Take C.J.’s Seafood, which provided seafood sold at Wal-Mart subsidiary Sam’s Club. Last month, some C.J.’s workers in Louisiana – non-union temporary guest workers from Mexico – went on strike. They charged the company with violating wage laws and locking them inside the plant. The National Guestworker Alliance helped workers organize and bring a complaint to the Workers Rights Consortium, a labor-monitoring organization. The WRC found that employees worked up to 24 consecutive hours, were paid less than 60 percent of minimum wage and lived in vermin-infested trailers on company property. One worker told the WRC, “It was forced work. They would come to the trailers and make us go back to work … We were screamed at and had to go to work. I felt like a slave.” According to the WRC, workers’ complaints to management were met with threats of deportation or violence.
Josh Eidelson 