do not know their rights or
are unable to claim them,
native-born workers face a
miserable choice between
accepting degraded conditions or pricing themselves
out of the labor market. In
fields like office cleaning,
residential construction,
hospitality, food processing,
and other low-wage industries, native-born workers
suffer from increased injuries, longer hours and lower
pay.
There are laws on the
books that address these
violations. But the federal
government has steadily
withdrawn resources from
workplace inspections,
enforcement of minimum
wage and health and safety laws. Seeking to avoid
legal liability, reputable companies have hired subcontractors. However, several recent lawsuits have ruled
that subcontractor and client firms are “joint employers,” sharing responsibility for violations.
The U.S. does offer some short-term work visas.
Like many other developed nations, we set aside a
certain number of “guestworker” slots for low-skilled
migrants to take temporary agricultural and seasonal
jobs (in addition to visas for high-skilled workers such
as computer programmers). These programs serve no
one well. Agricultural employers decry the program’s
excessive bureaucracy. Companies looking to hire seasonal workers point to a supply of visas so inadequate
that the allotment for the second-half of fiscal year
2008 had been exhausted by January second.
Of greatest concern, though, is that these programs have been structured in a way that is devastating to the rights of the guestworkers and their U.S.
counterparts alike.
A migrant’s right to remain in the U.S. on an H- 2
visa, the category assigned to seasonal and farm
workers, is tied to a particular job and employer. If,
as so often happens, he or she is housed in a shed
or forced to work without
pay, the worker faces a terrible choice: complain to the
authorities, knowing full
well that he will lose his job
and be deported, while his
name appears on a blacklist
that will bar his return? Or
keep quiet, suffering out the
term of his visa under conditions that no human being
should bear, and hope to
draw a better straw the following year?
It should not be surprising that, as a recent report
by the Southern Poverty Law
Center concluded, guestworkers in the U.S. are “
systematically exploited and
abused.” In the words of
House Ways and Means
Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, quoted in the
report: “This guestworker program’s the closest thing
I’ve ever seen to slavery.” 3
increased
enforcement
has created
permanence
when labor
circularity
would have
likely become
the norm.
Circularity with Rights
Policies designed to promote circularity are not without problems.
Programs to ensure that migrants
will go home after they put in a few
years of menial labor may look like
circularity, but they represent a perversion of the principle of migrant
choice that should lie at its core. And any effort to
facilitate circularity that ignores its impact on native
workers will hurt the U.S. workers that migrants
compete with in the labor market.
So what’s the alternative? Is there any way to support circularity for those migrants who want it, under
terms that comport with human dignity and protect
the rights of native-born workers?
A Transnational Labor Citizenship visa, or “TLC
visa,” would address all of these concerns. Its core
idea is a simple one. Migrants would be granted a
