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Washington: Vijay Kumar was working as a contract welder in the United Arab Emirates two years ago, far from his wife and family in southern India, when he spotted an advertisement offering welders and pipe fitters "permanent lifetime settlement in the USA for self and family."
Kumar answered the ad to find that workers were being recruited to rebuild oil rigs in Mississippi and Texas destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. He returned to India, signed a contract and paid a recruiter $20,000 (Dh73,400) to travel to the United States. He told his wife, who had just given birth to a son, that he would send for them as soon as he could.
"I sell my house, my wife sells her jewels, we borrow money from friends. We dream of living in America together," Kumar, 34, said this week. He stood outside the US Department of Justice during a protest with several dozen other Indian workers, all of whom have been staging a hunger strike for weeks.
Temporary visas
When about 500 Indian recruits reached Mississippi in the fall of 2006, Kumar and the others said, they found that they had been deceived.
Their new employer, Signal International Corporation, had hired them as temporary "guest" workers with ten-month visas. There was no possibility of obtaining permanent residency for themselves, let alone their families back home. Signal denies that it knew the workers had been promised US residency.
With support from the Union, law firms and advocacy groups, more than 100 of the recruited Indians have filed a federal lawsuit in Louisiana against Signal and several recruiting agents, under a federal law that prohibits "human trafficking" by fraud or force for labour or services.
The group also asked for a Justice Department investigation and for permission to remain in the United States, even though they are no longer employed here, while their court case is pending. Some of the workers, who quit Signal in March and made their way to Washington, have staged an intermittent hunger strike outside the Embassy of India to draw attention to their case. Eighteen members of Congress have signed a letter to Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey on their behalf.
In addition to the hiring process, the workers complained about their treatment. They said they were squeezed into crowded bunk rooms with too few toilets, given bad food and little freedom to leave the work site and had to labour in hot and dirty conditions, cleaning and repairing the damaged oil rigs.
"None of the promises were kept," said Shivan Raghavan, 45, another Indian worker, who said he paid the recruiter an additional $4,500 (Dh16,515) to send later for his wife and two children. "We were cheated, and we want justice," he said.
- Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service
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