Date Published:
March 14, 2008
More
than 100 guest workers carrying signs that said "I Am a Man" and
"Dignity" walked off the job at a Mississippi shipyard last week to
protest conditions they liken to slavery.
The shipyard workers, who are from India, have filed a class-action
lawsuit
[PDF] against Pascagoula, Miss.-based Signal International, one of the
largest marine and fabrication companies in the Gulf of Mexico. The
suit also targets recruiters in the U.S., India and United Arab
Emirates, as well as New Orleans immigration attorney Malvern Burnett
and the Gulf Coast Immigration Law Center.
Filed in federal
court in the Eastern District of Louisiana, where many of the
defendants are based, the suit says that in the wake of Hurricane
Katrina more than 500 Indian men were trafficked into the United States
through the federal H2B guest worker program to work for Signal at
shipyards in Pascagoula and Orange, Texas. Lured by promises of
permanent work and a chance at legal immigration, the men gave up their
jobs in India and went into debt to finance fees as high as $20,000
each. They then allegedly had their passports and visas held by
recruiters who told them that changing their minds about working for
Signal could bring legal action and even physical harm.
Once in
the United States, the men were forced to live in guarded, overcrowded
and isolated labor camps, the suit charges. After several of the
plaintiffs spoke out against conditions in the Pascagoula camp, Signal
security guards allegedly tried to forcibly deport them. One of the
workers -- Sabulal Vijayan -- became so distraught by the threat of
deportation that he attempted suicide and had to be hospitalized. The
guards locked three of the other men in a room for several hours,
refusing to provide them with water or bathroom access. The abuse left
Signal's immigrant workers terrorized, the suit says:
Deeply
fearful, isolated, disoriented, and unfamiliar with their rights under
United States law, these workers felt compelled to continue working for
Signal.
Filed by the
Louisiana Justice Institute ,
Southern Poverty Law Center and the
Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund ,
the suit charges the defendants with violating the Victims of
Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, the Racketeer Influenced and
Corrupt Organizations Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the Ku
Klux Klan Act of 1871, among other laws. Five of the plaintiffs are
also bringing individual claims of false imprisonment, assault,
battery, and infliction of emotional distress. The workers are also
asking the Department of Justice to investigate. Signal
says the charges are untrue and that most of its guest workers are satisfied with their living conditions.
During
last Thursday's walkout, the workers threw their hardhats over the
fence in protest as they left the shipyard and sang "We Shall
Overcome." Saket Soni of the
New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice , who served as an interpreter, said the workers talked of living "like pigs in a cage."
"The
U.S. State Department calls it 'a repulsive crime' when recruiters and
employers in other parts of the world bind guest workers with crushing
debts and threats of deportation," Soni says. "This is precisely what
is happening on the Gulf Coast."
(Photo by Ted Quant courtesy of neworleans.indymedia.org . To see more images from the protest, click on the previous link or the photo above.)