From time to time various politicians and industry lobbyists in the U.S. suggest that what this country really needs is a guest worker program, like the ones in the United Arab Emirates or the Marianas Islands, to import boatloads of expendable foreign labor that has no legal rights and no legal option but indentured servitude to their master... er, I mean, employer... for the duration of their contract, after which they're shipped back to wherever they came from, no muss, no fuss, no legal recourse for any complaints they might have.
What would such a program look like, in practice?
From a diary at DailyKos:
Let’s translate this for a moment. Dhimal had been working for the Tan Family for ten years. His employment contract ran out and the Tan Family would not renew it. Nobody else would formally renew it within the 45 days that CNMI labor laws mandate. He was not granted an extension. He found a job as a security guard at a local high school. His new off-the-books employers ripped him off for over $2,000 in wages. He could apply for recovery of his lost wages but he also had to be deported. His former employer the Tan Family, would provide the one-way ticket back to Nepal.Remember that the next time some well-dressed, gym-toned management type complains about those bad ol' unions, or those bad ol' federal labor laws. Because left to their own devices with an inexhaustible supply of cheap and desperate labor, 'most every employer in the world would treat *all* its workers, not just the imported third-world "guest workers", exactly the same way the Tan family and CNMI treat theirs.
This morning he was suppose to visit the CNMI Department of labor, pick up his ticket and then be flown penniless back to Nepal while local Osman Gani pockets the value of Dhimal’s labor—labor that was already undervalued due to the artificially low CNMI minimum wage of $3.05—a wage that he might not have even been paid.
He was without rights. Any hopes he had that the 110th Congress would end the system of abuse and finally extend rights to long-term guest workers like himself were extinguished.
He had no power. He had no rights. He had no hope.
And he knew that he was only one of hundreds, if not thousands of other CNMI guest workers facing the same systematic removal from the territory just as help looked like it was finally on its way.
So he fought back. He fought back in the way that many without power have fought back to shame the powerful.
He went to the place of power and set himself on fire.
2 comments:
Just curious - what is your solution to the illegal worker issue?
I don't have an immediate solution to that issue at hand. However, it's something of a red herring, since in this case, the person was not only legally in a US Territory, but was there as part of a longstanding legal recruitment process for "guest workers".
Based on logic and reports of episodes like this, I'm quite certain that a "guest worker" program that brings people in just to treat them as second-class, expendable resources, while simultaneously undermining the wages and legal protections of US citizens, is a bad idea. If they're going to be brought in, they should be treated as human beings with the same basic rights to fair treatment as other workers, not as disposable work-animals to be cheated, abused, and discarded.
I recognize the economic arguments in favor of free trade. But they have to be considered against the prospect of a global race to the bottom in which everyone who works for a living, anywhere in the world, is forced down to the economic level of the most desperate third-world beggar who can be loaded on a boat and imported to do their job not only dirt-cheap, but without the legal protections against poisonous workplaces, sexual abuse, outright refusal to pay earned wages, etc. People in the first world take these for granted today, but those protections don't exist in much of the world, and "guest-worker" programs have shown a de facto tendency to block the "guests" from having those protections. At the very least, employers should have to treat them equally to US citizens, both to keep the "guests" from being abused and to avoid giving employers an incentive to import "guests" in order to bypass existing standards for treatment of employees. This means that there would have to be some mechanism by which the guest workers could file complaints without being subject to summary deportation without investigation or redress of those complaints. If that's too much trouble for the employers, then it's too much trouble for the country to have a guest-worker program.
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