The Best American Magazine Writing 2016

by Sid Holt

  After Kadakkarappally and others began asking for better working and housing conditions, security guards raided his trailer early one morning and managers told him he was fired.

  “I almost lost my breath,” Kadakkarappally testified. He pleaded with managers, he said, recounting his huge debts and telling them “that I would not be able to support my family.” A fellow worker slit his wrist in a failed suicide attempt.

  Kadakkarappally and four other welders eventually sued Signal, and in February a federal jury in New Orleans awarded them $14 million. This month, the Southern Poverty Law Center announced that Signal had agreed to a $20 million settlement that resolves those claims and those of 200 additional Indian welders in 11 related lawsuits. Signal, which filed for bankruptcy to carry out the settlement, also agreed to apologize to its guest workers. Signal did not respond to requests for comment.

  Such a victory is extremely rare. Very few H-2 workers have the resources or support to file a lawsuit. Many workers become prisoners of their debt. The best way to pay it off is with a job in the United States—and the only job H-2 workers can legally get is the one with the company that sponsors their visas.

  “In so many cases, these workers end up being abused,” said Jennifer Gordon, a law professor at Fordham University and a former MacArthur Fellow who has conducted research into the discrimination against and mistreatment of immigrant workers. “In routine ways, all the time, the workers pay fees, they are threatened, their families are threatened. And the employer knows that if you get workers through that program, they’re not going to complain.”

  • • •

  That stark power imbalance can be downright dangerous, contributing to on-the-job injuries and even deaths.

  Leonardo Espinabarro Telles entered the country on an H-2 visa in April 2011, to work for Crystal Rock Amusements as it moved from Pennsylvania to Vermont and back, staging that most American of pastimes: county fairs. The Mexico native had been on the job about three months, living in a crowded converted horse trailer without a working bathroom, when the crew of seventeen guest workers arrived in northern Vermont for the Lamoille County Field Days.

  A little before three in the afternoon on Tuesday, July 19, Espinabarro went to retrieve electrical connectors from a trailer housing the hulking Caterpillar generator that powered the carnival rides.

  Inside, two feet separated the trailer wall from the generator’s massive spinning fan blades. The protective guard over the blades had either broken or been removed. At ankle level, pulleys and fan belts were also exposed.

  Espinabarro was alone, so no one witnessed what happened, but coworkers heard cries for help. One man rushed to the trailer to see Espinabarro standing upright, then watched him collapse and fall out of the trailer. His clothing had gotten tangled in the machinery, and the fan blades had ripped through his body. From neck to waist, his back was carved open, his organs spilling out. He was dead by the time he reached the hospital.

  Inspectors from the Vermont Occupational Safety and Health Administration found that Crystal Rock management knew the fan blades were unguarded at the time of the accident but had not told the workers. No one had posted proper warning signs. Nor had they delivered safety training in any language.

  Vermont OSHA levied $114,550 in fines. The case is still open, because Crystal Rock has not paid.

  Asked whether he had ever trained his guest workers how to be safe around heavy equipment, Crystal Rock’s owner, Arthur Gillette, told an inspector: “How can you train these guys?” adding, “Do you train someone to eat a hot dog?”

  Gillette, whose company has been certified for at least 358 visas since 2002, added that Mexican workers were “mechanically inclined and would figure things out” and that if the investigator had ever been to the country she would understand that. He explained: “The streets of Mexico, cars were stolen and disassembled with just the frames left on the street.”

  The Labor Department conducted its own investigation following the accident, finding that Gillette routinely underpaid workers and owed more than $60,000 in back wages. This month, the Maine state fire marshal criminally charged Gillette with falsifying physical evidence after an accident on a roller coaster injured three children at a carnival in Waterville in June.

  Gillette, reached by phone, said the criminal charges in Maine were “unjust” and denied tampering with evidence.

  He said both the Labor Department and Vermont OSHA investigations of Crystal Rock, which is now out of business, were unfair. “I’ve worked dozens of carnivals and dealt with hundreds of foreign employees,” he added. “The vast majority of the guys that worked for me said I am more than fair. That I owe them nothing. That we are square.”

  Guest workers in other industries have died after being run over in grisly accidents, or collapsing for unknown reasons. They’ve had limbs amputated and suffered other catastrophic injuries.

  On-the-job injuries happen to all kinds of employees, of course, but employers’ virtually unchecked sway over H-2 workers—as well as some employers’ attitudes about foreigners—can foster a cavalier attitude toward workplace dangers. It can also keep workers from pointing out safety violations or even reporting injuries.

  In a 2012 report from the Labor Occupational Health Program at the University of California, Berkeley, researchers surveyed 150 forestry workers in Oregon, about a third of them on H-2 visas, and found that more than 40 percent had been injured on the job in the previous twelve months. Fifteen of the workers had suffered broken bones, and another eighteen had dislocated one or more bones. And yet workers kept quiet about many of their injuries—including more than a quarter of the broken bones and nearly half of the dislocated ones.

  The report concluded: “They were afraid they would be fired, and they were afraid of otherwise getting in trouble.”

  • • •

  Topolobampo occupies a peninsula at the mouth of a bay off the Sea of Cortez in violence-ravaged Sinaloa, the home state of the infamous drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. The sparkling sea along the malecón belies a deep listlessness, more stifling than the tropical heat, that has settled over the town. The seafood plant along the waterfront closed down years ago. Mangy dogs range along barely maintained streets, while a few tiny restaurants with cement floors have almost nothing on the menu. Decent jobs—outside of the drug trade—are hard to find.

  As much as a third of the population of 6,500 travels to the swamps and prairies of Louisiana every year to catch and process seafood, according to local recruiters. Those who make the trek are colloquially known as “Louisianeros.” The rewards of their work are easy to see: solidly built houses, clean tile floors, modern appliances, and framed degrees from private schools. Less visible are the costs: children who grow up in someone else’s family because their own parents are working “on the other side.”

  Fernanda Padilla was just three when her mother, Guadalupe, started coming to Louisiana for ten months a year to process shellfish. “I couldn’t understand,” said Padilla. “I used to tell her, ‘I don’t care. I’ll eat rice and beans every day, but be here with me.’”

  But at seventeen, Padilla dropped out of school and decided to follow in her mother’s footsteps to make money. She secured an H-2 visa and arrived at her new job at Bayou Shrimp in April 2009. She was pregnant, but her pay stubs show she worked more than sixty hours some weeks. Forty days after her daughter was born, Padilla was back at work at the plant, leaving her baby with a friend.

  Padilla, who has since had a second child, worked in the Louisiana shrimp industry for five seasons before losing her job last year. She said she used to worry that, like her own mother, she was abandoning her children in order to provide for them.

  “Five years working there seemed like no time had passed at all, and my daughter had already grown up and I didn’t even realize it,” Padilla said, adding that she is now cobbling together a living with odd jobs.

  North of the border, H-2 visas are als
o important to the economy.

  Louisiana is the nation’s second-largest seafood-producing state, and its crawfish industry used to rely on local labor. But competition from cheap Asian imports, along with the demand by huge retailers such as Wal-Mart for ever lower prices, have squeezed profit margins and put downward pressure on wages—below the point, producers say, where people in America will take the jobs on a seasonal basis. In the 1990s, processors including Craig West hoped that machines could be built to take over the repetitive task of extracting the tail meat from the crustaceans. But eventually crawfish farmers discovered that the best and cheapest option is a Mexican on an H-2 visa.

  The visa comes in two types: H-2A for agricultural workers and H-2B for nonagricultural unskilled workers, with varying rules and provisions. While many workers say that regulators don’t do enough to protect them, their employers generally have the opposite complaint. They say they are burdened by endless bureaucratic hurdles and inspectors who ding them for tiny infractions of incomprehensible rules.

  Ben LeGrange, the general manager of Atchafalaya Crawfish Processing, in Henderson, Louisiana, said most crawfish processors treat their workers well, and “isolated incidents” shouldn’t taint the whole industry. He said he tries to treat guest workers “as an extension of someone in my family” and that without them the whole company, which also employs six American workers, would be in jeopardy.

  • • •

  Standing on his expansive lawn beside a riding mower, West, who co-owns the crawfish producer L.T. West with his brother, said he treats his workers well. “My wife got holy water for them,” he said, adding that when they were not working he and his wife, Cathy, drove workers to Walmart or church, and sometimes invited them to relax in the shade of a tree that protects his house from the sun.

  But seven of his workers, including Valdez and Gonzalez, claim West took a different kind of interest in some of them.

  Some of their allegations include that he took to bursting into their trailer unexpectedly, even when they were dressing, and called them his “property” and his “Mexican ladies,” according to their complaint. Some of the women recall him saying things such as “mucho booby” and “mexicanas mucho booby,” gesturing for them to lift up their shirts. He instructed one of his other workers to tell the women in Spanish that the only way they could get out of poverty was to accept his propositions, which included requests that they come to his house when his wife was away. In the suit, the women did not allege he actually had sex with them.

  West, with his wife looking on, flatly denied the allegations, saying the women had made them up.

  Cut off from their families, often unable to speak English, and beholden to their employers, women with H-2 visas are among the most vulnerable workers in America. Advocates and law enforcement officials say they have logged numerous reports of guest workers being coerced into having sex with their employers or being sexually harassed. Over and over, that abuse involves the threat of deportation—and the loss of desperately needed income.

  Under such threats, workers describe attempts to control deeply private aspects of their lives, even their religious identity. When they worked at Harvest Time Seafood in Abbeville, Louisiana, Manuela Ruiz and her sister Yadira said workers were compelled to attend an evangelical church with their boss, Kevin Dartez, and his wife. Those who didn’t—even those who said they were Roman Catholic—were threatened with fewer hours, the sisters claimed in interviews. Employees were also ordered to keep their heads down while working, they said, and were forbidden to make eye contact with anyone of the opposite gender.

  “We couldn’t talk to any men because we were told it’s disrespectful to their religion,” said Manuela, who worked at Harvest Time from 2007 to 2009 and is now back home in Sinaloa, Mexico. “A lot of workers got baptized in their church to ensure they got a visa for the following year,” she added. “It’s ugly to work like that.”

  They said they never complained to outside authorities about being coerced to change their faith or about their bosses confiscating their passports or even about the seeping lesions that formed on their arms and legs that they attributed to chemicals in the crab bath. What finally convinced the sisters to seek outside help was Harvest Time cutting back on the one thing that made the pain and humiliation bearable: their wages. Dartez instructed his foremen to squeeze crabmeat after it had been pulled from shells, Ruiz said, making the juice run out and the meat weigh less. For workers paid by the pound, this meant less money. Particularly galling, she said, was that when the crab was canned, the juice was poured back in.

  A Labor Department investigation opened in 2011 found that Harvest Time owed workers more than $52,000 in back wages for 167 violations of worker-protection laws.

  Dartez said he invited workers to his church but didn’t coerce them to follow his religious practice. “We weren’t choosing family or church or nothing,” he said in an interview. He did not confiscate passports, he said, though “the problem with giving them their passports, they can skip out anytime they want.”

  As for crab squeezing, he said it was the only way to stop his workers from adding water to bloat their pay: “They didn’t tell you that they patted their hand in the water bowl and dropped the water on the meat, did they?”

  In an attempt to help workers who fall victim to abuses, U.S. consular officials hand out pamphlets to guest workers following their visa interviews. Among other information, that literature includes toll-free phone numbers they can call for help.

  Belinda Flores Shinshillas, an employee of the Mexican Consulate in New Orleans whose job was to protect Mexicans in the United States, was on duty when a distress call came in from a worker at L.T. West.

  Flores and a colleague made the four-hour drive to the compound that very day. Recalling her first glimpse of the trailer where Valdez, Gonzalez, and other women stayed, she shook her head. “They didn’t have means to buy food. They didn’t have water to drink,” she said. “Based on the standards of today, those girls were slaves.”

  The women, Flores recalled, began to sob. “They didn’t believe someone was there to help them,” she said.

  The Mexican government called a team of lawyers from Chicago, who came to Mamou and met with the women, taking statements and gathering evidence late at night to avoid detection. About a week later, the Mexican consul removed four women from L.T. West, including Valdez and Gonzalez, in another late-night operation. (Gonzalez couldn’t be reached for comment.) Others escaped separately and called a humantrafficking hotline. The women together filed suit against L.T. West and the Mamou Police Department in federal district court in Lafayette.

  Mexico has repeatedly appealed to the United States to do more to protect guest workers.

  In 2003, 2005, and again in 2011, advocates petitioned the Mexican government to intervene on workers’ behalf under the North American Free Trade Agreement. Mexico’s Secretariat of Labor and Social Welfare forwarded the complaints to the U.S. Department of Labor but received little or no response. Mexico resubmitted the complaints in 2012, making clear that it considers mistreatment of H-2 workers to be a grave human rights abuse. “The 13th Amendment of the Constitution prohibits all forms of slavery or involuntary servitude, regardless of nationality, and therefore it protects H-2A and H-2B workers,” the Mexican government wrote.

  It is the job of the U.S. government, the report continued, “to make sure workers are not intimidated, threatened or held against their will.”

  In response, the Labor Department said, it has taken steps to educate employers of their responsibilities and workers of their rights. Late in 2014 and early this year, it held a series of outreach events for guest workers in fifteen states. At some of those events, a spokeswoman said, officials learned of sixteen cases that may merit further investigation.

  • • •

  If a United States citizen were threatened on the job by a supervisor holding a gun or cornered by her boss while she was getting
dressed, she might well go to the police. But H-2 visa holders rarely choose that option.

  “These are people that work ten to fourteen hours a day,” said Doug Molloy, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Florida who now works as a criminal defense attorney in Fort Myers, Florida. “People that wouldn’t know how to even call the police for help.”

  But another factor may also be at work: the close relationship that their employers have with local authorities.

  Even before Star One Staffing, a Miami labor-staffing company, brought Filipino workers to the United States to clean hotel rooms, its owners informed those workers that the company had tight connections with politicians and police.

  The company squeezed numerous unpermitted fees from its workers, at times reducing their net pay to less than one dollar per hour, employees alleged. They also feared being deported, especially because the company was connected to “powerful people” such as Florida criminal judge Andrew Hague, who is married to the company’s president and who met the workers in the Philippines. In addition, workers said a police officer frequently visited the house where they slept, and they were brought to meet to a staffer for a U.S. congressman. Reached by phone, Judge Hague said he could not comment on the matter, and his wife, Mary Jane Hague, did not respond to requests seeking comment.

  If workers ever tried to complain or leave, Star One managers “would have our visas revoked or deport us and we could never work in the U.S. again,” Robert Bautista, who shared a house with forty other workers, said in a sworn declaration. “They were very powerful people and we all knew this.”

  In Mamou, West told his workers he was friends with local police and made a point of inviting an officer into the trailer where they lived, according to the lawsuit.

  When the Manuel brothers picked up Valdez and Gonzalez for their date, West called 911. “I asked [Sgt. McGee] why he brought the girls” to the station, Officer Brent Zackery said in a sworn deposition, “and he told me that Mr. West wanted him to scare them because they shouldn’t go out late like they did.”