Day laborers in the United States: "Walking ATMs"

Day Laborers Are Easy Prey in New Orleans

February 15th 2009, by Adam Nossiter, NY Times

NEW ORLEANS — They are the men still rebuilding New Orleans more than three years after Hurricane Katrina, the head-down laborers from Honduras, Mexico and Guatemala who work on the blazing hot roofs and inside the fetid homes for a wad of cash at the end of the day.

But on the street, these laborers are known as “walking A.T.M.’s.”

Their pockets stuffed with bills, the laborers are vulnerable because of language problems and their status as illegal immigrants. And as Hispanics have become the prey of choice in crumbling neighborhoods here in one of America’s most crime-ridden cities, racial friction between the newcomers and longtime black residents has moved close to the surface.

Geovanny Billado, a worker from Honduras, spoke of one incident in which “they waited to punch me,” and “one of them stabs me with a knife.” It was four against one, Mr. Billado said, and he lost the $350 he had earned; another time, it was seven against one.

“You don’t get a chance to say anything,” he said. “They just fall on top of you. It’s better to just give the money up front. If you don’t give it to them, they’ll beat you and take it anyway.”

It is an under-the-radar crime epidemic: unarmed Hispanic workers are regularly mugged, beaten, chased, stabbed or shot, the police and the workers themselves say. The ruined homes they sometimes squat in, doubling- or quadrupling-up at night, are broken into, and they have been made to lie face down while being robbed. Keep reading

Migration debts worry OFWs in Taiwan

From the GMANews.tv article "Give us more time to pay, laid-off OFWs ask lenders"

"Two weeks from now, Elwood Yambao would have to give his first payment to the lending company where he borrowed P55,000 to cover his expenses going to Taiwan. He returned home last November, along with 171 others, after the LCD company they were working for suffered a huge blow from the global economic crisis."

“How can we pay our debts if we don’t even have a source of income anymore?" Yambao told GMANews.TV in an interview on Tuesday.

Toots Ople of the Blas F. Ople Foundation, an organization advocating migrants’ issues, appealed to the lending companies for a reprieve in the payment of loans of laid off overseas Filipino workers (OFWs).

According to Ople, laid off workers from Taiwan borrowed between 50,000 and 120,000 from various lending companies to cover their placement fees and other travel expenses.

“The Philippine Overseas Employment Agency (POEA) has called a meeting with the lending companies to tell them to impose a moratorium on the payment of loans by laid off workers," Dimzon said. (Dimzon is the head of the OWWA - Overseas Workers Welfare Administrations)

Dimzon reported that lending companies have yet to decide about the moratorium."

Adding Insult to Injury

In an article about a trafficking and peonage case pending in New York Distrct Court court, GMA News.tv engages in sloppy journalism by making statements about likelihood that someone would pay a placement fee without obtaining a receipt.

The article is about 39-year-old Marichu Suarez Baoanan, who filed a complaint alleging that Ambassador Lauro Liboon Baja Jr., former head of Philippine Mission to the United Nations, engaged in trafficking, forced labor, peonage and racketeering. In the 25-page complaint, Baoanan said the Bajas lured her to the US and promised her a job as a nurse. In exchange for their services which included her plane fare to the US, a visa, work authorization and assistance with finding employment, Baonan was told to pay 500,000 pesos (roughly US$11,000).

According to the complaint, The Labaire International Travel, Inc., owned by the Bajas, facilitated Baoanan's travel papers, collected fees, and provided temporary housing for her.She alleges that said she was made to work 16 hours daily, seven days a week and was paid only a total of $100 for three months of work, and another $100 for taking care of Facundo’s son who, she said, was allowed to hit her.

Citing an affidavit entered into evidence, the GMA article states that:

The allegation that Norma Baja or Labare collected an employment agency fee from Baoanan could not have happened because most of Baoanan’s “neighbors and friends" say she “had no money to pay for it. It would be unbelievable" that "an educated ‘nurse’ and sophisticated businesswoman would be taken by a scam to pay 250,000 pesos on a promise for work as nurse without even a receipt of payment."

It is not at all irrational or implausible that someone would pay Php 250,000 in placement fees for the opportunity to migrate to America. Ms. Baoanan explained in a press conference her motivation for leaving the Philippines:

“I wholeheartedly thought that if I go to America I would make a lot of money and eat good food and that I would be able to send my children to a good school... I was wrong. My life was miserable. They really abused me.”

Recruitment agencies commonly and regularly circumvent the legal prohibition on assessing placement fees by promising high wages and then refusing to issue receipts for the fees, thus preserving their ability to deny the crime.

The United States Government Accountability Office recently released a report that critiques the United States on their inability to prevent human rights abuses by diplomats residing in their borders. In the report, US GAO states, “... the U.S. government’s process for investigating trafficking of household workers by foreign diplomats has, in some instances, been hampered by delays in coordination between State and Justice on the use of investigative techniques.”

I hope Ms. Baoanan's case draws more attention to the high fees assessed to workers who want work abroad.

Joblessness Grows for China's Migrant Workers

China’s government offered a telling indicator Monday of the slowdown in its once-galloping economy, announcing that more than one in seven rural migrant workers had been laid off or are unable to find work, twice as many as estimated just five weeks ago. Read more.

Profile of Mafiwasta: Migrant Advocacy group

This newspaper clipping from UAE Uncovered highlights the scant attention paid to worker rights abuse in the press.

Check out MigrantRights.com for another great profile of leaders fighting for the rights of transient workers in the Middle East.

Migrant Rights talks to Nick McGeehan, founding member of human rights group Mafiwasta, set up in 2005 to bring to attention abuses of migrant workers in the Gulf.

Mafiwasta currently focuses on the UAE, but hopes to expand its work to other countries in the region in future.

Mafi is Arabic for ‘no’ or ‘none’, while ‘wasta’ connotes influence, connections or ‘who you know’. Migrant labourers are among those who lack ‘wasta’ in UAE society, with no connections to power and no protection offered to them by the state.

Mafiwasta was initially set up with the sole aim of raising awareness of the abuses of migrant labourers in the Gulf through the media, and served as a valuable reference point for journalists and researchers. However, after 2006 the organization galvanized into a lobbying group, and joined forces with the Irish-based Human Rights for Change to submit an official complaint to the International Labour Organisation (ILO). Mafiwasta argued that the whole system of abuse of migrant workers was underpinned by the denial of trade unions, a position which it still holds today.

McGeehan first came to the UAE as an English teacher, and then worked with an oil company, which brought him into contact with the dire working and living conditions of migrant labourers. He is now studying for a PhD in law at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, on legal issues relating to the abuses of migrant labourers in the UAE. In his thesis, he argues that the labour system in the UAE is based on systematic racial discrimination, which is tantamount to enslavement in the worst cases.

The UAE has recently had its Universal Periodic Review by the United Nations. Has this done anything to highlight the abuses of migrant workers?

The UAE’s Universal Periodic Review by the UNHCR was widely received by the Gulf press as a glowing report on the state’s ‘positive’ progress in promoting human rights. But while the UN delegation praised the UAE for for improvements on children’s rights and for compensation for former child camel jockeys, the issue of workers’ rights was a cause for concern.

McGeehan explained that states that submit to the review are given three options when it comes to handling the individual recommendations of the Universal Periodic review; they can accept, consider or reject. The UAE accepted ‘non-binding’ recommendations, but has ‘rejected out of hand’ recommendations such as allowing foreign labourers to form trade unions or taking further steps to eliminate racial discrimination.

‘The UN Periodic Review is a useful mechanism for some states that already have a record on human rights’ McGeehan told Migrant Rights. However, he argues that the review is less likely to have an impact in states such as the UAE where there is not an active tradition of civil society or human rights documentation and protection.

Will the current global financial crisis make working conditions for migrants in the Gulf worse?

McGeehan told Migrant Rights that the current global financial crisis could leave migrant labourers more vulnerable to abuse by their employers, as construction companies tighten their budgets and consider pay cuts and layoffs. ‘Work’s going to go, contracts are not going to be borne out and there will be even less concern for workers conditions’ he said. There is also a risk that construction companies could fire workers without securing their repatriation, meaning that thousands could find themselves stranded in the UAE without enough money to get home – and without any legal protection. Repatriation is an expensive process for construction companies, and McGeehan says he fears that the companies will neglect their responsibilities to their workers as they hit stormier financial times. ‘The UAE is a legal no-man’s land for workers that need repatriation’ he said.Keep reading.

Credit Crunch Affects Migrants - Photo essay from Financial Times

Though manual workers only earn 3 to 5 dirhams an hour, they make up the largest cost for construction companies and are the easiest to let go due to the absence of employment protection. The drab, prison-like buildings house more than 100,000 blue collar servants and workers.The UAE employs millions of expatriate manual workers in its construction industry that was, until recently, booming.

For more, see the the Financial Times photo essay.

Do Labor Standards Hurt the Poor?

There is a very challenging and insightful article by Nicholas Kristof in today's NYTimes. I continue to be impressed by Kristof for his bold reporting --- no doubt, he will attract a lot of ire for this article and its point of view. In a nutshell, he argues that labor standards are relative; what poor people want is better jobs. What looks like exploitation to an American is a big step up for someone who had previously worked in far worse conditions. A factory job in a sweatshop is a better job than, for example, scavenging in a garbage dump, pulling a rickshaw, or selling your body.

This is a familiar argument and one that often is used to criticize advocates who yell about the way the world should be, but who ignore the way the world actually is. It is a compelling argument, and we cannot just dismiss it as unfair or morally vacuous.

You are better off in a factory that pays $2 than in a job that pays $1/day. That extra income will allow a parent to support her child, educate her child, and buy better opportunities for herself and others. One concern - that as the standards improve, the factories will just leave -- is not reason to limit manufacturing to those countries that already have very high labor standards.

What worries me, however, is when people use this rationale to justify importing poor people and paying them what "is better than they would get at home." Is is OK to pay a Cambodian woman $2 in Cambodia? Maybe. Is it OK to pay that same Cambodian woman $2 if she is in Hong Kong? No? Why not? She is still better off.

In a recent trial on forced labor, the woman on trial for keeping her child maid in the garage, entered into evidence a picture of where the child would have lived if she had stayed in Egypt:

From the Huffington Post article,"Child maid trafficking spreads from Africa to US"

"The garage's walls are made of concrete instead of hand-patted bricks. Its roof doesn't leak. Its door shuts all the way. Shyima's mother and her 10 brothers and sisters live in a two-bedroom house with uneven walls and a flaking ceiling. None of them have ever had a bed to themselves, much less a whole room. At night, bodies cover the sagging couches.

Shown a snapshot of the windowless garage, Shyima's mother in the coastal town of Agami made a clucking sound of approval.

"It's much cleaner than where many people here sleep," said Helal, the child rights advocate. He explains that Shyima's treatment in the Ibrahim home is considered normal -even good - by Egyptian standards.

Even though many child maids are physically abused, child labor is rarely prosecuted because the work isn't considered strenuous. Many employers even see themselves as benefactors."

This situation is special because it was a child who was the victim. But would it have been different if it was an 18 year old women living in the garage? Can something be wrong, even if it makes the person better off? Is a women living in a garage in the United States a victim, even if her only other option is a worse situation in Egypt?

Can advocates articulate why this is wrong -- that is our challenge.