• Continued presence in the U.S without the threat of deportation
• The right to participate in a criminal trafficking investigation into their former employer, Northrop Grumman subcontractor Signal International, and the US and Indian recruiters who cheated them.
• Congressional hearings into abuses of the guest worker visa program in the US Gulf Coast
• Concrete action from the Indian government to protect future Indian workers.

After Hurricane Katrina forced many African-American workers to flee their flooded communities on the Gulf Coast, and politicians failed in their elementary responsibilities to help their communities recover, corporations based in the area found the Federal Government acutely responsive to their needs to replace their scattered workers. One tool was the US government guest worker program known as H2B.

Signal International operates two shipyards in Pascagoula, MS and four in Port Arthur and Orange, TX. Signal makes the huge floating oil rigs for the offshore fields in the Gulf. Claiming that it could no longer recruit enough skilled craftsmen in Mississippi, in 2006 the company used the labor recruiting firm Global Resources to recruit Indian workers to fill first-class welder and fitter positions. By the end of 2006 there were over 300 skilled Indian workers at the Pascagoula shipyard, and the company had extended the H2B program to its Texas shipyards.

The Department of Homeland Security, so inept in relief and recovery efforts in New Orleans, found the resources to provide background checks on the Indian applicants, each of whom paid recruiters from Global Resources between $15,000 and $20,000 for the privilege of working for Signal International in America. The recruiters promised them permanent jobs, green cards, and eventually the right to bring their families to America. To raise the money the Indian workers borrowed large sums and often sold their homes. But when they got to America, they found out that all they were guaranteed was a temporary ten-month visa. The housing Signal provided them in Pascagoula consisted of a bunk-house, for which $1050 a month was deducted from their paychecks. According to a worker, that entitled him to three meals, and a bunk-bed in a room with 24 workers and two toilets.

Human Trafficking

So far this is an all-too-familiar story of the exploitation and victimization of migrant workers, not very different from the fate of tens of millions of victims of a version of 21st century slavery that tarnishes work from China through the Gulf Emirates, from the Ivory Coast through Europe to the Americas. A world where global capital is freed from restraints on its mobility while workers are processed through ever more stringent bureaucratic channels and fenced off by ever higher border walls is rife for the crudest forms of worker exploitation.

The Victims Organize

But the story of the Indian workers in Mississippi has not ended. Strangers in a strange land, for the most part speaking no English, they chose to play a role not that of the poster child for victimization, but of the human being fighting for dignity.

In May 2007, six of the Indian workers, including Sabulal Vijayan and Joseph Jacob, were held captive by armed guards in the shipyard and later fired for organizing against their mistreatment. The other three hundred Indian workers briefly went on strike in support of the six organizers, but were intimidated back to work. Holders of H2B visas are not permitted to seek other jobs, and are liable for immediate deportation back to India if they lose their jobs at Signal, which would be disastrous because of the debts the workers had incurred to pay the recruiters.

Fighting against despair (one attempted suicide), the fired workers made contact with the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance (MIRA), a coalition of labor and civil rights groups that had championed the rights of Latino immigrant workers before and after Katrina. Lacking the linguistic skills for communicating with the Hindi-, Tamil- and Malayam- speaking Indian workers, MIRA called in Hindi-speaking organizer Saket Soni from the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice. The workers began to organize under the aegis of the New Orleans-based Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity.

Heirs to Gandhi and Martin Luther King March Together

On March 6, 2008, nearly a hundred Indian workers walked off the job in Pascalousa, sang “We Shall Overcome” in their native languages, and tossed off their hard hats as a symbol of their renouncing “human trafficking.” For this historical moment, the heirs of Gandhi began marching with those of Martin Luther King. A few days later, they began an eight-day journey through key sites of the civil rights struggle (Jackson, Selma, Atlanta, Greensboro) to Washington, DC, to demonstrate against the abuses and threatened expansion of the H2B guest worker program. Everywhere they carried the signs DIGNITY and I AM A MAN.

Speaking on their behalf, Saket Soni said: “It’s time for Congress to wake up to the fact that the guest worker program is a path to an American nightmare.” The workers demanded that the US and Indian governments negotiate an agreement on guest workers that reflects the interests of workers rather than merely that of recruiters and corporations.

A dozen Indian workers and their leaders together with Saket Soni attended the Jobs with Justice National Conference. Their inspirational story was a centerpiece of a major conference thread on organizing immigrant workers, and on the link between forced migration and corporate globalization. Far beyond any mere abstractions or ideological linkages, the Indian workers and their supporters embodied a powerful relationship with historical roots in non-violent struggle across borders.

We cannot know the outcome of this particular struggle, which faces overwhelming odds. The struggle of these workers is not about compensation for themselves as individuals. They have already lost everything material, though the value they have achived by standing up for their dignity as human beings is beyond calculation. They hope that it will benefit future “guest workers” from India and elsewhere. But maybe even more it will help some Americans “get over” their problem with seeing migrant workers as enemies of American workers.