Day 926: Indian Worker Trafficking In KatrinaRitaVille [Update 2]

The Signal International foreign workers strike continues.

At noon today, D and I saw about a hundred workers congregated and protesting at the Coliseum Square Fountain in the Lower Garden District. Their plan is to take to the streets and make known their grievances with their employer and recruiter. As New Orleans’s WDSU reports, “500 workers had filed a class-action anti-racketeering suit against Signal International and various recruiters, including New Orleans attorney Malvern Burnett. The workers, members of the Alliance of Guest Workers for Dignity, filed the lawsuit in federal court in New Orleans late Friday.”

Sepia Mutiny and the South Asian Journalists Association are now covering this story. The respective Comments sections are worth reading for further discussion and understanding.

The workers’ biggest grievance was not with their living conditions, but with the fact that they each paid their recruiters $20,000 in exchange for a green card and a permanent job, but were instead given visas that allowed them to work in the States for only less than a year. $20,000 is approximately 10 lakhs in Indian rupees, which equates to the house, farm, jewelry and every asset that each worker and his family own back home. They are bankrupt now, here and in India. The insult to injury is wage garnishment to the tune of about $1050 a month for the honor of living with 23 other workers in one room.

Again, there are three possible culprits here: Signal itself, the recruiter Dewan Consultants and/or local immigration lawyer, Malvern Burnett. While it seems easiest to pin the blame on the India-based recruiter (remember that African slaves were sold by their own kind), the other two are not off the hook. There was money to be had and saved.

Finally, I voice a big personal concern: The ramifications of the demolitions of four New Orleans public housing complexes, which should be of concern to anyone regardless of political inclination, were co-opted by some parties to further their own agenda. Thanks to their words and tactics, the real message of Housing The Poor was written off by the general public and the important members of the struggle, those who will eventually need a home, are left stranded. This is something that should not happen to anyone, but especially not to foreign workers. They are not Americans and have little legal recourse here. The worst thing that can happen is that their cause is adopted in the name of Socialism, Communism or Egoism and that they themselves are deported, while Signal continues its hiring pattern through another recruiter (which is why S. Mansur and Company have to be watched) and the culpable suffer little more than a slap on the wrist for theft and international human rights violations.