Last month, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that the Decatur Hotel chain owed not one penny to 300 immigrant workers from Peru, Bolivia and the Dominican Republic who each paid contractors  $3,000 to $5,000 for the “privilege” of coming to the New Orleans to be super-exploited. In one more sign of growing fascism in the legal system, the Court OK’d these slave labor conditions on the grounds that the workers couldn’t prove that Decatur “required” or “approved” of these payments.

These workers were recruited to come to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina destroyed large parts of the city in August 2005. New Orleans’ hotel bosses like Decatur saw a big chance to lower the already rock-bottom wages of the mostly black hotel workforce there. Conniving with other local bosses, recruiters promised the workers 60-80 hours work per week, time-and-a-half for overtime, free food and rooms in hotels with swimming pools.

The recruiters lied through their teeth! The hotel bosses jammed four workers into each room, charging $50 per week per worker, plus $8 per meal. The workers only got 24-40 hours per week at $6.39 per hour. Of course, as “guest workers,” termination or leaving the job could result in immediate deportation. And their every move was under the watchful eye of the hotel bosses.

Despite this racist and fascist set-up, these workers organized against their slave-like working conditions. Unfortunately, the leadership of this struggle fell into the hands of opportunists, including Saket Soni, now head of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice. Soni and his fake-leftist friends convinced the workers that they should mainly rely on the bosses’ courts to win this battle. He and others viciously attacked PLP members when we tried to expose the workers to a real communist view of how to fight these bosses’ attacks with class struggle.

Immigration laws, like all bosses’ laws, are designed to insure that U.S. employers reap maximum profits from the labor of the working class. The liberal Southern Poverty Law Center exposed this collaboration of the government with the bosses in its report “Close to Slavery.” In order to legally hire guest workers, it was necessary to show that attempts to hire local residents failed. U.S. citizen workers would most likely have told Decatur where to stick their $6.39 per hour. However, Decatur’s obviously false statement that they had tried to recruit workers from among “hurricane evacuees” was accepted by the U.S. Department of Labor, no questions asked.

This gave Decatur the green light to go ahead with its plans. They let the contractors handle the dirty work. This separation allowed them to claim that they “didn’t know anything” about the recruiters’ extortion. This gave the courts all they needed to legalize this workers’ slavery.  

Communists will never promote confidence in this bosses’ system of “justice.” Instead, we call for class warfare against the whole capitalist system and its attacks on workers. We encourage anti-racism and internationalism to win citizen workers to support the struggles of their immigrant brothers and sisters. Most importantly, we organize for a communist revolution. In a communist world, the bosses’ national borders would be abolished, and none of our working-class brothers and sisters would endure slave-labor conditions in order to survive.