Photo: David Rae Morris
"On their way out the door, the Bush administration's Department of Labor has eviscerated the few protections our nation's guestworker program offers to U.S. and foreign workers," said Mary Bauer, director, SPLC’s Immigrant J
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and a coalition of immigrant rights advocates have filed a federal lawsuit challenging last-minute changes to the nation's guestworker program by the Bush administration, charging that the new rules shred worker protections and make it easier to replace U.S. workers with temporary foreign labor.
Filed on Jan. 18 in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the suit also claims these changes would hamper the Obama administration's ability to reverse the regulations and protect U.S. workers from the damaging effects an influx of foreign labor would have on wages and working conditions.
"On their way out the door, the Bush administration's Department of Labor has eviscerated the few protections our nation's guestworker program offers to U.S. and foreign workers," said Mary Bauer, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Immigrant Justice Project, a member of the coalition bringing the lawsuit. "These new regulations are a giant step backward for workers."
The regulations – set to go into effect on Jan. 18 – concern the H-2B guestworker program, used by businesses to hire low-skilled, temporary foreign labor. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of farmworker organizations that include the Farmworkers Support Committee, the Alliance of Forest Workers and Harvesters, and Piñeros y Campesinos Unidos del Noreste. It also names Salvador MartÃnez Barrera, a Mexican citizen who has worked as a guestworker and would be affected by the regulations.
The new regulations expand the types of jobs that are considered to be temporary – and therefore eligible for the program – to include jobs that will last up to three years. Currently, foreign guestworkers may be hired for no more than one year.
These regulations would also allow employers wishing to use the guestworker program to simply vouch that they
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Ty Inc. became one of the world's largest manufacturers of stuffed animals thanks to the Beanie Babies craze in the 1990s.
But it has stayed on top partly by using an underworld of labor brokers known as raiteros, who pick up workers from Chicago's street corners and shuttle them to Ty's ...
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