More than 300 young foreigners, packing candy in a warehouse in Pennsylvania, staged a high-profile walkout and protest against their employers and the State Department, which oversees the program. They alleged that they had been worked to exhaustion and had met few Americans except supervisors who pressed them to pack faster and threatened to have them deported.
“My parents agreed to send me because it would be a way to improve my English,” wrote Aysel Kiyaker, a student from Turkey who paid $3000 for her airfare and work visa. “They told us the job would be easy and fun and they would have pizza parties for us.”
Instead, Kiyaker found herself lifting heavy boxes on long shifts in the rural factory, owned by the Hershey Company. “After work my whole body was numb,” she wrote in an affidavit for the National Guestworker Alliance. She said one friend was threatened after she complained, and another was fired for not working fast enough. “After that happened, people were more afraid.”
...
But the bad publicity stunned and embarrassed the State Department. Officials there promised to investigate the alleged abuses and review the program, which brings more than 100,000 foreign students to the U.S. every summer. This week, department officials said they are planning a major overhaul to prevent such problems from recurring and reinforce the program’s diplomatic purpose.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-security/foreign-students-say-visa-program-abused/2011/10/26/gIQAbsUESM_story.html
The goal of the program, according to the State Department's site, is to foster "global understanding through educational and cultural exchange."
Instead, says a representative of the National Guestworker Alliance, students who wound up at the Hershey's plant were living in "economic captivity," forced to pay for mandatory company housing that left them with $40 to $140 a week for 40 hours of work.
"They were desperate and feeling isolated," the organization's communications director, Stephen Boykewich, said in an interview with The Times.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/2011/08/students-protest-at-hersheys-packing-plant.html
With all the millions of jobless in this country, why is the federal government and companies like HERSHEY importing slave wage visa workers?
These are clearly sweatshop factory conditions. "Work faster or you get deported." No cultural exchange as promised, no contact with Americans other than hard labor in the factory. Company housing, that they have to pay for, leaving them with $40 - $140 for 40 hours hard labor.
According to the above article, the Turkish girl had to PAY $3,000 in fees for the privilege of being a foreign visa sweatshop worker in the US. That's worse than indentured servitude -- at slave labor wages, she won't even make enough to recoup the "fees." They promise these kids "fun and pizza parties" but obviously it's all about companies like Hershey getting SLAVE WAGE LABOR for their US plants.
Happy Halloween. Enjoy your candy.. it was packed by a slave worker, either offshore or right in Pennsylvania by frickin' Hershey. Evil corps. The outrage never ends.. they just LOVE their cheap labor visa immigrants whether for the factory or IT, nurses, all fields -- why employee Americans, when employing foreigners who you can pay less than minimum wage and deport if they complain is so much more profitable.
