July 10, 2014 — If you’ve purchased shrimp, crawfish or crab in the last 15 years or so, odds are that it was shelled along the Gulf Coast by guestworkers living in conditions that will sound awfully familiar to anyone who’s read The Grapes of Wrath.
Last week, some of those workers traveled to Boston in search of new allies to bolster their request of major retailers like Walmart, Whole Foods and Target to pressure their seafood suppliers on fair employment practices.
“We live in trailers on the property the employer owns, and the trailers are in very bad conditions,” says Olivia Fernanda Guzman Garfias, who worked for Bayou Land Seafood until this year. “It is sometimes 12 women to a trailer and the [H-2B] visa we have has our employer’s name written on it. That means we can’t go out and find any other employment if we aren’t being treated well. It feels like we are slaves. The employer constantly threatens he will call immigration and have us deported, we’re always under threat, sometimes there is even sexual abuse that happens to women and they still stay because of these threats.”
Guzman had been returning (from her village in Mexico) to temporary employment in the Louisiana seafood processing industry for 17 years, most recently for Bayou Land Seafood. Five years ago, she got involved with the National Guestworker Alliance, a workers’ center based in New Orleans. Last year she traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet with lawmakers and other workers in the Walmart supply chain. (Most of her factory’s output is sold to the mega-store.) Then this year, when she tried to come back, her employer would not re-hire her. Guzman claims she has been blacklisted.
Read the full story at NextCity.org