The danger immigrants face when they
stand up for their rights was powerfully
illustrated when an immigrant advocate
in New Orleans told SPLC researchers
what happened when one Hispanic worker
attempted to collect wages from a
contractor.
"The contractor raised his shirt and
showed he had a gun and that was
enough," said Eva San Martin, an
advocate working in New Orleans. "He
didn't have to say any more. The worker
left."
Beltran, a day laborer in Louisiana,
said he carpeted 10 apartments and was
never paid the $3,000 he was owed for
the work. It wasn't the first time he
had been cheated.
"This happens to everyone," he said.
"The humiliation begins there. I know in
this country you can defend your rights,
but people are afraid of the police."
The SPLC survey found Hispanic
immigrants were employed in a variety of
labor-intensive fields. Construction was
the leading industry employing them,
with 17 percent of respondents, followed
by factory work (11 percent), cleaning
(10 percent) and restaurant work (9
percent).
Widespread Abuse in Wake of Katrina
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 created the
ideal conditions for immigrant abuse as
the cleanup and rebuilding effort drew
thousands of migrant workers looking for
employment. In the wake of the storm,
the Crescent City quickly became home to
a labor force eager to work but highly
vulnerable to exploitation.
A look at a few of the cases have
resulted in legal action provides a
glimpse into the conditions many of
these workers endured. They also are a
reminder of the immigrants who are not
so fortunate to find legal help and the
countless instances of abuse that go
unreported every day.
Hispanic immigrants were among the
hundreds of workers restoring schools in
New Orleans following Katrina. Despite
their hard labor, many discovered they
were frequently shortchanged on payday.
"When we weren't paid, we didn't even
have money for food," said Sergio de
Leon, who cleaned toxic mud and mold
from St. Bernard Parish schools. "These
companies are robbing us of our money
after we worked so hard."
The SPLC filed a lawsuit against LVI
Environmental Services of New Orleans,
Inc., and its subcontractor, D&L
Environmental, Inc. on behalf of these
workers. The case has since been
settled.
Hispanic immigrants also worked to
restore key public services in New
Orleans and the Gulf Coast, including
Tulane Hospital and Tulane University.
They often worked 12 hours a day, seven
days a week, to remove mold, mud and
toxic contamination from the flooded
buildings.
Workers employed by subcontractors of
Belfor USA Group Inc. discovered they
were not being paid the overtime wages
they had earned. After the SPLC filed a
lawsuit against Belfor on behalf of the
workers, the company launched an
internal investigation that found
certain subcontractors had not
appropriately paid overtime wages to
their employees.
Belfor reached a settlement agreement in
2006 to ensure that hundreds of workers
would receive the pay they earned.
Another group of immigrant workers were
drawn to New Orleans to repair an
apartment complex. They were promised a
wage of at least $500 a week and an
apartment at the Audubon Pointe
apartment complex they were repairing.
They arrived to discover they would be
living in storm-damaged apartments and
cheated out of wages. Their employer
allegedly responded to complaints of
nonpayment with threats of eviction and
deportation.
"They said that we did not have rights
in this country and we had to shut
up and continue working if we did not
want problems," said Reyes
Aguilar-Garcia, an Audubon Pointe
worker, in an affidavit that's part of a
lawsuit the SPLC filed against his
employer.
Their apartments had holes in the walls
or no finished walls, broken windows,
smelly carpets and cockroaches. One
worker shared a two-bedroom apartment
with seven other workers. Despite these
conditions, the fear of homelessness
kept many workers from leaving.
"Without any money, Audubon Pointe was
the only place we had to sleep, and we
could not survive if we were to lose
this housing, as bad as it was,"
Aguilar-Garcia said.
A federal lawsuit was filed in March
2008 on behalf of these workers by the
SPLC, the Pro Bono Project and the
National Employment Law Project. It
alleges the employers violated the Fair
Labor Standards Act and the Victims of
Trafficking Protection Act. The case has
since been settled and an agreement
reached to pay the workers' wages.
Guestworkers Face Systematic Abuse
Having few opportunities in Peru,
Humberto Jimenez jumped at the
opportunity to earn money for his
child's college education even though
it meant mortgaging his house.
A major hotel chain in New Orleans was
looking for workers to fill jobs left
empty after Hurricane Katrina. Labor
recruiters promised 40 hours of work
each week and plenty of overtime.
Jimenez mortgaged his house in Peru to
pay $4,000 in fees to a recruiter who
helped him secure the job.
But the promises were not true. Many of
the workers hired by the hotel chain
found themselves working 25 hours a week
or less. Jimenez couldn't make ends meet
on what he earned much less pay back
the money he borrowed.
"Four thousand dollars is a lot of money
in Peru," Jimenez said. "I came here to
make enough money to see my child
through college. If I had known the
truth I would never have come."
Jimenez, who was in the country legally
as a guest worker, could not get a second
job or quit the job to find other work.
That's because workers with H-2
guest worker visas for low-skill,
seasonal jobs are bound to the employers
who hire them under the program and
cannot legally look for other work. They
are often forced deeply into debt
because of exorbitant fees charged by
the recruiters who bring them to the
United States. Accepting abuse and
earning what little money is available
is often seen as better than returning
home with crushing debt and no earnings.
Workers Jailed after Demanding Pay.
Department of Labor Offers Little Help
The SPLC documented widespread abuse in
the H-2A and H-2B programs in its 2007
report, Close to Slavery. The report
describes rampant wage violations,
recruitment abuses, seizure of identity
documents and squalid living conditions.
Under these conditions, it shouldn't be
surprising to hear Hispanics recounting
stories of desperation, such as the one
Berta of Oak Park, Ga., told for this
report.
Berta was driving home from work one
night when she saw two Hispanic men on
the road looking for a ride. They were
guest workers who had escaped from their
jobs. Their employer had threatened to
fire them if they left the job site, an
action that would cost them their visas
and result in deportation.
The men risked an escape only because
they weren't making enough money to
live. The cold calculation for them was
it was better to become an
undocumented immigrant than to work
legally under their employer.
"Even though we don't have papers,
undocumented immigrants are sometimes
a little freer because we don't have to
ask permission from the boss to be able
to leave," Berta said. "In some ways,
it's like guest workers are prisoners,
because they cannot leave and look for
other work. They are here like slaves."
South's Weak Labor Laws Key to Abuse
It is not surprising workplace
abuse flourishes in the South. The South
has the weakest labor protections of any
region in the United States. Every
Southern state, for example, is a "right
to work" state, making it harder for
workers to unionize and collectively
improve wages and working conditions.
Further, these Southern states do not
have strong enforcement mechanisms to
help workers assert their rights. While
many states have vigorous state
Departments of Labor, that simply is not
the case for most states in the South.
The result is, given the failure of
the federal government to protect them,
workers in the South are largely without
recourse when their rights are violated.
In examining one major industry that
relies heavily on Hispanic migrant labor
agriculture it is easy to understand
why conditions for agricultural workers
in the Southeast are considered the
worst in the nation. State laws to
protect farm workers from abuse are
appallingly weak, or nonexistent.
For example, farm workers are not covered
by workers' compensation laws in many of
the Southern states. That means when
farm workers are injured on the job and
many are, given it is one of the
most dangerous occupations in the U.S.
they are routinely denied any benefits
at all. And there is little or nothing
they can do about it.
In addition, many state wage and hour
laws, if they exist at all, exempt
agricultural workers from their
protection. In some states, farm worker
children are even exempt from the
state's compulsory education laws. And
many state health and safety laws
exclude farm workers.
These antiquated laws are vestiges of
slavery. The farm worker population in
the Southeast has always been composed
principally of racial or ethnic
minorities and has suffered shocking
prejudice and oppression as a result. As
one North Carolina grower summed up the
situation: "The North won the War on
paper but we confederates actually won
because we kept our slaves. First we had
sharecroppers, then tenant farmers and
now we have Mexicans."
The treatment in the fields described by
one Hispanic is a sad confirmation of
this attitude. Hilda, who has worked in
the United States for eight years,
described working in the fields of
Georgia, where plants are covered in
pesticides or even sprayed with
pesticides as the workers harvest.
"There is no protection," Hilda said in
an interview for this report. "A simple
shirt, a bandana, no protection for the
mouth or the nose nothing.
When we
ask for protection, they say there is
none."
In the spring of 2008, the author
interviewed numerous migrant tomato
workers in Immokalee, Fla., and found
them desperately poor, fearful of
retaliation and lacking in the benefits
most workers take for granted. These
workers earned as little as 40 to 45
cents for each 32-pound bucket of
tomatoes they picked or about $25 per
ton.
The workers faced regular exposure to
pesticides in the fields and chronic
violations of wage and hour laws. As one
worker said: "If you say something, they
fire you."
Farm workers who try to stand up for
their rights often find themselves
frustrated by multiple layers of
subcontractors and middlemen an
arrangement that seems designed to
insulate corporations at the top from
accountability for the mistreatment of
workers. The same phenomenon was seen
repeatedly in New Orleans with
contractors working to clean up the city
after Hurricane Katrina.
In southeast Georgia between 2003 and
2006, hundreds of Hispanics both
foreign guest workers and U.S.-based
migrant laborers toiled in onion
fields controlled by Fresh Del Monte
Produce (Southeast), Inc. a subsidiary
of the food giant Fresh Del Monte
Produce. They lived in Del Monte labor
camps. They used Del Monte equipment.
They were supervised by Del Monte
employees.
The workers claim they were consistently
cheated out of their pay. They contend
hourly rates were sometimes wrong and
pay stubs frequently showed fewer
hours than they actually worked. But the
company claimed it wasn't responsible
for shortchanging the workers it
was the responsibility of an
"independent" labor contractor. The SPLC
brought suit against Del Monte and won a
ruling the labor contractor and the
workers were really employees of the Del
Monte subsidiary and the company
was indeed responsible for any wage
abuses that could be proven.
The federal ruling was an important
milestone for workers, but the fact
remains most Hispanic farm workers
in the South have little or no access to
legal representation.
Many low-income individuals across the
U.S. rely upon legal services offices
when they have legal problems.
Unfortunately, many immigrants simply
cannot do that. Federally funded legal
services offices are prohibited from
representing undocumented immigrants and
many legal immigrants, as well.
Because there are few private lawyers or
other nonprofits in the South willing to
take cases on behalf of low-income
immigrants, many people whose rights
have been violated are left with no
recourse whatsoever.
Suffering in Silence
Even if an immigrant is fairly paid by
an employer, there's still the worry of
how the employer will respond to an
on-the-job injury or illness.
Miguel, a Hispanic in Georgia, described
the ordeal his brother faced after he
began having trouble with his back on
the job. The supervisor told Miguel's
brother there was nothing he could do
since the Guatemalan was undocumented.
Eventually, his supervisor agreed to
take him to the hospital on one
condition. He had to tell hospital
officials the company found him on
the side of the road, drunk and run over
by a car.
It was a story that would completely
disassociate the man from the company
that had employed him for nearly two
years.
In New Orleans, an advocate recounted
the story of a Hispanic whose thumb was
severed on the job. The worker was taken
to the home of his employer's brother
where he waited for four hours until he
was taken to the hospital.
A Hispanic in Nashville described how
she cut herself while cleaning a
restaurant. Although she had seen
managers take non-Hispanics to the
hospital, she was told they wouldn't
take her. Even after receiving medical
treatment, her employer refused to pay
any of the cost. The injury has left her
with limited mobility in her hand.
In 2004, an Associated Press
investigation found Mexican workers
were about 80 percent more likely to die
on the job than native-born workers.
That figure translates to one Mexican
worker a day dying on the job from
accidental deaths; workers as young as
15 were "impaled, shredded in machinery,
and buried alive."
In the South, the rate of deaths for
Mexican workers was 1 in 6,200 workers
more than double the national average
for Mexican workers, the AP study found.
The deadliest states were Georgia,
Florida and North Carolina. The total
deaths jumped from 27 in 1996 to 94 in
2002 a more than three-fold increase.
Every day, the SPLC receives calls from
workers who are not paid for work
performed, illegally fired, or injured
on the job and fired. Quite often, if
the SPLC is unable to provide
representation, there is no other legal
recourse available. As a final resort,
they are referred to the U.S. Department
of Labor, even though it is highly
unlikely they will ever see their lost
wages.
Berta, the Hispanic in Georgia, said the
impact of workplace abuse, like being
chronically exposed to pesticides, isn't
fully realized while they still live in
the United States. And the cost is not
borne by the U.S. companies that employ
them or by the consumers who enjoy the
products or services they produce.
"What happens is when we feel sick, we
go back to our homeland, and that's
where we die," Berta said. "The
consequences are not seen here, they
leave and they are seen in Mexico."
