The story of the foreign students in the United States on J-1 visas who walked off the job at a Hershey subcontractor to protest abuses has a lot of villains. There's the subcontractor, which required students working here on a cultural exchange program to work night shifts lifting heavy boxes, and the State Department, which failed to adequately oversee a rapidly growing program and prevent abuses. But the most actively vile party in this story is the Council for Educational Travel, USA (CETUSA), which was contracted by the State Department to handle the details of students' time in the U.S. and is now under investigation.
CETUSA began by placing students in a physically demanding, underpaid job at which they reported unsafe working conditions and verbal abuse. But that was just the beginning. It also took massive deductions from their paychecks, charging them far above the market rate for housing and leaving them with little to live on. The New York Times reports further on CETUSA's abuses. The organization lied to the State Department:
But according to State Department officials, Mr. Anaya told them shortly after the walkout that his organization had not received any complaints from Palmyra before the protest.
Mr. Torres, however, recalled a gathering in March when dozens of students assailed Cetusa representatives with their grievances.
And to maintain its ability to whitewash the State Department's view of what was going on:
When the agency learned that Mr. Ureche had complained to the State Department, it terminated his participation in the program, putting him in violation of his visa, according to correspondence between Alan J. Leahy, a lawyer for the organization, and a labor lawyer Mr. Ureche contacted, Laurence E. Norton.
The State Department is investigating, and one obvious first step in improving oversight to the J-1 program is to suspend contracts with CETUSA for the duration of the investigation. But that organization's abuses demand further action—according to the Times, CETUSA had placed 400 students this summer. The Hershey workers were being overcharged on rent by up to $250 per month; we don't know if that pattern holds for all of the students CETUSA sponsored, but if it does, it's possible that nearly $100,000 per month was being inappropriately deducted from student paychecks. That's something the State Department should be making someone answer for.
CETUSA chief executive Rick Anaya insists that the organization's behavior was totally reasonable and that students who objected to being charged $400 a month to share a one-bedroom apartment with several other people while doing back-breaking work were dupes of the evil unions and will one day regret objecting to their treatment. "It’s clear and obvious to me that this whole thing was started and fueled by the unions," according to Anaya. But if he'd ever been treated the way he treated these students, he might start to get that it doesn't take a union to fuel outrage.
