Court rules in favor of guest workers.

AFTER NEARLY A YEAR OF COURT PROCEEDINGS, a United States District Judge based in New Orleans ruled recently that "nonagricultural" guest workers are entitled to the same rights as all U.S. workers under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act.

The case involved three men--Daniel Castellanos-Contreras, Oscar Ricardo Deheza-Ortega and Rodolfo Antonio Valdez-Baez--who had been recruited post-Katrina from Bolivia, Peru and the Dominican Republic to work in luxury New Orleans hotels. In August 2006, attorneys for the three men filed a lawsuit against the hotel chain employer, Decatur Hotels, and its president Patrick Quinn.

"I worked in Mr. Quinn's hotels for next to nothing because I had to earn enough money to make back what I paid to get here," said Castellanos-Contreras. "Even though I was so tired at the end of the day, I would go to the meetings at night to help bring this lawsuit because I knew that this was important not just for our group, but for all guest workers in the U.S."

The three men's cases were advocated by the group Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity, which has been organizing hundreds of guest workers in New Orleans and trying to negotiate with employers like Decatur for more than a year. The attorneys came from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the National Immigration Law Center and the Louisiana Justice Institute.

According to the lawsuit, the workers were promised high wages, 40-hour work weeks with overtime and good living conditions in exchange for housekeeping and maintenance jobs. Instead, the workers say they were given only part-time work at the same time that the unscrupulous labor recruiters hired by Decatur were charging them as much as $5,000 to get their H-2B visas. (More than 100,000 guest workers legally enter the U.S. each year to work for a sponsoring employer through the Department of Labor's "H-2" program.)

Decatur's failure to reimburse workers for the costs of the trip to New Orleans, including airfare, visa processing fees and other travel-related expenses during the first week of work, meant workers earned far less than minimum wage, amounting to a violation of the federal law, according to the lawsuit.

Lack of enforcement of the Fair Labor law enables employers to exploit migrant workers who have no avenues for becoming U.S. citizens, according to "Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States," a report released by the Southern Poverty Law Center,. The report calls the current U.S. guest worker program "a modern-day system of indentured servitude ... that treats foreign workers as commodities to be imported as needed without affording them adequate legal safeguards or the protections of the free market."

The legal precedent set by the ruling opens the door for thousands of guest workers to file lawsuits against employers who have relied on exploiting migrant workers for cheap labor. New Orleans activists say the lawsuit points to the tendency of many employers to minimize costs by seeking out immigrant labor rather than hiring the thousands of residents of New Orleans left jobless by Hurricane Katrina in the largely Black city.

"We want to ensure there are strong labor protections for all workers and that U.S. workers, especially African Americans, are not displaced by employers who simply want cheaper labor and to exploit us," said Castellanos-Contreras.