Slavery Lives in the US

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.21.07]

When you’re in a restaurant, ever wonder what’s going on in the kitchen? Here’s one possibility:

In a restaurant somewhere in New Orleans, black women were working in the kitchen being paid $10/hour.

They were all fired and replaced by undocumented workers who were paid $8 an hour.
Later, they were all fired and replaced by Brazilian H-2b visa holders at $6/hr. Those workers had paid $10,000 to get the necessary papers to come to the United States.

–Saket Soni, spokesman for the Alliance of Guest Workers for Dignity on Democracy Now March 15.

The vast influx of illegal immigrants, which the Bush plan to allow “guest” workers will only exacerbate, drives wages down and steals jobs from American citizens so that businesses can stay “competitive”(?)

Does that mean keeping the price of a dish of bacon & eggs as low as the next restaurant that is hiring illegals or other “guest/slave” labor? Who knows what the term competitive means in this context.

So what would happen if employers had to hire the workforce what was available and pay them a fair rate? And what would happen if those workers on the lower rungs of the work ladder were not under the constant threat of being replaced by the latest desperate Latin who just got out of the coyote van?
Would your bacon & egg dish go from $6 to $8? or $10? It’s just not right to take advantage of people this way. Bush’s plan would make for rampant exploitation of immigrants while simultaneously driving down wages and curtailing opportunity for the present workforce.

Foreign citizens who come to the United States as guest workers are routinely cheated out of wages, forced to live in squalid conditions, and denied medical care for workplace injuries, a report released Monday by a civil rights group found.

The report — “Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States” — comes as Congress is poised to debate a major bill that would create a large temporary worker program and offer a path to citizenship to millions of illegal immigrants.

- Cox News Service, March 13.