[DEBATE] : Fw: [LNSA] S Asian shipyard workers walkout in Mississippi - the issues

[peter waterman]

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From: Harsh Kapoor 
To: lnsa at yahoogroups.com 
Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2008 3:09 AM
Subject: [LNSA] S Asian shipyard workers walkout in Mississippi - the issues


[Labour Notes South Asia
Year 8, Dispatch No. 869, May 13, 2008 ]

o o o

Mississippi Mutiny Challenges Anti-Trafficking Law

South Asian migrant shipyard workers who were promised Green Cards 
protest against miserable working and living conditions in 
Mississippi. The case challenges policies towards and perceptions of 
victims of human trafficking.

by Svati Shah

(Samar 29, published online May 13th, 2008)

On March 6, 2008, over 100 Indian shipyard workers walked from their 
jobs in Pascagoula, Mississippi, located on the Gulf of Mexico. They 
claimed that they had been trafficked from India by Signal 
International, a marine construction company with ongoing projects 
throughout the Gulf of Mexico, and by two labor recruiting companies. 
The story was reported on by the South Asian Journalists Association, 
and has been covered extensively in the national press in India, in 
local media outlets in Mississippi and New Orleans, and in immigrant 
community-based media in the U.S. The story also garnered attention 
in the national U.S. media, with stories running in the New York 
Times, on National Public Radio, ABC, and in the international press, 
including stories run by the Associated Press, the BBC, and the 
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The media reported that the 
workers were all in the U.S. on H2B visas, also known as 'guest 
worker' visas, and were employed in Signal International's Pascagoula 
shipyard.

The March 6 SAJA story reported that "...the workers contend they've 
been lured into a human trafficking ring created by [Signal] in the 
aftermath of Katrina... They plan to report themselves to the 
Department of Justice as victims of trafficking, and demand federal 
prosecution of Signal." The walkout was executed with support from 
the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice, directed by Saket 
Soni, and a host of ally organizations, including (but not limited 
to) the Southern Poverty Law Center, the American Civil Liberties 
Union, Jobs with Justice, the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, 
Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), SAALT 
(South Asian Americans Leading Together), and the National Asian 
Pacific American Women's Forum (NAPAWF). The workers' campaign for 
justice has captured the attention of both labor and immigrant rights 
activists in the U.S. and in India. Their campaign bears careful 
consideration, both for the ways in which it marks the front lines of 
immigrants' rights activism in the U.S., and for the possibilities it 
holds for upending some of the deepest problems of the 
anti-trafficking framework.

The Pascagoula workers who participated in the walkout, all highly 
skilled men from India who had paid recruiters to bring them to work 
in the U.S., contend that they have been subject to human 
trafficking. They use the language of "modern day slavery" to 
describe their situation with Signal, a phrase that is often used 
synonymously with "prostitution" in international media reports, and 
even in legal and policy arenas that focus on female migration from 
the Global South. The workers' claims are based in their experience 
of being deceived by Signal, by Global Resources Inc., an 
international labor recruiting firm, and a Mumbai-based recruiting 
company called Dewan Consultants. According to Sabulal Vijayan, a 
former Signal employee who was fired for helping to organize fellow 
workers, and who has been a visible member of the ensuing campaign, 
"All three of these companies acted together. Signal says they didn't 
have a hand in this, but that's not true, they all worked together." 
The workers are now taking legal action against these companies at 
the state and federal level in the U.S., and are considering 
initiating litigation in India, as well.

Many of the workers who walked out had been employed in the United 
Arab Emirates prior to being recruited for the Mississippi shipyards. 
Vijayan says that, although he was already employed in the UAE, the 
offer to come to the U.S. came with the promise of a green card, and 
the option of permanent residency, something that would not have been 
possible in the UAE. "I thought, with the green card, I could come 
here and bring my family." Temporary workers in the UAE and 
neighboring countries are not allowed to bring their families with 
them; immigrant workers are ubiquitous in the region, but labor under 
severe immigration restrictions. Workers like Vijayan were recruited 
in India, where they were apparently told by the recruiters that they 
were being hired for permanent jobs in the U.S., and that they would 
be able to apply for green cards immediately. Each worker was 
required to pay a fee of up to $20,000 to the recruiters ("payable in 
three installments," explained Vijayan) for the visas and paperwork. 
Many of them sold all of their property, including the family 
jewelry, or took high interest loans to cover the fee, with the 
understanding that this was an investment that would garner greater 
returns. The workers report arriving in Pascagoula to discover a 
completely different situation to the one they had been promised, 
especially with respect to their immigration status. Rather than 
being eligible for green cards, they found themselves to be guest 
workers on H2B visas, legally prevented from applying for permanent 
residency in the U.S. In addition, they report that they were made to 
live 'like pigs in a cage,' 24 men to a room, in a compound encircled 
by fences and barbed wire. An exorbitant $1050 was withheld from each 
worker's monthly paycheck in rent for these barracks, which no worker 
had the option of refusing.

H2B visas typically expire after 10 months, and can only be renewed 
for up to two additional years. Renewal is negotiated between the 
employer and the Department of Homeland Security, and not with the 
worker. The workers' H2B visa status meant that their right to work 
in the U.S. was contingent on their working for Signal. The guest 
worker program builds in a significant degree of dependency for legal 
immigration status on the employer, due to the necessity of 
sponsorship by that employer, combined with the extremely short-term 
nature of the visa. According to J.J. Rosenbaum, an attorney with the 
Southern Poverty Law Center involved in the case, "Modern day slavery 
doesn't always involve physical violence or holding guestworkers' 
passports-- human traffickers have other means of control. The 
imbalance of power between employers and guestworkers, whose U.S. 
employment is tied to one employer, leaves workers incredibly 
vulnerable...exploitative employers and recruiters also use 
fraudulent recruiting, exorbitant debt, hostile law enforcement, 
isolated and restricted labor camps, threats against workers' 
families, and direct retaliation against workers who speak 
out...Structural reform of the guestworker program is critical."

In addition to being deceived about their working and living 
conditions, the Pascagoula workers report suffering intimidation from 
their employer if they tried to leave their jobs, saying they were 
threatened with being reported to ICE (Immigration and Customs 
Enforcement) or the local police if they complained in any way.

"This is part of a pattern," says Jacob Horwitz, an organizer with 
the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice. In an interview, 
Horwitz spoke of jobs throughout the Gulf Coast that were outsourced 
to foreign guest workers after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Employers 
in the construction and hospitality industries, for example, 
capitalized on the displacement of poor communities by these storms 
to replace many of their local workers with foreign workers who could 
be paid as much as half of what local workers had been paid. These 
foreign workers would have less power to negotiate for higher wages 
and better working conditions than the people they were unwittingly 
replacing. "They want a work force that's disposable and easily 
exploitable," he explains.

Because the main alleged harm to the workers includes being 
transported across an international border under false pretenses, as 
well as being harassed, intimidated, and exploited upon arrival in 
the U.S. by their employer, the workers are able to frame their legal 
claims as a set of violations under the Trafficking Victims 
Protection Act (TVPA), passed into U.S. law in the year 2000. "The 
language [of trafficking] comes directly from the workers," says 
Horwitz, describing the wider campaign for immigrants' rights in the 
Gulf region. "In scores of meetings, different groups of H2B workers 
who either had their passports confiscated, were sold from one 
company to another or had been kidnapped by their employers with the 
help of local law enforcement have described their experiences to 
U.S. as slavery." Deepa Iyer, the executive director of SAALT, 
concurs. "This is framed as "modern day slavery" because there was 
forced or fraudulent migration, and exploitation by an employer."

This use of the TVPA in the Pascagoula campaign poses a whole series 
of challenges, not only to the employer and recruiters in the case, 
but also to the ideological framework that led to the initial passage 
of the TVPA and to how the legal anti-trafficking framework been 
understood since then. The TVPA's passage was the result of many 
years of wrangling between feminists about prostitution, a struggle 
which has its own antecedents in feminist debates on pornography. The 
history of opposing "white slavery," a late nineteenth century 
euphemism for white women and girls in forced prostitution, also 
provides an important historical context for understanding the 
contemporary priorities imbedded in this law. An important 
contemporary context for the passage of the TVPA was the infamous 
"Reddy case" in San Francisco in the late 1990s, in which Lakireddy 
Bali Reddy, a wealthy Indian businessman, was eventually convicted of 
trafficking girls from his village in Andhra Pradesh. The Reddy case 
involved local and national law enforcement in the U.S. and in India, 
and required literally dozens of governmental agencies to coordinate 
legal strategies and efforts to find and compensate the victims. 
Given the ongoing discussions on the need for an omnibus 
anti-trafficking law in the U.S. at the time, as well as growing 
anxieties about the perceived increase in undocumented migrants 
crossing American borders, the Reddy case provided an almost perfect 
additional rationale for the new law.

When it was passed, the TVPA was lauded for a number of reasons, 
including the creation of two new visa categories that provided 
access to permanent residence in the U.S. - the T Visa, and the U 
Visa. The fact that an extremely low number of T and U visas that 
were actually given became a point of criticism, along with the 
requirement that people who claimed to have been trafficked had to 
cooperate with law enforcement to be classified as legitimate victims 
of trafficking (even if this meant putting themselves or their 
families back home in greater danger). The greatest point of 
criticism revolved around the fact that the TVPA had ideological 
roots in anti-prostitution rhetoric, and that it therefore drew an 
implicit connection between prostitution and trafficking. Critics 
pointed out that was problematic because everyone doing sex work is 
not trafficked, and because, although the TVPA recognizes a wide 
range of human trafficking, the rhetorical focus on prostitution 
would potentially leave out people who were trafficked into other 
industries. In a recent article, feminist scholar Wendy Chapkis 
articulated a further criticism of the TVPA.

In the case of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, language 
within and surrounding the legislation neatly divides "violated 
innocents" from "illegal immigrants" along the lines of sex and 
gender. Trafficking victims, described as vulnerable women and 
children forced from the safety of their home or homelands into gross 
sexual exploitation, are distinguished from economic migrants who are 
understood to be men who have willfully violated national borders for 
individual gain. The walkout in Pascagoula addresses Chapkis' concern 
about the distinction between "violated female innocents" and 
"illegal male migrants." It is also worth noting because it 
challenges the historical conflation between trafficking and 
prostitution, and is part of a growing trend of exploited immigrant 
workers in the U.S. using the language of trafficking to describe 
what is wrong with their situation. This particular campaign also 
challenges another fundamental assumption imbedded in the 
anti-trafficking framework, by naming Signal International and the 
two recruiting agencies as the primary culprits. The policy and legal 
discourses on trafficking have tended to highlight evil individual 
criminals, or "networks organized crime," as the main perpetrators of 
human trafficking. (That a major anti-trafficking initiative in India 
is being coordinated by the United National Office on Drugs and Crime 
is a case in point.) Instead, this case highlights the role of 
corporations working transnationally to maximize their profits by 
exacerbating economic vulnerability and legal dependency among 
potential workers.

The workers' walkout has evolved into an organized campaign for 
justice, and has included a march from New Orleans to Washington DC 
by members of the campaign, which resulted in workers speaking with 
members of Congress about their struggle. The workers have taken on a 
set of legal challenges which stretch between the U.S. and India. 
While they aim to have their legal case heard, it is clear that 
Signal is also waging its own campaign, having hired a lawyer that 
did public relations work in the Clinton administration. As it 
happens, Signal is a subcontractor of Northrup Grumman, which places 
it close to the center of power in the military industrial complex. 
This may or may not have had anything to do with the Indian 
consulate's delayed condemnation of the workers' situation in 
Mississippi. According to Sabulal Vijayan, and numerous press 
reports, the Indian consulate's response has been lukewarm, at best. 
Tracking this case as it develops will mean taking note of how the 
U.S. and Indian governments respond to this case. It will also mean 
paying attention to how the politics of the term "trafficking" play 
out in the movement for immigrants' rights, and the struggle for 
immigration reform.

Svati Shah is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wellesley College. 
She is currently working on a book on sex work and migration in 
Mumbai's informal sector. She has also been involved in queer, 
progressive, and feminist South Asian organizations in the U.S. and 
in India.

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