Saket Soni and the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice have beaten the drum in the more than four years since Hurricane Katrina about the abuses to south Asian guest workers pulled into the shipyards during the desperate labor supplies after the storm. Lawsuits against Signal International now coming to light reveal clearly the dark underbelly of the H-2B temporary guest worker program, and why it is so clearly not a solution to the immigration crises in our country.
Primarily Indian metalworkers paid brokers up to $20,000 USD, which is literally a king’s ransom in rupees, to undertake the work. They expected and put up with the terrible living conditions common in a labor camp in the shipyard, especially in the post-Katrina. What they also expected was that promises of a green card which would allow them to continue working in the USA would also be delivered, since that was so clearly the line that recruited them to the shipyards. Unfortunately, as any reader would know, that line was a total line.
Continue Reading Guest Worker Abuses
New Orleans I have taken some heat for recommending that homeowners who are underwater walk away from their mortgage obligations in the face of totally, and now admittedly, inept response to the foreclosure crisis by the Obama Administration all facilitated by the total greenwash of the banks by Treasury Secretary Geithner. It seems according to numbers crunched by Oliver Wyman consultants from credit bureau data reported in the New York Times that an estimated “17% of owners defaulting in 2008, or 588,000” voted with their feet to walk away from shrinking values and no relief. And, that’s 2008! Wait until we see the numbers for 2009 and the march to the street, and the running stampede as this problem hits its apex in 2010.
The Wyman calculations were based on credit bureau data and derived from the number that went from being “current on their mortgage to default, rather than making spotty payments.” Accurately this is a walk away profile, abandoning any pretense of looking for remediation based on inability to pay. These are homeowners that could and had been paying, but who looked at the bottom line, read the paper, and realized it was going to be decades before they got their money back.
Continue Reading 500,000+ Flee Mortgages in 2008
