers suf-

fered. A civil lawsuit states that Million Express Manpower was

founded “to capitalize on (1) the need of impoverished people in north-

ern Thailand to get employment abroad in order to support their fami-

lies; and (2) the desire of some North Carolina farmers to obtain H2-A

workers more cheaply, and with less accountability, than if they made

application on their own behalf or used a more established H-2A labor

provider.”83 Subsequently, Legal Aid of North Carolina sued for dam-

ages on behalf of twenty-two of the workers under the 2000 Trafficking

Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, RICO, and North Carolina common

law. Asserting a strong connection between the contractors and the

growers, Legal Aid is suing
both
groups.84 Since there is a high likeli-

hood that Million Express Manpower has no money, whatever com-

pensation the workers receive will have to come from the growers, who

are being sued for violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act and breach

of contract.85

Meanwhile, what becomes of the workers once they’re freed but

before the government certifies them as trafficking victims? This is a big

problem. In general, there is a lack of both funding and social services

for rescued or escaped victims. In this instance, though they were vic-

tims of serious crimes, North Carolina had nothing to offer them. No

shelters would accept them. In the end, they were sent to Washington,

D.C., where they were cared for by a victim service organization called

Boat People SOS.86

A T visa—and frequently funds and support—are available to certified

trafficking victims, but the certification process can be a nightmare.

According to Kate Woomer-Deters, an attorney with Legal Aid of North

Carolina, although various government agencies can certify a person

simply by filling out a form qualifying him as a victim of human traffick-

ing, “This is where they drag their feet.” Neither an investigation nor a

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prosecution is required for certification, but many law enforcement offi-

cials will refuse to certify in the absence of one or the other, or both. Yet

as Woomer-Deters states, “Without a slam dunk case—with barbed wire

and beatings to place before a jury—there is less likelihood of prosecu-

tion.”87 As a result, victims hang in limbo—no social services, no hous-

ing or food allowance, no acknowledged place in the world of people.

Victims are ghosts, and ghostlike, they will often simply disappear.

So Who’s Minding the Store?

We would assume that the DOL would be involved in the process of

approving and tracking agricultural guest workers, given the ease with

which they can become trafficking victims. But the DOL has expressed

its intention to become
less
involved in the program by removing itself

from the approval process of employers’ applications. There are already

too few wage and hour inspectors, and in the words of Mary Bauer,

director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project

and the author of “Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the

United States,” “I have never seen a DOL inspector in the field.”88 The

“Close to Slavery” report further explains: “The number of wage and

hour investigators in the . . . DOL has declined by 14 percent between

1974 and 2004, and the number of completed compliance actions

declined by 36%.”

In July 2008, the federal watchdog, the Government Accountability

Office (GAO), reported to the House Education and Labor Committee

in Congress that the Wage and Hour Division of the DOL—the agency

responsible for investigating complaints of wage, hour, and child labor

violations—was failing to fully investigate and properly address viola-

tions of the law. They concluded that the agency “does not sufficiently

leverage its existing tools to increase compliance.”89 The GAO calcu-

lated that actions initiated by the department on wage and hour viola-

tions had dropped from approximately forty-seven thousand in 1997 to

fewer than thirty thousand in 2007, a smaller number of complaints

than were investigated in 1941, the year of the department’s founding.

And the use of fines that punish repeat or egregious offenders had

declined by nearly 50 percent from 2001 to 2007. Anne Marie

Lasowski, a GAO investigator, told lawmakers that there had been a

sharp decline in enforcement during the tenure of the Bush administration

and that the number of wage and hour inspectors had been slashed during

that period from 942 to 732. Lasowski explained, “It’s not working for

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low-wage workers; they are becoming victims because the law is not

being enforced.”90

When you combine this information with the fact that the number of

workers has grown radically over the past several years, the conclusion

is obvious: the government is abdicating its responsibility to protect

these people from employers who ignore or abuse the laws as a matter

of course and as a way of doing business.91 Mary Bauer adds,

“Government enforcement has been largely ineffective. . . . Though vio-

lations of federal regulations or individual contracts are common, DOL

rarely instigates enforcement actions.” Despite the alarming number of

employers who have violated the legal rights of workers, there is hardly

a single recorded instance of the DOL taking action to stop any of them

from importing more workers.92

The DOL’s position regarding enforcing the rules of the Guest Worker

Program became clear after the Federal Appeals Court handed down its

verdict in the Arriaga case. The issue, which came out of Florida, con-

cerned the payment of workers’ transportation costs, and the court

ruled that the employer was, in fact, liable for the reimbursement of

travel expenses. This was an important case because it took a step

toward easing the workers’ burden of debt. The DOL, however,

responded by stating that it would continue to maintain a position of

nonenforcement. After opening the door to the exploitation of guest

workers, the government was saying, “I don’t want to get involved.”93

Of course, governmental noninvolvement is preferable to harassment

and interference. In Northwest Colorado’s Moffat County, the

Vermillion Ranch Limited Partnership—a large multigeneration stock

operation—for years brought guest workers from Chile on H-2A visas

to work with cattle. Once on the ranch, however, the workers were

made to surrender their documents. Instead of herding, they were put to

maintenance chores, corral building, gardening—various types of non-

H-2A work for which they should have received the minimum wage,

instead of the much lower pay the government allows under the Range

Production of Livestock law. In fact, they received
no
money; their

employer told them it was being deposited in individual accounts set up

for them at a local bank. Deductions were taken from these accounts for

overpriced food, medicine, and other daily necessities, which they were

forced to buy from their employer. The guest workers were allowed no

visitors, and the rancher opened their mail. Having taken their doc-

uments, the rancher threatened them with deportation if they tried

to run. The two workers who mustered the courage to ask to leave

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were sent to a remote part of the ranch, with no phone or means of

transportation.94

In 2006, a group of workers escaped and sought help from Colorado

Legal Services, who sued the ranch not only for breach of contract but

also for false imprisonment and outrageous conduct. Members of the

ranch family had served as county commissioners, and presumably they

inspired the county sheriff to take the next step. Claiming that the work-

ers had “absconded,” the sheriff notified Colorado Legal Services that

their attorney was under investigation in a missing persons case! The

sheriff’s office began a campaign of intimidation aimed directly at her,

digging up all the personal information they could find. Rather than

gearing their resources toward uncovering a trafficking operation, local

law enforcement elected to support the home boys and harass the traf-

ficked workers’ legal team. This is the same law enforcement agency