Foreign Guestworkers who were Trafficked to New Orleans Win Decision in Suit Against Luxury Hotel Chain

-JEN HERRMANN
During our orientation with the People's Organizing Committee, the organizers presented the problems guestworkers were facing: they had essentially become slaves in a new system of slavery. Elisa and Emily worked on researching this issue, and you can see Elisa's comments at her section below entitled "Research for Lawsuit on Behalf of Non-Immigrant Workers." I'm happy to report the following update.

From the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice, via email 5/18/07:

NEWS FLASH! NEWS FLASH! NEWS FLASH!

Foreign Guestworkers who were Trafficked to New Orleans Through False Promises Win Landmark Decision in Suit Against Luxury Hotel Chain

Ruling is one step in the struggle to end modern-day slavery, say victorious plaintiffs

Guestworkers who were trafficked into the country to work for Decatur Hotels, LLC in atrocious conditions had a major victory this week. After more than a year of mass meetings, company intimidation of workers, and retaliatory firings 82 Latin American guestworkers obtained a precedent-setting legal victory that provides relief to tens of thousands of foreign guestworkers on H-2B visas who typically are forced to pay exorbitant fees to obtain low-wage, temporary jobs in the United States.

The ruling in Castellanos-Contreras, et al., v. Decatur Hotels, LLC, et al., is an important precedent for the more than 100,000 H-2B guestworkers who enter the United States legally each year and serves as a strike against a system that members of the Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity describe as modern-day slavery. The Alliance is a guestworker-led organization dedicated to challenging the rampant abuse in the guestworker program and to fighting for the rights of all workers in post-Katrina New Orleans.

As part of a larger guestworker organizing campaign spearheaded by the Alliance, workers from Bolivia, Peru and the Dominican Republic met secretly over three months to address the problems they had been facing under the H-2B visa program.

“I paid $3,800 to come to work in this hotel because my daughter has cancer, and I wanted to be able to get her treatment. My recruiter told me I would have a full time job plus plenty of overtime. They promised great living conditions and a good working environment,” reflected Rodolfo Baez, one of the Decatur guestworkers, a leader of the Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity. “When I got here I found myself paying to stay in a moldy hotel room with three other people, working 25 hours per week at $6.02/hr., and with no way to work anywhere else to supplement my pay because of the restrictions on my visa.”

Jose Sanchez, plaintiff in the case and worker leader in the Alliance, explained,“I worked in Mr. Quinn’s hotels for next to nothing because I had to earn enough money to make back what I paid to get here. Even though I was so tired at the end of the day, I would go to the guestworker alliance meetings at night because I knew that this was important not just for our group, but for all guestworkers in the U.S.”

In July of 2006, the Decatur workers confronted Mr. Quinn about their inhumane living and working conditions. The workers presided over a meeting in which they demanded that Quinn stop participating in slavery and forbid his labor recruiters from retaliating against the workers’ families. Their thirteen demands also included translation of their employment contracts into Spanish, access to health care, English classes, and reimbursement of the money they paid up front to the labor recruiters. The guestworkers also requested proof that Quinn and Decatur Hotels did in fact attempt to recruit Black survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

Because Quinn refused to meet most of their demands, the workers retained the legal assistance of local civil rights attorney, Tracie Washington, president of the Louisiana Justice Institute, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the National Immigration Law Center. The workers filed the lawsuit in August 2006 alleging that Decatur and Quinn violated the Fair Labor Standards Act when the company failed to reimburse them for the inflated costs of their trip to New Orleans, including airfare, visa processing costs, recruiters’ fees, and other related expenses.

“When we found out the realities of this H-2B visa program, we decided that we had to take action, not only for ourselves, but for the other workers from our home countries who were trying to get jobs through these same recruiters,” said Ricardo Deheza, another member of the Alliance. “The recruiter in Bolivia told me that I would be able to make plenty of money to support my parents, so they took out a loan against their home in order for me to come to work at Decatur. For the first month I was unable to pay anything on this loan because I did not get enough work. My parents encouraged me to come home because I could make more money there. I decided to stay to fight for a more just system and I still have not been able to pay the loan off. This decision will be a huge relief for my parents.”

”This is a great victory for the Decatur workers and a great first step in fighting against the abuses of all the H2B employers,” stated Jacob, one Alliance member from India. “The workers at Signal International, LLC fully support the struggles the Decatur workers went through to make this decision possible. It will help all of us guestworkers being exploited and enslaved by these corporations.”

Eugenio, an Alliance member from Mexico working in Westlake, LA added, “The way the employers treat us makes me sick. I want to congratulate the Decatur Hotel workers because this shows that when we fight collectively for our rights, we win.”

This decision comes at a critical time as Congress and the White House are designing an expanded temporary worker program as part of larger immigration legislation.

“As President Bush and Congress seek to expand the temporary worker program, this and other organizing efforts by guestworkers across the Gulf Coast have unveiled the brutal realities of the H-2B visa program,” said Saket Soni, Lead Organizer of the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice.

The workers who lead the Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity have endured exploitation under the current H-2B program akin to that experienced by workers under the abusive Bracero program, which operated from 1942 to 1964. Despite this, Senate Democrats and Republicans announced a backroom deal they reached with the White House that creates a massive program of close to a half a million new guestworkers who will be lured into the US by unscrupulous recruiters and subcontractors working for US employers. Although these new guestworkers will have a “portable” visa and supposedly are “free” to change employers they can only go from one abusive employer to another one who has been certified by the DOL to accept guestworkers. The DOL currently rubber stamps employers’ labor certification petitions and approves even those who, like Quinn & Decatur Hotels, do very little to recruit U.S. workers and abide by US labor law.

Hotel tycoon F. Patrick Quinn III, president of Decatur, and hundreds of other employers across the hurricane-wracked Gulf Coast and throughout the nation are taking advantage of guestworkers to fill jobs that are often otherwise filled by Black workers in a race to the bottom. Many turn a blind eye as guestworker recruiters rob migrant workers of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“We want to ensure there are strong labor protections for all workers and that U.S. workers, especially African-Americans, are not displaced by employers who simply want cheaper labor and to exploit us,” added Daniel Castellanos-Contreras, plaintiff and worker leader in the Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity. “We demand that government officials and immigrants rights advocates consult those of us who are living the realities of the current H-2B visa program before any new temporary worker program is created. Policymakers would think twice about expanding this program if they had to spend one day in our shoes.”

A link to the courts opinion in Castellanos-Contreras, et al., v. Decatur Hotels, LLC, et al., (Case No. 06-4340) may be found at: http://www.splcenter.org/pdf/dynamic/legal/20070517114318302.pdf

# # #

For More information about the Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity please contact trabajadoreshuespedes@gmail.com

Article on State-Fed Relief Battle

Aid flap is new threat to New Orleans rebuilding
By Gina Keating

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - As homes in New Orleans' flood-stricken zones inch toward habitability, a bureaucratic storm is brewing between state and federal relief agencies that could derail the city's recovery from Hurricane Katrina.


The dispute over how $7.5 billion (3.8 billion pounds) in federal aid is handed out is slowing disbursal to more than 120,000 homeowners whose houses were damaged or destroyed by the storm on August 29, 2005 and by subsequent flooding.

Officials from the state of Louisiana contend that a new federal requirement that aid checks be issued jointly to homeowners and their mortgage lenders could mean that money bypasses the owners -- many of whom lost their jobs as a result of Katrina -- and goes straight to paying their defaulted mortgage payments.

A federal official said the government, in demanding a change in payout procedures, was relying on lenders to act fairly to New Orleans homeowners.

"If banks simply grab this money as a way to compensate for their subprime losses, we would not consider that the moral thing to do," said Bruce Sullivan, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

But state officials note that banks are feeling a pinch all over the nation because of a crisis in subprime mortgages and many would be likely to grab the Katrina cash.

GRATEFUL

Meanwhile, Katrina victims grow older and angrier as their woes go unanswered amid endless government bickering.

Barbara Johnson, 79, has all but lost faith that the government will come through with the aid she needs to rebuild her mould-infested home on a nearly deserted block of 1940s bungalows in St. Bernard parish, so she turned to charity.

"I am so grateful for the love of these groups that come in, because the city is not doing a 'blah blah' thing," Johnson said as college kids on spring vacation ripped out water-logged debris and piled it roof-high in her front yard.

Throughout St. Bernard, the Ninth Ward and Lakeview, some of the hardest-hit neighbourhoods, temporary trailers pop up as residents return. But the city's population is only about half of what it was before the storm.

Johnson has been waiting for funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the state-run, federally funded and roundly criticised Road Home program since being rescued from her attic days after Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast.

The Road Home program has received more than 121,000 applications and has 60,000 still to process, and has closed on fewer than 6,100 of them. Of $7.5 billion in funding, some $4.7 billion has been allocated, but not necessarily paid out.

The standoff between state and federal officials makes it even less likely that residents like Johnson will see any money, unless banks agree not to claim the back mortgage payments.

It has also prevented the state from rolling out a new software program that was supposed to help reduce the backlog of claims.

STALLED

As state and federal officials try to resolve their differences, the state is struggling to keep money flowing and "maintain some kind of protection for the homeowners to do repairs on the property," said Natalie Wyeth, spokeswoman for the Louisiana Recovery Authority.

Wyeth said the state and HUD expect to announce this week how aid will flow to homeowners with mortgages, and what lenders are likely to deduct from grants, which average about $76,000.

The state agreed last week to pay out grants to homeowners without mortgages in lump sums and with less oversight to ensure that the funds were spent on repairs.

Most streets in once-submerged neighbourhoods remain deserted. Despite a burst of grants from the state program last month that fuelled new construction, some residents are angry at the slow recovery.

"It doesn't make sense. Everywhere we been, we build other people's (countries) but when it come to ourselves it's completely different," said Vernon Lawrence, 75, pointing to the cost of the Iraq war and reconstruction. "Here we are in this country suffering like hell."

Lawrence was speaking after coming out of the Road Home's office in East New Orleans, not far from where his two-story home flooded during the storm. He was applying for a grant and was pessimistic.

After his insurance company failed to pay out on his homeowners policy, he managed to gut his home and make it liveable with a $15,000 grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He doesn't hold out much hope of getting relief from the government any time soon.

"They going to preach a good sermon but...I just wonder if they're going to deliver the things they said they're going to," he said.

(c) Reuters 2007. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by caching, framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters and the Reuters sphere logo are registered trademarks and trademarks of the Reuters group of companies around the world.

This article: http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=546992007

Last updated: 09-Apr-07 14:39 BST

Ninth Ward Article from Boston Globe

By Ann M. Simmons, Los Angeles Times | April 8, 2007

NEW ORLEANS -- Today, the Lower 9th Ward is a dreary landscape of deserted brick and wood-frame structures, concrete slabs where homes once stood, unshaded streets and sidewalks buckled by uprooted live oaks, and weeks of standing water. At night, a graveyard silence is broken only by the skittering of rats.

It is about as inhospitable a place as exists in post-Katrina New Orleans.

And yet sisters Tanya Harris and Tracy Flores are moving back.

To them, the "Lower 9" is still beautiful. In her mind's eye, Harris is fishing with her grandfather in Bayou Bienvenue at the end of the street where his house stood. She and her sister are sitting on his front porch "door-popping," their grandfather's term for playful gossip and people-watching.

Harris and Flores, whose feisty, stubborn devotion to their neighborhood has become well known to City Hall since the storm, are determined to reclaim the neighborhood that nurtured five generations of their family.

Their efforts may seem quixotic to people who know the Lower 9th Ward only from television news: block after block of houses flooded to their rooflines, and people waving frantically for rescue atop their homes. After the waters receded, crumpled houses had been ripped off their foundations by the wall of water that burst the levee and lay strewn about, some on top of one another.

Almost entirely black and working class, the neighborhood became symbolic of an economic divide, in which the have-nots were stranded, overlooked by their own government to the point that foreign nations offered help.

But to many people who lived there, the Lower 9th is not a symbol. It is a 22-block neighborhood, once home to 19,000 people.

It had a significant percentage of owner-occupied homes, a core of closely knit longtime residents and even its own celebrity: pioneering rock 'n' roller Fats Domino.

(Domino, who remained in his home during Katrina until being rescued, is rebuilding and expects to move back by summer.)

And it had families such as those of Harris and Flores.

Before Katrina, Harris, 31, and Flores, 34, were next-door neighbors in lookalike reddish- brown and tan brick ranch homes. Their cousin Vernine Veasley owned the house on the corner, and another cousin, Inez Ellis, lived one block over.

Josephine Butler, their grandmother, was less than two blocks away in a wood-frame Craftsman bungalow that her husband built in 1949. At least a dozen more relatives lived throughout the Lower 9th, which spans two square miles.

Flores finished renovating her flood-ravaged house in December and moved back in with her two children. They're the only family living on her block. "I hope to serve as a beacon of hope to my neighbors," Flores said. "I want them to see it can be done."

Harris is the midst of repairs to her home. And last month, Butler, their grandmother, moved into one of the first new houses to be built in the Lower 9th Ward since Katrina.

Butler and Gwendolyn Guice, her neighbor of 25 years, were given keys to houses designed by architecture students from Louisiana State University, mold and termite-resistant elevated wood-frame structures built to withstand 160 mile-per-hour winds.

The houses -- one painted beige, the other powder green -- stand against the Katrina-scarred terrain: abandoned skeletons of buildings, missing street signs, and pockmarked pavement.

But none of the surrounding blight deterred Butler from returning to the neighborhood she has called home for almost 60 years.

"I've been here for so long, I just enjoy being here," said the 84-year-old woman.

The maternal great-grandmother of Harris and Flores moved to the then-sparsely populated Lower 9th in the 1940s, after the death of her husband.

Ophelia Hugle Short worked cleaning stately homes along prestigious St. Charles Avenue for $3 a week.

Butler and her husband, C.F., a longshoreman and welder, decided to build their home next door to her mother's in 1949 after a fire destroyed their tenement building in the Uptown neighborhood.

"We just decided we weren't going to rent no more," Butler said.

C.F. Butler cleared the land covered in cypress trees, built it up, and with the help of his wife and her brother, laid the floor, installed the wood siding and hung the new home's sheetrock. The house occupied the center of a quarter-acre lot.

The sisters recall their grandfather describing how he worked 16 hours on the docks in the city and then came home to work on the house. The stories stuck with them.

"You owe something to that memory, that perseverance, that determination," Flores said.

Thoughts on Gert Town

-MATT DOURDIS (via email)
When we first arrived in Gert Town, the first thing I noticed was the devastation. The area looked run down and dilapadated. However, I believe that was how I perceived the area because that was what I was told to expect. Though, when I took a moment to truly assess the area, I noticed something much more encompassing than the destruction: the re-construction. On some streets, there would be a dilapadated lot next to a re-finished duplex. The juxtaposition of both the ravaged and the re-built perfectly illustrates the spirit that the Gert Town Initiative. The people of Mid-Town have taken an awful situation, perpetuated by red-tape and bureaucractic road blocks, and have begun to re-establish themselves, not only as individuals, but as a community. Ultimately, this is what our mapping project was all about. The people who run the Gert Town Initiative are residents of the area who have taken action to make sure the district is re-built to the community's specifications to accomodate the residents' needs. The mapping project seeks to make that goal attainable by organizing and categorizing the parts of the district in most need of development while ensuring that the development the does occur compliments the unique aspects of Gert Town. In the end, Alyssa and I were successful in creating the database and documenting the destruction; However, it was the re-construction that made creating the database worthwhile.

Common Ground Legal

-ELI ROESCHKE
I volunteered for Common Ground Legal along with Jack, Tom, and Dan. Volunteers from The New England School of Law, as well as the University of Pennsylvania joined us as well.

Tom and I worked on a special Section 8 project for Common Ground that will come to be used in the pending lawsuit against the housing department of New Orleans. Our efforts may eventually help to save some 5,000 housing units across New Orleans, which in turn would allow countless numbers of displaced families to return to their homes. Tom and I covered a great deal of the city over the course of the week, making numerous appointments with landlords to verify HANO's list of available Section 8 housing. HANO claims there are approximately 900 Section 8 housing units currently available for eligible families, and thus housing projects such as the Lafitte housing project are expendable in order to further "develop" the city. It would cost more money to demolish the housing projects, than it would to repair them. After working on this special project, Tom and I verified that more than half of the 900 "available" Section 8 housing units were in fact unavailable. Some units were in disrepair most were already occupied. Therefore, the list of 900 available Section 8 housing units should look more like 300-400 and the undamaged housing projects should be reopened. Only then will low income displaced families be able to return to their homes. Hopefully the work Tom and I did, will help to make an impression in the pending lawsuit against HUD New Orleans.

From my first hand experience interacting with members of the community, our presence as volunteers in New Orleans was greatly appreciated. I plan on returning to New Orleans to volunteer again before I graduate, and I strongly recommend other students to do the same.

Renaissance Trailer Park photos

BBC News.com

Renaissance Trailer Park article

This article from GOVEXEC.com, March 13, 2006.

FEMA works to keep trailer parks temporary

By Paul Singer, National Journal

Some excerpts:

Renaissance Village is the largest of the approximately 65 FEMA-run trailer parks in Louisiana. Agency officials insist that by April 2007, all the residents must find another home, find a new job or return to an old one, and generally resume their pre-Katrina lives. But an outsider walking through the rows and rows of trailers meets hundreds of people whose homes are gone and are unlikely to be rebuilt any time soon, whose workplaces were wiped out, and whose lives seem permanently shattered.

***

New Orleans wants to open a FEMA site for almost 1,000 trailers in City Park, but neighbors object. Scores of FEMA trailers are sitting empty, and thousands of evacuees remain homeless because of similar objections. Regardless of the government's euphemisms -- group site, village, gated community -- this slapdash suburb is basically a refugee camp. And a lot of folks just don't want a refugee camp in their backyard.

***

Despite its fancy name, Renaissance Village is little more than a barren grid of metal trailers separated by gravel roadways. Patches of new grass sprouting between trailers are the only natural greenery. Some residents have landscaped their lots with potted plants from the local Wal-Mart but, otherwise, little distinguishes one trailer from the next -- beyond the black-and-white numbers pasted to their sides that serve as an address: C-10; J-18; F-9. The overall effect is "compound," not "community."

Few children are anywhere in sight. According to FEMA, the park has nearly 600 residents under age 18, but not many of them play in the dusty streets. Resident Anita Richardson says, "A lot of our kids in this trailer park are under a tremendous amount of stress. There are a lot of children, but you don't hardly ever see them. Even in the afternoon, you don't see the kids. They get off the bus, and they go home, and that's it. It scares me that kids don't go out -- even when it's sunny". . . .

Social services providers also worry about the invisible young people. Sister Judith Brun, a former Catholic school principal who is now a child-services advocate for the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, says she is very concerned about a potential rash of child abuse, because parents and children are cooped up in small spaces. Many kids are skipping school, she said.

FEMA allows local school officials to come into the trailer park to search for truant schoolchildren. Because parents can be evicted for failing to keep their children in school, some kids caught by truant officers have refused to provide their names. So now, FEMA requires residents to carry ID badges at all times and has threatened to kick out any child found without an ID.

***

FEMA's Michael Cosbar is sympathetic but says his hands are tied. "I see individuals who have needs, but we can't provide them for them. There is nothing in the Stafford Act that says that we can offer them assistance beyond what we can offer." The act, which governs federal disaster assistance to states, is quite clear, he said: FEMA can offer housing assistance for 18 months, and that's about it. "That's the law, and we have to follow the law. And it wasn't FEMA who set it up. It was Congress."

***

FEMA installed a water and sewer system for the park and provided the propane for heat, hot water, and stoves -- until February 1. Residents now have to pay for their propane, at a cost of $25 to $35 a tank. Richardson, whose four-bedroom house was destroyed by Katrina and who now shares a two-bedroom trailer with her husband and five children, says that the family burns through more than a tank a week.

When FEMA announced it would no longer pay for propane, residents went ballistic. Many are on government assistance. Some lost their jobs as well as their homes in the storm. And most came from houses or apartments in New Orleans where they had never used propane for anything but a barbecue grill. How would they know how to hook up the tanks, to use the gas efficiently? Would the senior citizens in the park survive a frost without heat?

Beyond the actual cost of propane, FEMA's announcement upset residents because it contradicted what many say they were told. According to Richardson, "They said to me, 18 months free. No utilities, no nothing. Free." That's a common refrain in Renaissance Village. Residents believe they were promised 18 months of free living, with all expenses paid. FEMA is now reneging on the deal, they believe, although everyone has a different story about how this promise was made, and no one seems to have proof of it.

***

Former FEMA Director Michael Brown, who lost his job after Katrina, said of FEMA's trailer parks, "They've been a bad idea for 20 years." Brown added that, before Katrina, he had requested funding for an in-depth study of alternative approaches to emergency housing, but Homeland Security never approved his request.

Scott Wells, FEMA's federal coordinating officer for hurricane recovery in Louisiana, told a Senate committee in December that the government pays $30,000 to $40,000 to purchase and install each trailer and that evacuees would be better off if FEMA just gave them cash. "Temporary housing is not cost-effective or customer-oriented," he said.

***

"What I fear," said Randy Ewing, interim director of the Louisiana Family Recovery Corps, the nonprofit group set up by Gov. Kathleen Blanco to coordinate state, federal, and private humanitarian assistance, "is [that] we will be left with thousands of people living in trailers that are dilapidating, and we will have the worst slums in America."