Labor Conditions for Immigrant Workers: Broken Promises
To many immigrants, the dream of coming to the United States to seek a better life quickly transforms into a nightmare of forced labor and unfair wages. Many Americans remain oblivious to these conditions, relying on the reassurances provided by American wage and hour laws. However, many immigrants cannot avail themselves of the protections provided by those laws because they may not be legally in the United States. Furthermore, even documented immigrants can have trouble finding jobs, due to language, educational, and cultural barriers. In those instances, they often work as contract laborers, and wage and hour laws no longer apply to them. Contract labor is not a new concept. In fact, "labor contractors were first used in Philadelphia in the 19th century when builders needed more workers and turned to some enterprising Italian-Americans who knew where to find newly arrived countrymen." (Greenhouse, December 2003). Garment manufacturers followed in the path of construction managers, giving rise to today's sweatshops. These contractors have used two tactics to stay in business; they can underbid competitors because they violate wage and hour laws, and they prey on particular immigrant populations, using their knowledge
Furthermore, discriminatory labor practices are not the exclusive province of big business. A surprising number of smaller businesses engage in labor practices aimed at cheating immigrant workers. For example, in 2001, four former workers at a Chinese restaurant began a protest of the exploitation of immigrant workers in the New York suburbs. (Hanley, 2001). These protesters were not garment workers or employed in traditional sweatshops. Instead, they worked in restaurants, and alleged that the owners and managers of the restaurants failed to pay them and forced them to return some of their tips. (Hanley, 2001). Such conditions were not unique to those four workers or to the restaurant industry. According to Jennifer Ching, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney, immigrants from Asia, Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Russia have encountered discriminatory and illegal labor practices in fields as varied as landscaping, construction, demolition, restaurants, and factories. (Hanley, 2001). Faced with an economy of plenty, which is built upon the backs of poor laborers, it is difficult to imagine how immigrant laborers can achieve financial equality with the rest of Americans. Traditional routes, such as unionization, may no longer be valid options. First, the threat of unionization is no longer intimidating to big business is that there is a constant influx of immigrant laborers who can replace those workers who threaten to strike. The divide between immigrants of different ethnic groups greatly decreases the likelihood that they will work together against business owners. How can these types of labor conditions, which frequently amount to indentured servitude, be permitted in
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Approximate Word count = 1160
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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