USA: reviving indentured servitude

Efforts by the union movement in the US to organise more workers and 
sign them up into unions are being countered by employers acting in concert 
with the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS).

Migrant workers are among the most exploited and are often eager to join a 
union. But many of them are "illegals", lacking a Green Card (work permit).

These undocumented immigrant workers are vulnerable to employer threats to 
"dob them in" to the INS if they try to join a union or take strike action 
or otherwise struggle for better pay and conditions.

Now some US employers and legislators have come up with a scheme to offer 
residency papers to about half a million currently undocumented 
agricultural workers — provided they first work for five years in the 
fields for US agribusiness companies.

Should they be dismissed or leave, they lose their chance to become legally 
documented.

This provides an enormous club for employers to hold over the heads of 
workers, forcing them to accept whatever conditions the employer cares to 
impose, no matter how unfair or brutal they may be.

Walter Ewing in The Washington Report on the Hemisphere describes 
the scheme as "an updated version of the infamous bracero program 
under which millions of Mexican farm workers provided low-wage labour in US 
fields for more than two decades after World War II.

"This push to resurrect a system that one Labour Department official 
described as `legalized slavery' is led by supporters of the restrictive 
immigration reform law of 1996."

Among the sponsors of the Bill, euphemistically named the Agricultural Job 
Opportunity Benefits and Security Act of 1999, is notorious ultra-right 
Republican and anti-immigration proponent Jesse Helms.

Comments Ewing: "Although the 1996 law championed an immigration approach 
which has been used to imprison asylum seekers fleeing persecution, its 
backers apparently have now developed a scenario for a ready supply of 
`illegal' immigrants as a source of cheap labour for large-scale US 
agricultural corporations."