The new underclass: expanding an abusive U.S. guest-worker program is great business--and borderline slavery.

When was the last time you paid to work? Latin Americans seem to be doing just that under the current U.S. guest-worker program. Some are even paying with their lives.

Eighty-two workers from Peru, Bolivia and the Dominican Republic have filed a class-action lawsuit against Decatur Hotels in New Orleans, a luxury hotel operator. The employees say hotel recruiters promised them 40-hour weeks and plenty of overtime. Instead, they claim, they received only 25 hours or less and quickly fell into debt since they couldn't pay back hefty recruiting fees of between US$4,000 and $5,000. It's the kind of employment seam more often associated with the poorest of developing world economies, and usually seen among rings of sex workers or field hands, not carpenters at luxury hotels.

Even more startling, Mexican workers in the United States are four times more likely to die on the job than the average U.S.-born worker in industries such as tobacco, beef, construction and forestry, according to an Associated Press investigation done in 2004. Mexican workers were not adequately trained, often lacked safety equipment and were afraid to complain for fear of deportation, the AP found.

For years, unscrupulous U.S. companies, in sectors including hotels, construction, forestry and landscaping, have been exploiting guest workers recruited to do seasonal work on H-2B non-immigrant visas. The program permits 66,000 foreigners annually--mostly Mexicans and Guatemalans--to enter the United States to perform jobs for a maximum of one year when no qualified or willing U.S. citizens or legal residents are available. They plant trees in the Southwest, herd sheep in Idaho, pick onions in Georgia and cut sugarcane in Arkansas.

Some companies, however, clearly view the program as a way to cut costs by bringing on laborers who not only come cheap but also rarely complain. These bosses are well aware that H-2B workers fear deportation, are ineligible for federally funded legal aid, and that private attorneys are reluctant to represent them in class-action lawsuits. "It's a system by which guest workers are exploited and their only legal choice is to go home," Mary Bauer, director of the immigrant justice project at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, told me. "In industries such as forestry, exploitation is systematic."

The Southern Poverty Law Center and a few other private non-profits are the only groups willing to represent guest workers over violations of minimum wage, unpaid wages, the requirement of property deeds as a condition of employment and illegal fees charged for tools, visas and travel expenses.

In the past two years, Bauer has filed five lawsuits against U.S. companies, including Decatur Hotels, Express Forestry, an Arkansas reforestation company, Del Monte Fresh Produce in Georgia and Eller and Sons Tree, also of Georgia. In the latter case, the suit argues that Eller and Sons recruited thousands of Latin Americans, paying them less than the minimum wage and denying them overtime pay, among other violations.

How could companies get away with such monkey business? For one, the U.S. Department of Labor claims it has no authority over enforcing contract violations, Bauer says. The feds just look the other way. Employers, too, are well aware that H-2B workers are barred from working for anybody else and can be deported if they complain or quit.

The White House wants to expand exactly this kind of broken guest-worker program, arguing that it would reduce illegal immigration. Doing so would be a huge mistake unless alleged abuses are investigated and addressed.

Congress must order the Department of Labor to enforce H2-B contracts, levying huge fines against companies that hire dishonest recruiters and cheat workers out of pay. (Right now, it's $10,000 per violation--if reported.) It should also introduce criminal charges for employers who create unsafe working conditions that lead to fatal accidents.

Congress also must allow guest workers to seek federally funded legal services and be allowed to switch jobs if need be. Otherwise, the "deportation card" that abusive employers use so effectively remains a powerful incentive for workers to put up with nearly anything.

If the Bush administration believes a guest worker program is the answer to illegal immigration, it should first clean up the mess that is the current system. Without beefed-up legal safeguards, one of the world's freest societies will just be broadening a system just a few steps shy of slavery, one that rewards corporate mistreatment and punishes the poor for the crime of simply trying to work.

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