IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT, GET THE **** OUT YOU NASTY TURD WORLD **** SKINS
Aasheesh Sharma & V Kau****k Kumar, Hindustan Times
Email Author
New Delhi, March 08, 2008
First Published: 15:12 IST(8/3/2008)
Last Updated: 18:51 IST(9/3/2008)
Over a hundred Indian workers at a ****pyard in a small American town on
the
Gulf of Mexico lodged a dramatic protest against inhuman living and
working
conditions on Thursday, singing “We Shall Overcome”, and tossing their
hard
hats in the air.
The workers, hired from India in 2006 to tide over a labour shortage in
the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that killed over 1,800 on the Gulf coast in
August 2005, said they were made to live “like pigs in a cage” in a
“work
camp” run by their employer, marine fabrication company Signal
International, in Pascagoula, Mississippi.
The workers said an earlier attempt at protest had been ruthlessly
muzzled,
prompting a worker to attempt suicide. The worker had been sacked and
police
had been called in to control the situation. The protesters said they had
been lured with promises of permanent US residency into a “human
trafficking
ring” run by Signal International.
Signal issued a statement denying the charges. But it said 500 workers
were
recruited from India two years ago, after Katrina. The company said it had
sponsored the workers for H2B visas.
Hindustan Times spoke to Sabulal Vijayan, the 40-year-old pipe-fitter who
had been fired for organising the workers on the previous occasion.
He accused Signal of reducing the workers’ already meagre pay by almost
a
third, and described the conditions in which the Indians stayed at the
“camp”.
“Initially, we were paid $18 an hour and it was later reduced to 13,”
Vijayan said.
“Twenty-four of us stayed in one cramped dormitory that included our
beds,
showers and water coolers. All of us had paid between Rs 6 lakh and Rs 10
lakh to a Mumbai-based recruiter to get to the US. We were all promised
green cards,” he added.
WLOX-TV, a local TV channel, which covered the protest widely, re****ted
that
many workers had taken huge loans to raise the amount, and now felt
trapped.
The channel quoted Saket Soni of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for
Racial
Justice, who served as an interpreter for the workers at a press
conference.
The channel quoted Vijayan as saying: “I slit my wrists to kill myself
(on
the earlier occasion). There was no other option for me. Signal was
retaliating against me.”
The workers were “trapped between an ocean of debt at home and constant
threats of de****tation from our bosses in Mississippi”, the channel
quoted
Vijayan as saying.
Soni, 30, told Hindustan Times: “We will now demand that the US
government
and the Department of Justice prosecute the company and recruiters for the
crime of human trafficking.” He added that Signal International was
currently recruiting again in India, but this could not be independently
verified.
Soni said: “We will explore our legal options. But we have already begun
a
campaign for prosecution of the company.”
Signal said it had spent over $7 million to construct state-of-the-art
housing complexes for the workers, and was paying them “greater wages
than
that they could earn in their home country”.
The company said facilities and labour practices had been inspected and
approved by both the US Department of Labour and the Federal Immigration
and
Customs Division.
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