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Transcript - May 26, 2006
BRANCACCIO: Welcome to NOW.
There's no shortage of evidence that undocumented immigrants live a
life open to exploitation. The work tends to be hard, the hours run
long and the workplace protections are few. But how much better is it
for people who come to this country to work with the proper visas and
permits?
The answer is not much. They are called guest workers and are part of a
little known program that is in place right now. Congress is proposing
legislation that would expand the program enormously.
Producer Michelle Smawley and Senior Correspondent Maria Hinojosa
visited the mostly hidden world of guest workers, and brought back a
cautionary tale.
HINOJOSA: Everyday at 5am it's the same story for these Mexican workers
Three men share a bed in a motel room in Montana. It's early spring and there's still a chill in the air and there is no heat.
Exhaustion permeates the room ...
There's time for only a quick breakfast of cookies and milk ... outside the rest of the crew gathers in the cold ...
The men pile into the van which will take them to work ... they are
roughly 2000 miles away from the place they call home in Mexico.
An hour into the trip they arrive at the Lolo National Forest -- cradled in the Rocky Mountains.
You may think these men are undocumented workers but they are here
legally -- part of America's guest worker program. We came to Montana
to take a closer look at the program. There are allegations of
widespread abuse of guest workers and there is a proposal in Congress
that would increase their numbers significantly.
Today this crew will plant pine seedlings in an area previously devastated by a wildfire.
Ausencio Yanez has been coming to the United States as a guest worker
for the last four years. Even so, he knows little about what a guest
worker is ...
HINOJOSA: What do you know about what the H2B visa program is all about?
YANEZ: I don't know exactly what it is, just that it's a work permit we're given.
HINOJOSA: How do you get motivated for a day long work like this, and most people don't even know you are here?
AUSENCIO: We don't have enough resources in our country, and here we have to work, to struggle, to survive better in Mexico.
HINOJOSA: Yanez and his fellow guest workers make this job look easy. But it's back- breaking labor.
The mountains are steep ... the soil is loose and rocky, making it easy
for the workers to slip. The work is tough, repetitive, physical labor.
They plunge their tools into the earth ... plant a seedling -- move on
-- repeat -- for eight hours a day, six days a week, sometimes more.
Most of the labor intensive work in the woods is done by Latino labor
... . They have earned a nickname because of it: los pineros -- the men
of the pines.
The Federal Forest Service has contracted with a company called Oaxaca reforestation to replant these mountains.
Silvino Escalante supervises the crew for the company ... he watches them closely -- urging the workers to keep up the pace.
HINOJOSA: Does it seem at all strange for you, Silvino, that the
replanting that's happening in the U.S. forest preserves is being done
by Mexican workers?
ESCALANTE: All the time I work in the -- forest -- in the forest
service with the s -- pretty much are the same people. All Mexican all
the time. Sometimes in a while bring -- American peoples but just for
two or three days. And then leaving. They don't like the hard work.
HINOJOSA: Escalante's says most of his men have come over on the
H2B visa which allows companies to request foreign labor to do
seasonal. Like this crew the vast majority of the guest workers come
from Mexico.
Escalante says the program has been good for the workers because they are here legally.
HINOJOSA: You would say, your workers feel more secure --
ESCALANTE: Right.
HINOJOSA: -- because they have H2B visas. They don't have to worry about the --
ESCALANTE: I think so. Yeah.
HINOJOSA: -- immigration coming in and --
ESCALANTE: I think so.
HINOJOSA: and doing raids.
ESCALANTE: Yeah. The way I feel, the peoples is -- feel more comfortable, more happy ... more, more happy.
HINOJOSA: You think it makes them better workers?
ESCALANTE: I think so. Uh-huh.
HINOJOSA: "Better workers" in Escalante's world may mean harder
workers. While we were there production was nonstop. The only break, if
you want to call it that was when the crew climbed back up the mountain
to stock up on more seedlings, which they did 3 times during the day.
There was also a paid, lunch break -- so to speak. The men gathered
round ... heating tortillas on a small burner. But the meal only lasted
18 minutes.
The crew was alone in the woods except for two Forest Service
inspectors. The government employees trailed the team at a distance.
Their job is to make sure the planting is up to specifications.
HINOJOSA: And so the actual role of the U.S. Forest Service in a contract like this is what?
AUSTIN: Is to insure that the work that we need to have done is being done appropriately and correctly to -- to an acceptable quality.
HINOJOSA: But it's about the trees.
AUSTIN: Right.
HINOJOSA: It's not necessarily about the workers.
AUSTIN: No.
HINOJOSA: The government has no hard statistics on how many
guest workers are actually in the country, the best estimate is roughly
120,000 -- the number of visas that have been issued.
Around the country there have been news accounts and lawsuits
highlighting the exploitation and lack of oversight of guest workers.
So, there is mounting pressure on the forest service to look after the
workers and not just the trees.
AUSTIN: ... our people are trained in natural resources. That's
their background, that's -- that's what they know how to do. But we
have had a lot of recent training and education on what to look for in
terms of the workers.
HINOJOSA: And what up until now have -- have you noticed from your own teams that are doing inspections here?
AUSTIN: I've noticed again with this particular contract, and
this is the second year of this contract with this company, it's been
exceptionally high quality.
HINOJOSA: The crew would agree that sentiment -- this is as good
as it gets for guest workers. Even so, Yanez told us that after almost
a year of hard labor -- he ends up with just $9,000 to support his wife
and three kids.
Still, he and his crew are grateful for even those kinds of earnings --
but they worry about something else ... once a guest worker is hired
they are tied to their employer.
Yanez says it is a reality his crew talks about a lot.
YANEZ: In a way, it might feel like slavery. When you have that
visa, you work for that particular company. You can't go work for
another company. So in that sense, you are enslaved. What happens is
that if you wanted to ask for, say, a raise, if the boss realizes
you're the one organizing it, the next year there's no visa for you,
you get cut off.
HINOJOSA: When you hear Americans saying that workers like you are taking jobs away from American citizens, what do you say?
YANEZ: I would simply liken to see them do that work, and I
don't see them doing it. That's why we Hispanics are here. Because of
that difficult work. They wouldn't do it, and much less for the pay one
gets.
RAMOS: We bring in single -- males, able bodied; we use 'em, and then we want 'em to go back home
HINOJOSA: Roman Ramos is a paralegal with the Texas Rio Grande
legal aide. Over the course of his career he has advocated for numerous
guest workers in their complaints of unfair treatment by us companies.
Ramos is part of a growing chorus of critics who believe the guest
worker program is good in theory but is often highly exploitative in
practice.
RAMOS: The guest worker comes into the country after going
through a great deal of expense. Once in the U.S., he's vulnerable he
can only work for one employer. You know, one employer. He has to put
up with whatever crap that employer wants to put on him. He has no
choice. I've seen workers get fired for asking for clean drinking water.
Ramos has documented these abuses. And for him, there is a personal
history as well. His parents were migrant workers and as a young man he
worked in farming too.
He says conditions now are often similar to those he witnessed as a boy.
RAMOS: Most of these jobs are in isolated areas the workers are sort of kept separate and apart from society.
RAMOS: Talk about dependency, talk about isolation. You know,
you depend on this person for your basic survival, food. And then
you've got to depend on him to take you into town to buy the damn food.
HINOJOSA: Just how bad can it get for guest workers? Meet Hugo Martin Recinos.
Six years ago Recinos says he worked as a farmer in Guatemala, earning
the equivalent of two U.S. dollars a day, while supporting his family.
He says a cousin told him about a recruiter in Guatemala who was
looking for workers to reforest private lands in the United States.
RECINOS: They told us it was to plant pine trees. But in
Guatemala, we didn't know anything about what it meant to plant pine
trees. I asked him how much it would cost to get the job, and he said
all the expenses would be $1600. I told him that would be fine, because
I needed to improve my family's situation.
HINOJOSA: Sixteen hundred dollars, a fortune in Recinos world,
but he was told it was the only way to get the job. Which is why he
says he agreed to the next demand, he claims the recruiter asked for
the deed to Recinos' family home as collateral.
RECINOS: We had to leave the deed with them so once we got to
the United States, no one would run off. No one would leave the
company. And if you left the company, and broke the contract, then
you'd lose your property, according to them.
HINOJOSA: Recinos came to the States and began working with a
company called Express Forestry. He was told he would receive an hourly
wage but once he began working, he says the company reneged and paid
him for piece work. He was paid for the number of trees he planted --
in the end he says he sometimes made less than minimum wage.
HINOJOSA: When you came to this country for the first time, what did you feel?
RECINOS: I was thinking about making money. Earn a little bit
and send it home. Do something to live a better situation later. When I
got here, everything changed. You didn't earn that much in that
company. It was hard to make money.
HINOJOSA: Recinos says Express Forestry deducted the cost of the
equipment from his paycheck and that he also had to pay for motel rooms
while on location. After taxes and with all of his expenses, he says he
sometimes made as little as $50 a day. Recinos also claims he typically
worked 60-70 hours a week, sometimes more and says he never received
any overtime compensation.
To save money he told us he shared a room with 4 or 5 other workers. He
says the few times he attempted to question how dire his situation had
become his job was threatened.
HINOJOSA: You understood that you were in this country legally. And yet you felt like you had no rights?
RECINOS: You have no idea, no experience in this country, no one
has told you what your rights are, no one told us how to live here in
the U.S. We lived from work to the hotel, and from the hotel to work.
Recinos slowly began to realize that his work conditions would not get
any better. And then at the end of his fourth season he says Express
Forestry stopped paying him all together. He alleges he confronted
management and got the run around. Eventually working with the Southern
Poverty Law Center, he filed a lawsuit against the company claiming
violations of minimum wage and overtime protections.
Recinos says he still has not received the deed to his family's land.
RECINOS: We made repeated attempts to contact Express Forestry to get their side of the story, but never heard back from the company.
HINOJOSA: There are many people in the business community who
say guest workers are a good idea. Don Mooers is an immigration
attorney who advises companies on how to get H2B workers. He says that
while he has heard about exploitation in the program -- it is hardly
the norm.
MOOERS: For workers they come, they're able to go back home with
usually a lot of money in their pockets. Many of them come back after
having bought a new house, having bought property, paid for the school
of their kids and family members.
HINOJOSA: How broad is the American economy's dependence on foreign guest workers?
MOOERS: For the country as a whole the GDP would barely register
a blip, if there was no H2B guest worker program. Specific communities
though around the country it would be devastating. From Alaska salmon
roe processors, the Eastern shore or Maryland are seafood processors,
landscape folks up the northern half of the U.S., so it's widespread
HINOJOSA: It appears that the needs of the business community
have been heard. On Thursday the Senate passed legislation that would
create a new and expanded guest worker program of 200,000. Ramos is
concerned congress is selling out to big business.
You would say what about a guest worker program? Is it a good thing to do? It's a right thing to do?
RAMOS: Well, it's -- it's -- it's the political thing to do.
Because it -- it's -- it fits politician's purposes. If you really want
to do something for folks, give them the freedom of choice, not to be
-- tied down to just one employer.
HINOJOSA: The Senate bill proposes a fix, it is called
portability. It allows workers to move between jobs within the guest
worker program. But the bill faces an uphill challenge in the House
before it becomes law. Ramos says if history is any indicator of how
guest workers will make out in the new program, it doesn't look good.
ROMAN: Foreign guest workers don't vote. U.S. employers vote.
And who's on their side? The U.S. government. The U.S. government is
not on the side of guest workers. Never will be.
BRANCACCIO: You can find out more about the guest worker program and proposed legislation on our website, PBS-dot-org.
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