Helping all workers win

To Louise Luis, it sounded like the opportunity of a lifetime: the chance to come to the U.S. from the Philippines on a guestworker visa to work for a new bakery being opened by Filipino investors Ana and Goncalo Moitinho de Almeida. The Almeidas promised Luis and ten other Filipino workers good working conditions, fair pay, and the chance to more than quadruple their salaries in time.

“I wanted what everyone wants, Luis said, “the chance to help make a better life for my family.”

{mosads}Instead, the Almeidas subjected Luis and her fellow workers to severe exploitation—not only at the popular L’Amande bakeries in Beverly Hills and Torrance, but at the Almeidas’ private home: 14-hour work days with pay as little at $3 an hour, and threats of retaliatory deportation and financial ruin to silence their complaints.

In spite of the threats, and with great personal risk, Luis and her fellow workers came forward to file a lawsuit against the Almeidas for forced labor, wage theft, immigration-related retaliation, and discrimination. The workers’ brave action provides an urgent warning at a time of renewed calls to expand guestworker programs—and also sheds light on exploitation in the little-known E-2 “investor visa” category, which the Almeidas used to obtain both their own visas and those of the workers.

E-2 visas allow non-U.S. citizens who invest “a substantial amount of capital in a bona fide enterprise” in the U.S. to obtain renewable 2-year visas for themselves and “essential” employees. Touted as a way to increase foreign investment in the U.S., the E-2 provides workers virtually no protections against employer exploitation or retaliation. Also, once the investor makes their initial application to the U.S. government, they are subject to almost no oversight to ensure they are complying with the terms of the E-2. The L’Amande Bakery is the latest example of the abuses endemic in the E-2 program; before that, similar abuse of E-2 workers at Louisiana’s Grand Isle Shipyard made headlines.

But stories like these aren’t unique to any one visa category. The same dynamics of exploitation run across nearly every federal guestworker program, from E-2 visas to H-2B “unskilled worker” visas to J-1 “cultural exchange” visas to H-1B “high-tech” visas.

Guestworkers like Luis face severe debt from program fees and travel costs. When they arrive, the rules of their visa bind them to a single employer. Leaving their workplace for any reason means losing their legal status. As a result, they are trapped in debt bondage: no matter how egregious workplace abuse gets, employers can silence workers through threats of firing and deportation to their home countries, where workers have no means to repay their crushing debt. 
The fact that these stories have become so familiar is the clearest sign of how urgently these programs need reform. Those reforms aren’t going to come from Congress—the Republican majority actually succeeded in blocking the Department of Labor’s last attempt to incorporate worker protections and other improvements in the H-2B program in 2012.

Still, the Obama administration can and must take action to help exploited guestworkers come forward. We have a strong Secretary of Labor in Tom Perez who has shown he understands the vulnerability of immigrant workers to labor abuse. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Jeh Jonson has signaled that he wants DHS to move beyond being a tool of exploitative employers for retaliation.

Most immediately, President Obama’s November 2014 executive actions on immigration created an Interagency Working Group for the Consistent Enforcement of Federal Labor, Employment and Immigration Laws. The group could help provide crucial protections for guestworkers—and all immigrant workers—through its goal of “strengthen[ing] processes for staying the removal of, and providing temporary work authorization for, undocumented workers asserting workplace claims and for cases in which a workplace investigation or proceeding is ongoing.”

The brave L’Amande workers deserve what all workers like them do: employment authorization and protection from removal while they pursue their civil and labor rights, as well as access to T- and U-visa protection as the victims of serious civil and labor rights violations.

When employers like the Almeidas can get away with labor abuse, all workers lose. It’s time for the Obama Administration to help all workers win by ensuring that employer retaliation and immigration enforcement do not block enforcement of basic workplace rights.

Hoq is litigation director for Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Los Angeles. Rosenbaum is legal and policy director of the National Guestworker Alliance.