Photo: NPR
Every year, a number of people arrive in the United States with a J-1 visa, a permit to study, which leaves the student unable to work legally.
The visa allows a person on a cultural work exchange to come to the U.S. and study for a determinate amount of time.
However, some of these college students who have come here to study have instead found employment in places like McDonalds and other enterprises, who have highjacked the visa system in place for students to procure themselves low wage labor.
Some of these students are now protesting openly, and denouncing a McDonald's franchise in the city of Harrisburgh, Pennsylvania. The students told that once they arrived in the U.S., they were driven to a basement in a house owned by a McDonald franchise owner where another seven students were ammassed in a communal arrangement. Each of them was made to work and then docked 300 dollars a month in rent from his pay.
The conditions in the basement were considered squalid and unhygienic.
In addition, the work hours were uneven, even though they were promised a 40 hour workweek.
One of the students, Jorge Rios has organized a protest and filed a complaint with the U.S. Labor Department.
Be as it may that only the franchisee could be found solely responsible for this abuse in the end, what this has opened up is the secret that has remained untold for a long time about the abuse of foreign students by certain businesses who hire them as cheap labor to circumvent hiring locals and paying for benefits and taxes.
Many of the students who come here on the J-1 do so after a lenghty bureaucratic process that is not cheap. And when they come here they are forced into hard labor and placed in despicable housing.
The program has been curbed recently from 150,000 visas issued annually, to about 90,000 due to the abuses already reported. The program in fact was inaugurated to promote diplomacy between countries, but the program has in some cases been abused by unscrupulous merchants who see it as a cash cow for their labor needs.
The Labor department has stated that any business that has been authorized to receive students with J-1 visas and is found to have abused the program will be stripped of the authorization forever.
It is however, part of a current trend, where businesses are trying in every which way to obtain cheap labor, whether it be by hiring illegal aliens or anyone who they hire without accountability, only to abuse the laborer and his rights once hired. Labor rights have been eroded significantly since the 1960s, and the increasing deregulation of the past 20 years has placed the worker in a much more fragile position since then.
Source: NPR 3.18.13/ Department of Labor./ GPB Network 3.18.13
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