Six months ago Yuri Turkin thought he was the luckiest man alive. A resident of a small Russian town, he managed to come to the United States on a guest worker visa and find a job at a fairly respectable Russian business (at Yuri's request, Russian Reklama is not publishing a profile of the company).
The young man worked himself ragged hoping to win the favor of his boss and the respect of his colleagues.
"I was ecstatic when I made it through my probationary period," recalled Yuri. "After all, I had a real chance of gaining a foothold and staying in America forever. I hoped that with time I would be able to get my mother out of Russia, where her future holds only loneliness and poverty."
However, after some time Yuri's happiness began to evaporate. It wasn't that he lost his job and was left to survive in the jungles of New York without any money. But he began to recognize that he had fallen into some kind of a trap. His boss paid him less than he had promised while saddling Yuri with a heavier workload than expected. There were times when he paid Yuri late or even underpaid him, citing temporary financial difficulties.
"I work like a horse from dawn until dusk. I can barely stand by the time I get home," said Yuri. "I don’t have time for anything like figuring out immigration law or doing something so that I could really start a new life here. I have no personal life. My boss knows that I depend on him for everything and he has no scruples about taking advantage of this. On top of it all, he's always picking on me and threatening to fire me. I have no idea how to escape from this trap. It's a no-win situation. It's easier for the undocumented in this respect. At least they're not tied to a specific company. If their bosses harass them, they can look for another job."
Yuri shares the fate of many foreigners who come to the United States with high hopes on guest worker visas, but soon find that their situation differs little from that of people here who have no rights. Like the undocumented, lucky holders of guest worker visas are subjected to cruel exploitation reminiscent of the times of predatory and unbridled capitalism.
This specifically applies to so-called guest workers, who are recruited abroad, mainly in developing countries, for various businesses ranging from farms and factories to restaurants and hotels. In order to pay the recruiters' exorbitant fees, these workers sell or pawn/mortgage their belongings (even homes, small plots of land, etc.). But their trials do not end there. After they arrive in the United States and start working, they meet with the most diverse forms of deception and abuse.
They are frequently paid less than stipulated in their contracts and are often fired before their contracts are up. They are not compensated for funds paid to recruiters and/or spent on travel to the United States. They are forced to perform entirely different duties than were discussed at the time of hire. They are compelled to live and labor in unbearable conditions and are saddled with excessive workloads. Sometimes they are even told upon arrival that they came later than they should have, and that there is no longer any work for them.
Businesses allow themselves to take such liberties with temporary workers because they know that workers who open their mouths and start complaining risk being sent back home. Besides, unlike Americans or legal immigrants, foreign workers cannot move to another company, no matter how poorly they are treated. The guest worker program does not employ enough inspectors to ensure that the terms of each contract are adhered to or to check on working conditions at every business. Therefore visiting workers generally swallow insults and derision without complaint, hoping that they will be able to earn at least a portion of the money promised them.
Almost 120,000 people arrive in the United States on guest worker visas every year. However, many American business people (particularly owners of farms, factories, hotels and restaurants) assert that this is clearly not enough. They argue that the guest worker program should be expanded because they are supposedly experiencing a labor shortage. Americans born in this country, they say, do not deign to take on arduous and low-paying work.
As immigration reform is being taken up both in the White House and on Capitol Hill, business owners, who insist on expanding the program, are actively lobbying to achieve their goal.
"If employers cannot find Americans to fill vacancies in their companies, they must be allowed to find foreign workers," stated Randall Johnson, the co-director of the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, a group of businesses, which, as the name makes clear, is trying to increase the number of temporary workers.
However, Johnson's critics and others of their ilk – including many union leaders and immigrant rights groups – are convinced that these businesses are basing their arguments not on facts and statistics, but on their own interests and selfish motives. Some labor experts also believe that the need for foreign workers is not that great after all and that many Americans (especially legal immigrants) would work on farms or in restaurants if they were paid well. But that's the crux of the matter: businesses do not want to pay well, preferring instead to hire cheap, obedient foreign workers or undocumented immigrants who can be treated like slaves.
But the patience of temporary workers does sometimes run out. Recently a group of guest workers from Thailand took their employers to federal court, accusing them of fraud, violating the terms of their contracts, non-compliance with the minimum wage law, and even human trafficking. These accusations are completely valid. According to their contracts, the Thais were supposed to work on a farm in Louisiana for three years, earning $16,000 per year.
However, a month after they started, they were told that their services were no longer needed and they were sent to clean up the ruins of a hotel in New Orleans that had been destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. To make matters worse, they were forced to sleep in a dirty, run-down hotel that reeked and had no electricity or hot water. But the most shocking thing is that they received no compensation whatsoever for this difficult work. So instead of the enticing $48,000 to $50,000, the Thai workers ended up earning $1,400 to $2,400. And since their passports were taken from them upon their arrival in the United States, they were utterly helpless before the swindlers who had hired them.
President Bush and many members of both chambers of Congress support expanding the guest worker program. Legislation about expanding the program, which is now being considered on Capitol Hill, includes two important and humane provisions: one prohibits employers from dealing harshly with temporary workers who have dared to stand up for their rights and complain about their working conditions, and the other allows workers themselves to sue employers for breach of contract.
The question of how great a need America has for a significant increase in guest workers is open to debate, but the intentions of legislators to ease their situation can only be welcomed. The trend over the last few years has shown that, regardless of protests by working Americans, businesses will continue to use various forms of cheap foreign labor by exporting jobs, recruiting batches of temporary workers from developing countries, and inviting young people, like Yuri, who hope to start a new life in America. The rights of these people must at the very least be supported by some kind of law.
