Foreign students hired for summer jobs in US subjected to abuses, says study
Foreign students who come to the US seeking a summer “cultural exchange” are subjected to wage theft by employers, retaliation, physical threats and human trafficking, a new report has revealed.
The allegations are made in Shining a Light on Summer Work,a damning survey by the International Labor Recruitment Working Group, a coalition of 30 US-based labor rights organizations.
The report focuses on recipients of the Summer Work Travel visa (SWT), the largest in the J-1 visa category, which offers foreign college students summer jobs in the US.
In 2018, nearly 105,000 J-1 SWT workers were hired in the US. More than half worked in the leisure and hospitality sector, including accommodation, food services, amusement, gambling and recreation for wellknown brands such as McDonald’s, Disney and Food Lion.
The top five states receiving such workers are New York, California, Massachusetts, Florida and Wisconsin.
But between 2015 and 2017 about 67 visa holders sought help from an anti-trafficking hotline managed by the Washington DC-based not-for-profit Polaris, and labor advocates believe this is just the tip of the iceberg. “The stories are not anomalies. They are systemic,” said Meredith Stewart, an attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Over the years, foreign summer workers have filed several lawsuits alleging mistreatment or trafficking.
In a landmark case earlier this year, a class action lawsuit involving 100,000 au pairs from around the world reached a $65.5m settlement with their recruiters, who had allegedly fixed wages illegally to depress their earnings.
In 2018, hospitality workers from Jamaica and other countries filed a federal lawsuit alleging that from 2008 to 2013, their employers left them in debt after charging them elevated recruitment fees, paying them less than promised and charging them high fees for substandard accommodation. According to the complaint, they were threatened with financial or physical harm if they left their jobs.
Labor advocates argue that the J-1 visa program offers even less protection than other temporary visa programs such as the H-2A and H-2B guest worker visas for agricultural and nonagricultural work.
“The state department has no mandate or expertise on labor standards,” said Daniel Costa at the Economic Policy Institute. They outsource this to sponsor organizations for whom this is a business and who “have an incentive not to report”.
Carole Vigne, an attorney at Legal Aid at Work, said that the lack of government oversight, the age of participants as well as potential cultural and language barriers conspire to “increase the vulnerability” of members of the Summer Work Travel program.
According to the report, the average age for J-1 SWT in 2015 was 21 and 55% were women. The top five countries of origin for SWT workers are Ireland, Bulgaria China, Romania and Ukraine.
A common complaint among labor advocates and workers is the elevated fees paid to recruitment agencies or sponsors. Oliver Benzon, a J-1 worker from the Dominican Republic, had to take out loans of up to $3,000 to pay for his own recruitment fees and transportation to Ocean City, Maryland, where he was supposed to work as a chef. But on arrival he was paid less than he was initially promised and was assigned construction work on the restaurant.
“We were treated like dirt because our supervisors knew we couldn’t complain,” he said.
The state department was contacted for this article but did not comment.