Our Country Is Addicted To Cheap Labor-Your tax dollars at work-trafficking in brown people!

[kpete]

Your Country Is Addicted To Cheap Labor
There is so much wrong with this scenario I don’t even know where to start.

How about starting with the human rights violations:
http://sobeale.blogspot.com/2010/08/your-country-is-addicted-to-cheap-labor.html

SMYRNA — A Mexican guest worker says a landscaping company with Tennessee state contracts and a federal stimulus loan guarantee held him and fellow workers like indentured servants, confiscating their passports and subjecting them to constant surveillance by managers who were often armed.

Hilario Razura Jimenez said in an interview that he was rescued from Vanderbilt Landscaping’s company housing Wednesday night by staff from the Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity. He waited until everyone else was asleep before sneaking out at about midnight, he said. Staff with the New Orleans-based nonprofit were in touch with him by text message and drove out to pick him up.

Alliance executive director Saket Soni said company officials last week put another worker on a bus back to Mexico when they learned that he had been talking with their group.

A person who answered the phone at the company on Thursday said he would not comment on the allegations and refused to give his name. The company, which has $2.4 million in state Transportation Department contracts and a $900,000 a stimulus loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has offices in Smyrna and Mason.

http://www.dnj.com/article/20100813/NEWS01/100812035/Mexican+workers+for+TDOT+contractor+claim+abuse

[Laelth]

1. Sad, but true, and nothing new.

We have always been addicted to cheap labor. We had a war in the middle of the 19th century over that subject, in fact.

-Laelth

[dkf]

2. See how employers treat non-Americans? And we wonder why these type of employers don't want

To hire Americans. We are on to them. We need to be suspicious of any employer that cannot get Americans to work for them.

[Greyhound]

5. That's a very good point.

I had an encounter with a large company that I would have sworn couldn't exist in The U.S. The illegal demands, blatant theft, and absolutely disgusting working conditions (they'd had two TB outbreaks in 1 year), were nearly Dickensian with fluorescent lighting.

They average over 800% annual turnover, but have been operating very profitably for 20+ years.

Another model of WorkCamp America®

[ThomCat]

3. 14 hour days, but they were only paid for 25 hour per weeks?

And they had to pay $100 each rent automatically deducted for a house they all shared that didn't even have furniture, and only had one bathroom for all of them?

Damn! I hope the people at that company spend a long, long time in jail for this! :grr:

[MadMaddie]

4. Until the government and states go after the employers

in a hard core fasion this will not end.