[Media Note: Vanderbilt has a 24/7 broadcast facility for TV interviews and a radio ISDN line. A recording of this event will be posted here and on www.youtube.com/vanderbilt.]
An attorney for the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, Jennifer Rosenbaum, will give a talk on the harsh realities of guest workers in the United States, entitled “Bonded Labor for a New Millennium: Guest Workers and Indentured Servitude in Post-Katrina American Politics.” The event will be held on Oct. 20 at 4:30 p.m. at Vanderbilt Law School’s Hyatt Room. The event is free and open to the public.
After Hurricane Katrina, American businesses brought thousands of international workers to the Gulf Coast on temporary guest worker visas to fill what employers claimed was a labor shortage caused by the displacement of local populations.
Promised fair wages, housing, and, in some cases, permanent U.S. residency, these workers sold all they had and often took on crushing debt in order to pay recruiting fees. They arrived in the U.S. to face unfair and unsafe working conditions, denial of earned wages, confiscated passports, forced residence in inhumane labor camps and the threat of deportation if they left their jobs or reported the conditions they endured.
Despite their collective disadvantage, these workers came together across industry and nationality to form the Alliance of Guest workers for Dignity. The group has successfully mounted challenges against the exploitation of guest workers by employers and Congressional expansion of the guest worker program.
Rosenbaum will discuss her work with the Alliance, including representing a group of more than 100 men trafficked from Mumbai, India to Pascagoula, Miss. to work in shipyards on the false promise of permanent U.S. residency. In protest of the working conditions they faced in the U.S. and to raise awareness of other guest worker program abuses, these men recently marched from New Orleans to Washington, D.C., where they held an almost month-long hunger strike, bringing national attention to their cause. Rosenbaum will also consider the experience of the post-Katrina Gulf Coast and what its lessons suggest for the next phase of the national immigration debate.
The event is sponsored by Vanderbilt Law School’s Social Justice Program which promotes a wide variety of activities aimed at exploring the role of law in creating, perpetuating and eradicating hierarchies of power and privilege in our society.
Media Contact: Amy Wolf, (615) 322-NEWS
amy.wolf@vanderbilt.edu