'Guest workers' protest recruitment tactics

[Robbien]

Source: Los Angeles Times-Washington Post

Washington: Vijay Kumar was working as a contract welder in the United Arab Emirates two years ago, far from his wife and family in southern India, when he spotted an advertisement offering welders and pipe fitters "permanent lifetime settlement in the USA for self and family."

Kumar answered the ad to find that workers were being recruited to rebuild oil rigs in Mississippi and Texas destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. He returned to India, signed a contract and paid a recruiter $20,000 (Dh73,400) to travel to the United States. He told his wife, who had just given birth to a son, that he would send for them as soon as he could.

. . .

When about 500 Indian recruits reached Mississippi in the fall of 2006, Kumar and the others said, they found that they had been deceived.

Their new employer, Signal International Corporation, had hired them as temporary "guest" workers with ten-month visas. There was no possibility of obtaining permanent residency for themselves, let alone their families back home. Signal denies that it knew the workers had been promised US residency.

With support from the Union, law firms and advocacy groups, more than 100 of the recruited Indians have filed a federal lawsuit in Louisiana against Signal and several recruiting agents, under a federal law that prohibits "human trafficking" by fraud or force for labour or services.


Read more: http://www.gulfnews.com/world/U.S.A/10222557.html

[surf]

1. How low can you go??

Promising someone a chance to be a perm resident just to get them to sign on the bottom line. Hope they sue and win.

[Anexio]

3. Sue?

Who is the guy going to sue, surf?

Signal International?

Nowhere in the article did I see a quote from anyone at Signal.

I'm not saying that Signal is without fault here, but cheese and rice, this is one hell of a one sided story.

It's just more crappy journalism piled on top of more crappy journalism.

[progdonkey]

4. "Signal denies that it knew the workers had been promised US residency."

[EFerrari]

6. What stands out as "crappy" to you? You're in Florida.

You know or should know that foreign workers are lured to job sites all the time and abused if not actually enslaved.

Here's a vitual tour of a part of your state:

http://www.ciw-online.org/images/images.html

[Anexio]

7. Way to stray off topic

The article the original poster provided links to was in my opinion, crappy.

Gulfnews.com, please, you're making me laugh. They are out of Saudi Arabia, hardly a bastion of high quality labor relations.

And regarding your kind words on Florida, I'm aware of that situation from a couple of years ago and realize that Florida has a long history of slave labor. It was a bad deal for all around but the Feds came in, undercover I might add, and shut the place down. The people that did those terrible things are now in jail and hopefully the illegals were given safe passage back to their homes.

And let me point out that Florida isn't the only state for shenanigans like that. Check out some Iowa hog/chicken farms sometime or Texas or Georgia.

[EFerrari]

8. So, how is that reporting "crappy"? You didn't answer the question.

Am I supposed to just assume that those A-Rabs do "crappy" reporting?

And, btw, the Feds had to be dragged kicking and screaming, into that situation. They didn't swoop down like 007.

The CIA says 50K human beings are trafficked in the US every year. And you better believe it's not just Florida. Here in San Francisco, human trafficking is alive and well and growing.

http://www.gvnet.com/humantrafficking/USA.htm

[NBachers]

2. Offshore Oil Drilling, Anyone?

So let's fit this item in with the current "big push" for offshore oil drilling. And who's pushing that?

[InkAddict]

5. Never, ever, pay the fee for working for someone else!

and investigate all franchise licenses carefully. If he was so talented and necessary to their success, Signal would have been glad to pay travel and relocation expenses. Our Indian friend should say thanks for the 10-month gig; he's lucky it didn't last two days in America. That's what happens in IT.

I don't expect a win here; our DOJ won't exactly be in a great hurry to fete justice nor will discovery lead to the prankster that created the ad as he was probably a Countryman who did not understand English very well (LOL-tongue in cheek-bet he knew) or is an individual in this Great Nation's State of Louisiana in Signal's marketing department that got stuck doing the classified ads and has long-since been terminated, no doubt outsourced. All things considered, maybe this is what Kenny Boy's doing to earn his keep now. After all, he didn't know what his subordinates were up to either, ROTFL and ROTFC all at once.

[Sanity Claws]

9. Why aren't these jobs going to Americans?

Why the offshore recruitment? That strikes me as the untold story here. Signal most likely wanted to pay substandard wages for dangerous work.

[MountainLaurel]

10. Some things never change

A century ago, companies that mined coal, asbestos, and other natural resources pulled the same sorts of tricks on destitute villagers across central and southern Europe.