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Daily Kos, "HRC's FINAL PAID SPEECH ON MARCH 19, 2015 TO AMER. CAMP ASSN.", Feb. 24, 2016
Why would a 501c3 non-profit organized to promote summer camps spend 10 per cent of its annual budget on a Hillary Clinton speech? That was the simple question I wanted to answer when I began researching this piece. I’d flippantly doubted that the American Camp Association would pay $225K for a speech and was corrected by kossack northleft that the actual amount was $260K. Intrigued by the notion that Hillary Clinton knew anything about camping, I soon found myself exploring a much deeper set of issues.
On March 19, 2015 Hillary Clinton made the last of a series of paid speeches to the Tri-State Chapter of the American Camp Association (ACA).
Twenty-four days later she would declare her candidacy for the presidency. While much has been made of her behind-closed-doors speeches to Goldman Sachs, the ACA speech and its follow-up Q&A session with former NY Democratic Party Chair Jay Jacobs, who owns Timber Lake, an overnight camp in the Catskill Mountains, was available right here on Daily Kos.
..The American Camp Association is a national non-profit 501c3 that has 10,000 members and three regional affiliates that represent 2,500 summer and day camps throughout the U.S. It provides professional development and educational opportunities for the camp industry and among its top public-policy priorities lobbies for the Camp Counselor and Student Work Travel (SWT) categories of the
J-1 visa program administered by the U.S. State Department.
- STATE DEPARTMENT J-1 VISA PROGRAM ADVOCACY -
According to the ACA’s own advocacy materials, 25,000 individuals were placed in ACA camps through the State Department’s Exchange Visitor Program in 2011– 20,000 from the specific Camp Counselor category; and 5,000 from the SWT category. Both categories of student workers are facilitated by a network of 49 State Department-approved “sponsors”. In effect, these are staffing agencies that work with feeder organizations in dozens of countries that recruit international students and workers to come to the U.S. for a four-month cultural/work experience.
>The SWT program grew dramatically – from 20,000 participants in the early 1990s to a peak of 153,000 workers in 2008. It is currently capped at 109,000 workers after public outrage over widespread abuses of working conditions, accommodation, compensation and a non-existent cultural component.
..Participants pay significant fees to the sponsoring agencies ($1100 to $2000) in the hope they will experience America and make some money while they are here. In reality, the experience is often far removed from the exciting marketing materials on sponsor web sites. Sixty to eighty-hour weeks of making beds, flipping burgers, working the night shift and sleeping four, six or eight to a room in poor accommodations for minimum wage are all too common.
Employers in such RESORT TOWNS as Ocean City, Maryland, employ thousands of these SWT workers for a variety of reasons divorced from any notion of cultural exchange. > For starters, they save 8 per cent over the cost of employing domestic workers because they don’t have to contribute to Social Security, Medicare or Federal Unemployment Insurance.
The Camp Counselor program which the ACA fully embraces, offers similar advantages to employers. State Department rule changes in 2012 sought to draw a clearer distinction between counselors and SWT staff roles but tremendous ambiguity and virtually non-existent enforcement remain. Those sponsoring agencies that do present an accurate picture of the job explain that counselors work 10 to 14 hours a day, six days a week during a nine-week camp placement. Sponsoring agencies describe compensation as a stipend and an ACA 2013 FAQ as “pocket money”.
Even using the high end of the stipend range ($1800), you get abysmal compensation: $1800 for nine 72-hour weeks, works out to >$2.77 an hour.
Undoubtedly there are some cultural benefits for young campers exposed to international counselors, but it would be naive to think that the obvious financial incentives for the camp owners are not front and center in the decision to hire staff from abroad. For argument’s sake, if we simply distributed the 20,000 counselors and 5,000 SWTs that the ACA claimed were employed in its 2,500 camps during 2011, each camp would have employed eight J-1 visa counselors and two J-1 visa SWT workers.
In other words, the camp industry relies heavily on this cheaper international labor force.
- MAJOR PROBLEMS WITH THE J-1 LABOR PIPELINE-
In 2014, The Southern Policy Law Center (SPLC) presented a report titled Culture Shock: The Exploitation of J-1 Cultural Exchange Workers, which argued “The undeniable conclusion is that these J-1 programs, an initiative once envisioned as a tool of diplomacy, has become little more than A SOURCE OF CHEAP LABOR FOR EMPLOYERS.”
BERNIE SANDERS, during debate on the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill S.744 , called the program “A SCAM.”
“It is not a cultural-exchange program,” he said.
“It is displacing young American workers at a time of double-digit unemployment among young people, and it is putting downward pressure on wages at a time when the American people are working longer hours for lower wages.”
In response, the ACA lobbied to keep the program alive. Quoting from its 2014 annual report, it argued that the ”ACA successfully mobilized the community to advocate for the continuation of the government program that allows for international visitors to serve as camp staff, thereby providing amazing cultural exchange programs for American kids and foreign nationals. This program was at risk during the Congressional debates regarding immigration reform.” Continued...
READ MORE: http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/2/24/1489983/-HRC-s-Final-Paid-Speech-260K-from-the-ACA
http://www.democraticunderground.com/12511329207
on the boardwalk in Ocean City, Md. and my sister worked at a chicken-seafood carry out place. These were our first jobs and what a worthwhile, fun experience. We were glad to get job training and earn some money. Our Dad was proud of us too and took us to work that summer.
