The H-2 guest worker program, which brought in 150,000 legal
foreign workers last year, isn’t supposed to deprive any American of a
job. But many businesses go to extraordinary lengths to deny jobs to
U.S. workers so they can hire foreigners instead.
“All you black American people, f--- you all…just go to the office and pick up your check,” the supervisor at Hamilton Growers told workers during a mass layoff in June 2009.
The
following season, according to a lawsuit filed by the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission, about 80 workers, many of them black, were
simply told: “All you Americans are fired.”Year after year, Hamilton Growers, which has supplied squash, cucumbers, and other produce to Wal-Mart and the Green Giant brand, hired scores of Americans, only to cast off many of them within weeks, according to the U.S. government. And time after time, the grower filled the jobs with foreign guest workers instead.
Although Hamilton Growers eventually agreed to pay half a million dollars to settle the suit, company officials said the allegations are baseless. Mass firings never happened, they said, nor did anyone use racially inflammatory language. But workers tell a different story.
“We want to go to work and work all day,” said Derrick Green, 32, a father of six who said he was fired by Hamilton Growers in 2012 after only three weeks picking squash. “But they don’t want that.”
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicagarrison/all-you-americans-are-fired#.caYZZwzX6a
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