Southern Poverty Law Center report: Slave labor conditions under US guestworker program

The report, entitled “Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States,” provides a wealth of detail of the appalling conditions faced by workers who come to the US as little more than indentured servants, legally bound to employers seeking immigrant workers they can cheat and terrorize with impunity. (The report can be accessed at the SPLC web site: http://www.splcenter.org).

The report’s executive summary states, “Bound to a single employer and without access to legal resources, guestworkers are:

* routinely cheated out of wages;

* forced to mortgage their futures to obtain low-wage, temporary jobs;

* held virtually captive by employers or labor brokers who seize their documents;

* force to live in squalid conditions; and,

* denied medical benefits for on-the-job injuries.”

It continues: “Former Department of Labor official Lee G. Williams described the old ‘bracero’ program—the guestworker program that brought thousands of Mexican nationals to work in the United States during and after World War II—as a system of ‘legalized slavery.’ In practice, there is little difference between the bracero program and the current H-2 guestworker program.”

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http://wsws.org/articles/2007/mar2007/gues-m14.shtml