The hunger strike by 16 Indian metalworkers in Washington D.C. has underscored what has long been a problem facing migrant workers that seek legal employment abroad. Insufficient international oversight and a lack of due diligence by employers, immigration lawyers and authorities must be taken more seriously by everyone involved.
The workers in this case are from India, hired to work in the Gulf of Mexico as welders for the Mississippi-based oilrig constructor, Signal International. Last week about 50 of them staged a protest in front of the US Department of Justice, which is investigating the allegations of human trafficking.
The workers, who have been granted temporary stay pending the results of the investigation, claim that they were housed by Signal under curfew in cramped quarters and prevented from leaving the shipyards in Texas and Mississippi where they lived and worked. They also claim that $1,050 was deducted from their paychecks each month to pay for the housing. Signal denies these charges and says the workers were treated well.
For its part, Signal has filed a lawsuit against three men for misleading the company on the visas: Michael Pol, the owner of the Mississippi-based foreign labor recruitment agency Global Resources; New Orleans-based immigration lawyer Malvern C. Burnett; and Sachin Dewan, owner of the Mumbai-based labor recruiter Dewan Consultants Pvt. Ltd. All three men deny that they cheated anyone, but Signal claims it was not aware that the recruiters had charged exorbitant fees to the workers.
One of the workers claimed they were ordered to pay $9,190 by the middlemen -- allegedly a fee paid to Pol and Burnett by Dewan in order to process the paperwork. This does not apparently include money Dewan charged for his services. One worker claims he paid Dewan a total of about $20,000 after reading one of his advertisements in a Mumbai newspaper boasting "permanent lifetime settlement in USA for self and family."
One of the hunger strikers, Rajan Pazhambalakode, said that he borrowed money against his property to get this work and now faced the prospect of being sent home to Kerala as a debtor facing foreclosure. Reports vary on the number of workers involved, but as many as 500 Keralite workers may be part of this investigation. They claim they were promised US Employment-Based (EB) visas - more commonly known as Green Cards. Instead they were brought into the United States on ten-month H-2B visas for temporary non-agricultural seasonal work.
This story illustrates how recruiters and fixers often use predatory and illegal tactics to entrap and rob from workers. Whether it's the Filipino led to believe he would be working in Kuwait but then ends up doing contracting work in Iraq, or the Mexican forestry worker suckered into labor camps in the Southeastern United States being paid less than minimum wage, or the Indian who signs up to work as a driver in Riyadh but later find himself working at an isolated rest stop in the middle of Saudi Arabia for an employer who "forgets" to pay his salary, the nature of this exploitation is endemic and global.
Take another recent example: the case in Saudi Arabia of Rizana Nafeek, whose case is currently bouncing around the Saudi court system after the 20-year-old woman was sentenced to public beheading for the alleged murdered a newborn in her care. (Nafeek claims the newborn choked to death during bottle-feeding and that she tried to seek help.) As the case unfolds it has come to light that a fixer of some kind in Colombo forged a passport and sent Nafeek to work as a housekeeper/nanny at the age of 17. And while Nafeek faces public beheading, the person who recruited and sent her has not been identified, investigated or charged with forging a Lankan passport and trafficking a minor to Saudi Arabia to work as a nanny - a job Nafeek clearly had no qualifications to perform.
Cases like these illustrate how weakly labor issues are addressed in the age of global trade. One of the reasons why such deceptive practices flourish is that labor protections don't cross international borders nearly as effectively as laws pertaining to global business. A free trade agreement has bilateral teeth; an agreement to crack down on predatory labor recruitment does not.
A country is not only expected to abide by the rules of joining the World Trade Organization, but can also be sanctioned in international court for not adhering to these rules. All countries that sign up agree to this and give up a certain degree of sovereignty to qualify for this lucrative international club.
On the other hand, if a country signs up for a UN resolution against human trafficking or child labor the gesture is often little more than a gesture. If a country doesn't fulfill its commitments stated in these resolutions there are no punitive measures beyond whatever pressure is exerted by human rights groups. And these criticisms are often met with defensive claims to national sovereignty, with governments ordering NGOs to butt out of internal affairs.
Meanwhile, the sovereignty of countless numbers of workers is violated every day by this chain of deception.
