From: DowJones@andrew.cmu.edu
Newsgroups: soc.culture.mexican
Subject: Mexicans Hired For Nonfarm Work Describe Mistreatment
Date: 28 Dec 92 10:21:21 GMT
Article-I.D.: andrew.cfDq71C00Uj5M0pS1F
Organization: Doctoral student, Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA


  

  By Michael J. Ybarra  

  With five children and a job as a maid, Silvia Guadalupe Rubio had
trouble just keeping her family clothed and fed. The luxuries of life
seemed far out of reach in Juan Jose Rios, a dusty town of 5,000 in western
Mexico where cardboard homes and open sewers mock dreams of ever having
anything more.  

  Then she met Monica Del Croix and Carl Doerter. They had come down
from North Carolina looking for Mexicans to pick and pack crab meat for
10 times what they could earn at home, The Wall Street Journal reported.
 

  It was perfectly legal: A little-noticed U.S. program (called H2B,
after the authorizing section of U.S. immigration law) lets companies
import foreign workers for all sorts of nonagricultural jobs if they
can't find Americans to do the work.  

  The recruiters talked a sweet deal. They said there would be Spanish-languag-
e cable television, washers and dryers, air conditioning and nice apartments
shared by two people, the women would later say in a lawsuit. They say
they were told they could take home $250 a week. "That's it, I'm going,"
Rubio recalls thinking. "I'm going to get a phone, a washer, a TV set.
That was my hope and dream."  

  Four days after leaving Mexico, 23 women stepped off a bus in Maryland
and set to work cracking crab shells, cutting out the meat and putting
it in plastic containers. Their hands grew swollen and fatigued as they
worked for hours at a stretch, but Rubio would look down at them and
think: I'm going to get a phone.  

  Instead, she got $15 for that 49-hour week after her employer deducted
certain charges from her pay, according to records of the employer, a
Secretary, Md., firm called Philip J. Harrington & Son. A coworker, Gloria
Osuna, received $16.04 for the same hours, less than she had made peeling
shrimp in Mexico. The following weeks weren't much better. The company
concedes that the women hadn't given prior written authorization for
the deductions from their pay, as required by law.  

  The two-person apartments turned out to be two dilapidated houses next
to the crab plant. Rubio and 12 other women were crammed into the smaller
one, two to a bed. The rent for the two houses: a combined $2,400 a month.
Rubio and most of the other women say their boss, Philip J. "Jaime" Harrington
III, threatened them with deportation and told them not to leave the
grounds, locking their passports and papers in his office safe.  

  After three weeks, 15 of the women fled, winding up at a homeless shelter.
The U.S. Labor Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation began
separate probes. Now, Harrington and Doerter and Del Croix are defendants
in a lawsuit brought by Rubio and several other women in federal court
in Baltimore, alleging fraud, civil-rights violations and conspiracy
to falsely imprison. The case, tried in July, is awaiting a judge's ruling.
 

  Suits alleging mistreatment also have been filed against at least three
other seafood processors in Maryland and North Carolina, two of them
connected to Doerter. H2B workers in other regions, such as four stone
workers in Idaho, have complained about similar abuse. There's a pattern
to these cases. They involve laborers who speak little or no English,
are housed in isolated areas and say they were told not to venture out.
Their employers transport them to and from work, are their sole source
for food and goods and often deduct these expenses from their pay, depriving
the workers of much of the money they expected to earn.   
    3 21 PM