Hundreds of thousands of workers enter the United States every year on temporary visas through the U.S. guestworker program. They work in critical industries, from landscaping to construction to education, in deeply exploitative conditions that frequently rise to the level of forced labor and involuntary servitude.
The National Guestworker Alliance (NGA) is a membership organization of guestworkers. Our members organize in labor camps across the United States to win collective dignity at work.
We are building national power to win fairness in the terms of migration. We also partner with local workersemployed and unemployedto strengthen U.S. social movements for racial and economic justice.
Plants in the Northeastern US that were once unionized now rely on temporary workers. These temporary workers, the NGA found, were not likely to come forward to report abuse even when facing severe labour exploitation. Retaliation against workers who do come forward has taken many forms, including threats of immigration enforcement, refusal to rehire workers in subsequent seasons, physical harm, loss of work hours and surveillance.
Seafood processing work is also heavily gender-segregated. On the Gulf Coast, men are paid hourly to perform boiling, loading and fishing work. Women earn piece-rate wages for peeling and picking work. These workers are seasonally employed. Women workers are routinely subjected to sex discrimination and sexual harassment. Across the board, migrant seafood industry workers are paid less than prevailing wages for the industry.
Seafood is now among the fastest growing and most traded food commodities in the world, representing about 10 percent of total agricultural exports and 1 percent of world merchandise traded in value terms. Today, 200 countries participate in the seafood GVC (FAO 2014). Within this highly globalized industry, working conditions and wages in developing countries have significant impact on wages and working conditions in developing and developed countries alike. US seafood processors, squeezed by international markets, seek to compete by employing a contingent workforce highly vulnerable to workplace abuse and exploitation. In Louisiana and Massachusetts, for instance, seafood processers rely heavily on various types of contingent workers, including through subcontracting, use of temporary staffing agencies, and other alternative employment arrangements. Migrant statusboth temporary guestworker status and undocumented statusadds an additional category of contingency for many workers. Status as a contingent workeras well as a migrant workercreates obstacles for workers when enforcing their workplace rights. This leads to an erosion of standards across the industry that impacts migrant and US-born workers.
Despite all these obstacles, seafood workers are lifting their voice and organizing. Their efforts reveal critical reforms necessary to ensure global value chains and contingent employment practices do not undermine decent work on seafood processing global value chains for workers in the US and around the world. This report by
the NGAa multi-sector membership-based US national organization dedicated to improving labor and migration conditions for contingent workersdocuments the impact of the seafood global value chains on the US national seafood value chain.