FROM: New Orleans
Workers’ Center for Racial Justice
803 Baronne St.,
New Orleans, LA 70113
CONTACT: Stephen Boykewich – (504) 655-0876
*** FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ***
100 Indian guest workers launch
eight-day ‘journey of justice’ through Deep South
Defy racism in walk from New
Orleans to DC after breaking human trafficking chain
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana – At 10 a.m. Tuesday, March 18, over
100 Indian guest workers who rocked the Indian political scene by breaking a
US-Indian human trafficking chain launched a risky eight-day journey, largely
on foot, from New Orleans to Washington, DC, to demand an end to abuses of the
H2B guest worker program.
The workers, members of the New Orleans-based Alliance of
Guestworkers for Dignity, will defy racism as they literally walk in the
footsteps of US civil rights leaders to demand a mass meeting in DC with Indian
Ambassador Ronen Sen, whom they excoriated in a letter late Monday for abandoning
them.
“Our own government has turned its back on us after we were
treated like slaves,” said Sabulal Vijayan, one of over 500 Indian workers who were
bound as forced labor to Gulf Coast marine construction company Signal
International, as the group began their journey
with a rally at the Department of Labor building in New Orleans. The
workers paid $20,000 to Indian and US recruiters for false promises of
work-based permanent residency in the US, and instead the workers received
ten-month H2B guest worker visas and worked at Signal in deplorable conditions.
“This guest worker program held me captive in the United
States while my father died in India without me by his side. I don’t want
compensation for my loss—I want justice for the migrant workers who come after
me,” said former Signal worker Paul Konar.
The workers will meet with their growing network of
supporters and allies as they travel through key sites of the US civil rights
struggle, including Jackson, Mississippi; Selma, Alabama; Atlanta, Georgia; and
Greensboro, North Carolina. Their
experiences will be detailed in a text and photo blog at www.neworleansworkerjustice.org.
They will arrive in DC on March 26 as Congress prepares for a session in which
a massive expansion of the guest worker program is at the top of the agenda.
The workers received widespread national coverage in the US
and raised a firestorm in the Indian media when they walked out on Mar. 6 from Signal
and demanded federal prosecution of the company and its US and Indian
recruiters. The Department of Justice has since opened an official
investigation into the workers’ charges of human trafficking, and the workers
have filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the traffickers.
The group sent a list of demands to Ambassador Sen late
Monday in a letter that blasted him for failing to respond to their request for
a meeting for seven days. The demands they said they would discuss with him in
DC on March 26 included pressure on the US Department of State to restrict
travel to India for Signal’s US recruiters, as well as pressure on the
US government to halt any expansion of the guest worker program until both governments
have adopted an agreement that reflects the interests of workers, as well as
companies and recruiters.
“What happened to these workers wasn’t the exception—it was
the rule,” said Tracie Washington, an attorney from the Louisiana Justice
Project and a member of the workers’ legal team. “While hundreds of thousands
of African-American workers were locked out of the reconstruction of the Gulf
Coast, the guest worker program has locked workers like these in.”
“These
workers want the same thing Americans want: a just immigration system that does not bind the US economy to
exploitable foreign workers while displacing poor and working-class American
workers,” said Saket Soni, director of the New
Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice. “It’s time for Congress to wake up
to the fact that the guest worker program is a path to an American nightmare.”
US CONTACT: Stephen Boykewich, Media Director, NOWCRJ
+1-504-655-0876, spboykewich@gmail.com
INDIA CONTACT: Anannya Bhattacharjee
+91-9810970627, anannya48@gmail.com
www.neworleansworkerjustice.org