Making Your Guests Feel At Home

A reader reminded me of this article, published in Ms. Magazine last year, which described how a guest worker program actually operates in a U.S. commonwealth:

Coming from rural villages and the big city slums of poor Asian countries, these garment workers began their sojourn in the Marianas with a huge financial deficit, having paid recruiters as much as $7,000 to obtain a one-year contract job (renewable at the employer’s discretion). Many of them borrow the money—a small fortune in China, where most are recruited—from lenders who charge as much as 20 percent interest.

In a situation akin to indentured servitude, workers cannot earn back their recruitment fee and pay annual company supplied housing and food expenses of about $2,100 without working tremendous hours of overtime. Before being able to save her first dollar, a worker who owes, say, $5,000 to her recruiter has to work nearly 2,500 hours at Saipan’s current minimum wage—which equals six more 40-hour workweeks than exist in a year.

And that’s assuming she gets paid. Increasingly, workers are filing formal complaints that they have not received their wages, with some women going without paychecks for over five months.....

The guest worker designation means that these foreign laborers can remain on the islands for an indefinite period but are not eligible for U.S. citizenship. If workers complain about conditions, not only can they be terminated at the whim of their employer, but because they’re exempt from U.S. immigration law, they can be summarily deported.

The local Department of Labor and Immigration, chronically underfunded, is of little help to them, taking six months to a year to complete reviews of complaints.

Of course, we all know that such things could not possibly happen if we were to enact our own guest worker program.

(Additional discussions of the Mariana Islands program are here and here).

Comments

[D Flinchum]

Back in February 2005, Lornett Turnbull of the "Seattle Times" wrote an article concerning how growers in WA state were starting to prefer LEGAL Thai workers to Hispanic workers, legal and illegal. These workers are coming in via job contractors under the H-2A federal program.

Some direct quotes from the article:

"In return, they say, they get workers whose immigration status and loyalty are not in question. And when the harvest is as big as it was last year, they know these workers — their English limited and their movements largely controlled — will show up to work."

"Growers also say many local workers "cherry pick" the orchards for the best jobs and pay, leaving some farmers guessing whether they'll have enough laborers, especially in a big year. "

"Global said 95 percent of the local workers it hired for jobs at two orchards last year didn't show up on the second day. But some workers say they were placed in a position where they couldn't compete with the Thais."

"Global is the target of a 2-year-old federal probe into wage-and-hour violations and came under fire from state regulators for how it paid and housed its Thai employees last year."

"He (Mordechai Orian, president of Global, a laor contracting firm) said the Thais have a lower runaway rate than the others and are more productive. "

And finally:

"Yet, it's questionable whether a farm-labor shortage, the rationale for H-2A workers, actually exists."

Movements largely controlled, inability to change jobs, low runaway rate? Sounds oddly familiar, doesn't it?

We're already there, Dr. Borjas, in our race to the bottom on wages.