Yes its slavery! This is exactly why they want to get rid of "illegals"....!

[Flabbergasted]

WORLD: Legalizing Human Trafficking



Current WTO negotiations threaten to worsen the already precarious lot of migrant workers around the globe.


For six months, Francisco* was a prisoner of his employers. He was housed in a trailer in rural central Florida with six other men from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. He would work from dawn until dusk picking oranges, earning an unbelievable $15 a week. He and his fellow workers were watched by armed guards and repeatedly threatened that they would be killed if they tried to run away.
In an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., Diana,* an elementary school teacher from Ghana, was working 100-hour weeks as domestic help in the home of a World Bank official. She worked for months without a day off, earning less than $100 a month. She was not allowed to leave the house and was subjected to regular verbal abuse. But she was lucky compared to the many domestic workers from abroad who are beaten or raped by their employers.

Across the country, Suresh* arrived from India on an H-1B visa to work as a computer programmer in California. His employer provided authorization for a one-year visa, but forced him to sign a six-year contract at a set salary with no raises. Pretty soon he was working an average of 70 hours a week. And when the time came to renew his visa, suddenly his employer piled on a lot more work. The message was clear: if you have any hope of staying on in the United States, be prepared to work 100-hour weeks.

These stories typify the abuse faced by immigrant workers in the United States and worldwide. The migrants come from Haiti, Mexico, Senegal, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and many other poor countries. They live and work, often without legal documents, mainly in wealthy venues such as the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, and the Persian Gulf, but in other less affluent countries as well. They usually work as laborers, maids, cooks, janitors, farmworkers, and in other low-wage occupations. Sometimes, however, they are employed in higher-wage occupations such as computer programming.

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13803

[Deja Q]

1. Given the lower cost of living in India, I betcha all the 'temporary workers' will go back.

And, no doubt, they'd treat Americans as badly if they actually allowed Americans to emigrate there...

And I wonder how many hours/week Indian programmers in India have to work.

I'm sorry he has to work 70 hours a week. But he signed the contract. It's vicious, but that's how the globalized corporate world works. None of us can have it both ways in the end.

My previous employer pulled the same shit on me and I was born here too. (poor wages, no benefits or leave time, excessive hours, frequent maltreatment by the boss - who claimed he was a liberal (bull shit...), sexual harassment at one point, and when I finally quit 3 years later he laid on the worst speech of them all. All I do know is that things got worse after I left. Seems I wasn't half the things he said after all... ) That's not to say it was all bad, but of all the jobs I had, that one was by far the most demeaning. And it was in a field I liked too.

Forgive me, but in a tangential but wholly relevant way, I've been there. I could either wallow in emotion or lump it and move on. Life is making dust or breathing the dust and while it hurts to cough it could be worse. (I could be married. :eyes: )

The whole universe point is, we're all meant to be equal. Slaves. May as well like what you are doing because they're all gonna piss on ya anyway.

[Flabbergasted]

3. So you believe you are a slave? That's really what you believe?

[struggle4progress]

4. Man, I miss working class solidarity: "an injury to one is an injury to all"

[Cleita]

2. Looks like our corporations gone amok are creating a new

slavery here. We really have to work on bringing back the power of the unions. It's the only way we will stop this Dicksenian world from arising again.