A month ago Monday, a group of guest workers from India placed a frantic 3:00 am phone call to Saket Soni, lead organizer for the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice. The workers said that armed security guards were holding some workers prisoner in the TV room of the Signal International Shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, where the company's 290 welders and pipe fitters live.
The men told Soni that Signal International -- a sub-contractor for mammoth defense contractor Northrop Grumman -- had staged a pre-dawn raid and that six Indian workers had been detained in the "TV room," flanked by security guards, one of whom carried a gun. About 200 other Indian employees at Signal were standing outside the room.
Signal says they detained the guest workers at the advice of US immigration officials, in an attempt to forcibly deport them following a labor dispute. Though the workers were later released into the custody of community groups, the incident has shed light on a longstanding immigration problem -- the vulnerability of guest workers who travel to the United States on H-2B visas, and their exploitation at the hands of so-called "recruiters" and the companies they work for.
Indian workers Joseph Jacob and Sabu Lal believe the Mar. 9 raid was initiated as Signal's reaction to worker complaints, while the company says the workers were fired for performance-related issues.
But the bigger story is in the details: These 290 Indians paid upwards of $15,000 each to travel to America, lured by the promises of a Mississippi sheriff's deputy.
Deputy Michael Pol is also the president of Global Resources, Inc., a placement firm that recruits Indian workers to fill jobs in the US. Global Resources works with local recruiting firms in India to enlist talent and with U.S.-based immigration attorneys to secure visas for the workers.
The Indian workers recruited by Signal International paid on average between $15,000 and $20,000 to Pol. For some, the sum represented their life savings. The six workers who face deportation are terrified of returning to India, where they now face loan sharks and the disappointment of their families. After the raid, Sabu Lal attempted suicide.
Overseas recruiters lure guest workers to the U.S. with lavish promises of permanent residency, high-paying jobs and better living conditions, charging thousands of dollars in "processing fees." Guest workers are usually deeply in debt by the time they arrive in the U.S., where the companies that hire them often charge additional fees for boarding, food and expenses.
Those companies have an incentive to charge by the day, because they save money on taxes when they deduct living expenses from an employee's wages instead of paying an equivalent sum to the employees and letting them secure their own housing and food. Signal charges residents $35 a day for living expenses.
John Sanders, who manages Signal's workers' camp, says his firm was also tricked by Pol, who promised to supply the company with badly-needed Indian welders and pipe-fitters and arrange their passage free of charge. The camp manager says he was shocked when workers told him that they had borrowed thousands of dollars at what he calls "usurious" interest rates from money lenders back in India.
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Lindsay Beyerstein is a New York writer blogging at majikthise.typepad.com
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