As they hustled up and down the fields harvesting giant tobacco leaves in the broiling heat, they weren’t allowed to stop for water. And the work went on into the night. When a few complained, they were promptly sent home to Mexico.
“They kept us going and going. They treated us like donkeys in the fields,” the rail-thin 25-year-old Mexican whispered, careful not to catch the crew boss’ attention.
This year he works for a different farmer, but he was still afraid to give his name, fearing that if he were known as a complainer he would not get invited back.
Clutching his arms together in a tough guy way, he said he didn’t mind the abusive conditions because it was only for a short while and he needed the money back home.
He is one of the 160,000 guest workers allowed into the U.S. But really he is a ghost worker who exists in a nether world beyond the public’s radar, and often beyond the government’s as well.
“Our experience is that there has been laughable little enforcement,” said Mary Bauer, an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., who has calculated that government enforcement of guest workers’ rights has steadily declined as their numbers have grown.
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A Tribune examination of federal records, lawsuits, and interviews with farmers, workers and advocacy groups has found that:
* A small number of guest workers have been treated like modern-day slaves, cheated out of their wages and shifted from job to job with little control over their fate.
* Some are forced into dangerous and lethal jobs or stranded financially as a result of broken promises made by U.S. labor contractors and employers. One common tactic is to promise good-paying jobs but then dump workers into hazardous low-paying jobs.
* Many guest workers have been taken advantage of by unscrupulous foreign recruiters who charge them hefty fees that put them into severe debt. The debts keep the workers in line; they need the jobs to pay their bills. Once in the U.S., some of these same workers are underpaid or put into jobs that normally would go to citizens.
* It’s not uncommon for foreign workers whose jobs don’t pan out, who are let go early or who simply want to stay here to wander off and become part of the underground of illegal workers, compounding an already complex problem.
* The lack of communication between various governmental agencies in charge of the guest-worker programs is one reason problems have lingered for years. Another is the failure of government officials to heed complaints of worker abuse from federal auditors, state officials, attorneys and even fellow officials.
Long list of violations
Despite a long trail of complaints, Evergreen Forestry Services, an Idaho firm, kept bringing in guest workers for forestry jobs.
In March 2001, Carol Brooke, a North Carolina Legal Aid lawyer, complained to federal officials that Evergreen’s guest workers were forced to live in unheated tents in midwinter and had their pay docked to use outdoor toilets.
Brooke again asked federal officials in 2002 to bar the firm, attaching a 15-page U.S. Labor Department list of violations across the country dating to the early 1980s. It detailed workers not paid, pay rates that ranged “wildly” and instances of workers not being told about jobs they would have to perform.
“The thing that prompted me to write the letter was the document,” Brooke recently recalled. “That was the most egregious list of violations I had ever seen.”
Regina C. Luginbuhl, head of agricultural safety and health for the North Carolina Department of Labor, also asked in a February 2002 letter why the federal government would continue to license such a firm. “I can’t stop the train,” Luginbuhl said recently. “I can slow it down in North Carolina. But I can’t pull it to a screeching halt.”
Billy Green, North Carolina’s migrant monitor, said agencies that are supposed to deal with problems rarely act.
“Everyone blames everyone else when there is no real attempt to help American workers or to protect against the abuses of foreign workers,” said Green. “My problem is I report to the people who operate the programs I monitor, and they don’t listen to my findings.”
In September 2002, 14 workers recruited by Evergreen from Honduras and Guatemala to work in Maine were killed when the van taking them to their jobs overturned. Brooke promptly asked the government to bar Evergreen. Spurred on by news reports that Evergreen continued to bring in workers, she stepped up her campaign.
Two months later the Labor Department fined Evergreen $17,000 in connection with the deaths and moved to revoke Evergeen’s license, as well as one for Peter Smith, head of the company. Evergreen and Smith appealed but lost their licenses in July 2003.
While the company was fighting the fines and license revocation, in 2005 it received approval from one arm of the Labor Department to bring in forest workers. Brooke promptly complained. Finally Evergreen lost out on the fines in 2006, but Smith has continued to press for a license, federal officials said. Evergreen did not return a reporter’s calls.
Human trafficking
A case that illustrates how guest workers find themselves in slavelike circumstances involves skilled welders from India. Between 2000 and 2002 they paid between $7,000 and $20,000 each to recruiters for guest-worker visas and travel to the U.S. They were promised good-paying shipyard jobs.
But once in Louisiana, their passports were confiscated and they told there were no such jobs, according to their federal lawsuit filed in 2004 in New Orleans. They were left stranded in a dumpy hotel.
“We were not put to work and we had no food,” Karunakaran Sundaresan, 37, said in a sworn statement, one of about 150 entered in the case. “I could not believe the trap I had fallen into. I did know what to do, so I waited for things to get better, but they did not get better.”
Kent Felty, their attorney, said such bait-and-switch guest-worker scams are common, “and it’s gotten to the point where it’s such a huge crime. I start shaking, I get so mad.”
Workers who complained about their treatment were threatened with prison or deportation. Some were farmed out to do work for other companies by Falcoln (Falcon) Steel Structures Inc., of Centreville, Miss., which had brought them to the U.S. Falcon Steel denied all the charges in court filings.
This year Felty’s suit was voluntarily dismissed after he lost contact with most of the workers. Many moved on because they needed work, he said.
“The guys lost heart and continued to work without authorization to survive and pay off loan sharks in India,” Felty said. “You can’t tell a man to obey the law and starve. … Without a certification of human trafficking, you’re doomed.”
In cases where human trafficking is verified, the U.S. government can issue a T-visa, which allows trafficking victims to stay in this country.
Attorney Lawyer Mary Lee Hall secured such help for 30 Thai guest workers earlier this year after their escape from an abusive contractor.
The Thais were brought to the U.S. in 2005 by a North Carolina labor contractor who took away their passports and showed them guns as a warning against trying to get away, Hall said. They were taken to New Orleans, where they were put to work repairing hurricane-damaged buildings, according to a federal lawsuit filed against the contractors and a North Carolina farmer. During that time they lived in a condemned hotel.
“There was no electricity, no safe water, and they were told they couldn’t light candles and they didn’t have any money for food,” Hall said.
Ultimately, they were brought back to a North Carolina farm. One night they escaped and contacted Hall who, along with others, helped them get visas as victims of human trafficking from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service.
Crooked recruiters
The guest-worker program is so fraught with corruption that farmers fear they will face the brunt of lawsuits, and with good reason.
“We’ve entered into five or six contracts and almost every one has ended up in a lawsuit,” said Jack King, an official with the California Farm Bureau. More farmers would use guest workers, King suggested, if there were guarantees that they would not face lawsuits for violations that are not their fault.
The problem, suggests Bruce Goldstein, head of Farm Worker Justice Fund in Washington, D.C., suggests, is that within the long chain of people who recruit, contract and then employ guest workers, “there is always somebody who commits some illegal act.”
ADDBut farm industry consultant James Holt says farmers are not the root of the problem. Rather, the problem comes from federal “bureaucrats” and attorneys for farmworkers, who, he said, target farmers because “they want to discourage workers from the program.”
Whatever the reason, few farmers use the guest-worker program. Less than 2 percent of the nation’s farmworker jobs are held by guest workers, Holt noted.
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Farmer Billy Carter of Eagle Springs, N.C., is among the minority who prefer guest workers. Since hiring them a decade ago, he says they have erased his concerns about unreliable workers. But he worries that the program’s costs might force him to quit it. He paid his workers $9.02 an hour and they cost him an additional $1.50 an hour in expenses this year, he said. Someone hired off the street would get a flat $7 an hour, he said.
For Miguel Avalos, 37, a veteran at the farm, the program has paid off. “Here the pay is good and I feel safe. I don’t worry about la Migra [immigration officials],” he said.END ADD
Still, the corruption is so rampant that some laborers don’t even know they’re not legally in the U.S.
Such is the situation with a 24-year-old Mexican who arrived last year in the U.S. on a bus believing he was a legal guest worker.
He said the contractor who brought him up from Mexico told him that he could work anywhere but he had to go back in nine months when his visa was up. He paid the contractor $500 and agreed to pay another $500 for the trip back. He recalled being on a bus with other recruits who were dropped off along the way north from the Mexican border.
“I realized it was an illegal deal when I arrived here,” said the man, who is now in the heart of North Carolina’s tobacco country.
When he could not pay the return fee to his recruiter, the worker said he decided to go underground.
“Now I hide. I hide all the time,” said the man, who gets by on construction jobs that pay him less than others because he knows that without papers he cannot ask for a better wage.
Leticia Zavala, who works for the Farm Labor Organizing Committee in North Carolina, said she was familiar with others like him. “We had to explain to them that they were undocumented.”
How many guest workers have become illegals?
The Labor Department was criticized several years ago by the Labor Department’s Office of Inspector General for not knowing how many guest workers have melded into the pool of illegal workers in the U.S. But Labor Department officials said they still don’t know and suggested that the Department of Homeland Security keeps such figures.
It doesn’t, said Stewart Baker, an assistant secretary for policy for homeland securityDHS. Nor does the department it have a system to track such workers nationally. But the government is looking into the issue, he said.
The failure of The fact that various agencies that monitor guest workers has been a recurring problem. In 2003 the Office of Inspector General said efforts to monitor guest workers were “ineffective” and added that many issues it had raised in a 1998 report hadn’t been addressed. The way the Labor Department divides up chores, problems fall through the cracks, it said.
Workers’ faith
Despite well-known corruption, farm workers continue to put their fates in recruiters’ hands.
For example, a number of guest workers at a small barracks near Wilson, N.C., said they had handed over the papers for their homes in Mexico to recruiters as guarantees that they would return. They said they were aware of stories of workers cheated out of their homes.
Still, David Posoz, 41, of Guanajuato, Mexico, said he was more concerned about the possibility of being sent home because he had hurt his elbow and already had had been out of work a few days without pay. He liked his boss but knew that if he couldn’t work he would have to leave. “I’m worried because I need the money for my family,” he said.
The men had gathered for a nighttime service and then a meal supplied by volunteers from St. Bernadette Catholic Church of Fuquay-Varina, N.C.
The Rev. Marco Antonio Gonzalez-Hernandez, 31, said he feels a responsibility to visit the men, and he identifies with them. When his family came to North Carolina from Mexico in 1988, he picked cucumbers, peppers, sweet potatoes and blueberries in nearby fields.
Several years ago he made a video to show guest-worker living conditions to fellow clergy. He hasn’t updated it, he explained, because the situations have not changed.
“Sometimes the farmers, they treat them like animals,” he said.
With a bright yellow streetlight overhead as the only light against the night’s darkness, he began the mass for workers sitting on folding chairs spread out on the grass. A church volunteer strummed a guitar; volunteers sang.
His sermon was on the meaning of sacrifice, as told in the Bible, and as lived by the men.
“You leave your families for a better life, so you have sacrificed,” he said in Spanish, his voice rising. “You need better places to live. You need better salaries. You need to speak out.”
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To view video and more photos, go to chicagotribune.com/guestworkers.