Businesses really like to use slaves when possible

Note these two recent Southern Law Poverty Center cases:

SPLC wins record $11.8 million judgment for guestworkers in suit against forestry company

Firm must pay $4.5 million to exploited teachers in precedent-setting SPLC case

In both cases, the businesses were using the foreign guestworker program in an effort to cheat their employees. (This is why businesses hate unions: with unions, it’s harder to cheat and mistreat employees.) Both companies are in the South, much of which still longs for the days of slavery: all that Confederate nostalgia.

In 2007 the SPLC published a report, Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States. It’s well worth a look. From the report:

Bound to a single employer and without access to legal resources, guestworkers are:

• routinely cheated out of wages;

• forced to mortgage their futures to obtain low-wage, temporary jobs;

• held virtually captive by employers or labor brokers who seize their documents;

• forced to live in squalid conditions; and,

• denied medical benefits for on-the-job injuries.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel recently put it this way: “This guestworker program’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to slavery.”