‘Used as cheap labor’: luxury Aspen resort abused visa program, lawsuit says
A class-action lawsuit filed by a former employee at a five-star hotel resort in Aspen, Colorado, alleges they and other workers were recruited under the J-1 visa internship program but exploited to work low-wage, menial duties rather than receive the internship training required under the visa program.
Daniel Esteban Camas López, a culinary arts student from Mexico, came to Aspen in autumn 2020 under the J-1 visa internship program. He was transferred to the St Regis Aspen resort operated by Marriott International in May 2021 to complete his internship when the hotel he worked at initially had closed for renovations after the busy winter season.
He said he was initially excited to intern at the St Regis, a five-star luxury hotel resort where stays can cost over $2,000 a night and guests can receive butler service, but quickly found the promises and plan for his internship signed by himself and his employer were not going to be fulfilled.
Instead, he would be used as a source of cheap labor, where he would be overworked and paid less than workers he would be tasked with training. The lawsuit is aimed at highlighting abuse of the J-1 visa program when companies allegedly use it as a way of paying workers low wages.
Camas López paid his visa sponsor, Alliance Abroad Group LP, a total program fee of $3,900 and owed a financial penalty if they left the program early.
“It’s ironic because you’re paying for something and you’re just being used,” Camas López said. “There was no training program to be followed. I signed a training program, but in reality I was just there to cover for the need of domestic labor.”
He explained the hotel was chronically understaffed, with at least 10 vacant positions in the culinary department. The hotel eventually hired temporary workers during the internship who were paid more despite requiring training by interns and he noted several co-workers on J-1 visas in his own and different departments were treated in the same way.
“They didn’t have the experience we had. We went to school for this, and we worked previously in this area. What happened was we were training them instead of us getting a training program, and they were getting paid more for us to do more work,” he said.
Under the J-1 visa program, participants must pay for costs associated with their employment but are not permitted to use the program to displace domestic jobs or be used as a substitute for ordinary employment.
“The important thing of the outcome of this lawsuit is for the J-1 program to be respected and honored. It’s a professional exchange program that motivates foreign students and professionals to come to the US to go through a training program, to learn what it’s like to work in American companies and businesses,” added Camas López. “The sad part is that these companies in my case, we were taken advantage of. We were used as cheap labor.”
The lawsuit alleges Marriott International, which owns the St Regis, violated the Colorado Consumer Protection
Act through fraudulent internships and conducting human trafficking in doing so, and also alleges Marriott International and the visa sponsor were part of a racketeering enterprise in relation to visa fraud statutes, foreign labor contracting statutes, and trafficking statutes.
He was paid $14 an hour, receiving $21 an hour for overtime, but had $800 in monthly rent deducted for what the lawsuit calls a “dilapidated house” shared with other interns and had a bus pass deducted from his paycheck as well.
Camas López claims that after an initial onboarding orientation he worked 48 hours a week, six days a week, with overtime that wasn’t optional, and his work duties deviated from his internship plan signed by himself and the hotel.
Then a few weeks into the internship, he began working 72 hours a week, six days a week, often asked to work even longer on several occasions. Under the J-1 visa program, interns are supposed to work a minimum of 32 hours a week and a maximum of 40 hours a week to permit time and opportunity for cultural engagement, which Camas López said he never received nor was given any time to do.
His pleas to the executive chef to receive training as part of his internship were ignored, and so were any requests for time off or reduced workloads.
The lawsuit described that on an average day, Camas López would wake up around 8am, shower and eat a quick breakfast to get to the bus station to arrive to work by 11am and he wouldn’t return home until around midnight, working this schedule six days a week and using his one day off a week to rest.
“A lot of these mountain towns have purported labor shortages. But as opposed to paying workers more and treating them better which they appear to have the resources to do, instead they’ve sought to exploit a visa program,” said David Seligman, an attorney and executive director of Towards Justice, a non-profit worker advocacy law firm that is representing the workers in this lawsuit.
Seligman added: “In this case [it is] the J-1 visa … [they] bring easily exploitable workers into the United States and pay them low wages for difficult work with bad working conditions, knowing those workers in virtue of their visas are going to be trapped in their jobs and won’t easily be able to seek out other employment. So they get a captive exploitable foreign workforce.”
He said the lawsuit speaks to the inefficient oversight and regulation of the J-1 visa program that is designed to be a cultural exchange program, but is often misused as a work program.
“The problem is that, as we allege here in this case, and we’ve seen this in other cases, the J-1 visas are a complete sham,” he added. “It’s not about a cultural exchange, in this case, it’s not about preparing people to advance their careers in their home countries. It’s about low wage, exploitable work and that’s deeply concerning.”
The J-1 Visa program has previously faced scrutiny for being exploited by employers to obtain cheap, foreign labor.
A 2019 report by the International Recruitment Working Group found the most common occupations used under the program, such as hospitality workers, typically pay among the lowest wages in the labor market, affecting thousands of workers who work under these visas and workers in communities where they are employed because of the ripple effects on the labor market.
The AFL-CIO, the largest coalition of unions in the US, has noted that despite the US state department overseeing the visa program, it has very little oversight over working conditions, enabling abusive work and recruitment practices in the program.
In February 2023, the Salt Lake Tribune reported that seasonal 12 workers on J-1 visas in Park City, Utah, were being charged $1,000 a month in rent for a one-bedroom apartment all 12 of them shared together, and that similar cases are common in the city but very few workers have the courage or resources to speak up.
Marriott International declined to comment, citing pending litigation.