Trafficked Filipino Teachers Win $4.5 Million Lawsuit Over LA-based Recruitment Company
Excerpt: A U.S. appeals court Monday, December 1 upheld a jury’s $4.5 million award to a class of roughly 350 Filipino teachers who accused recruitment companies of demanding they pay massive processing and placement fees or face losing their jobs in Louisiana. A class of 347 Filipino teachers, who came to the United States to work on H-1B guest worker visas, said recruitment agencies and their agents misled them and collected millions of dollars in fees, according to Courthouse News Service. They reportedly paid up to $16,000 each to work in public schools in Louisiana. News story from Inquirer.net.
Mairi Nunag-Tanedo is one of hundreds of teachers recruited from the Philippines to teach in Louisiana public schools. SPLC PHOTO. Image credit: Inquirer.net.
A U.S. appeals court Monday, December 1 upheld a jury’s $4.5 million award to a class of roughly 350 Filipino teachers who accused recruitment companies of demanding they pay massive processing and placement fees or face losing their jobs in Louisiana.
Affirming a California federal judge’s amended judgment following the jury verdict, the the Ninth Circuit decided that Los Angeles-based Universal Placement International Inc. and its principal, Lourdes “Lulu” Navarro, had to pay back the fees collected from the teachers, along with about $1.3 million in attorneys’ fees.
A group of 347 Filipino teachers, who came to the United States to work on H-1B guest worker visas, said recruitment agencies and their agents misled them and collected millions of dollars in fees, according to Courthouse News Service. They reportedly paid up to $16,000 each to work in public schools in Louisiana.
The teachers incurred debts and the recruiters tried to silence them with threats of legal action and deportation, the teachers’ lawsuit claimed.
Louisiana school districts chose Los Angeles-based Universal International Placement, its president Lourdes “Lulu” Navarro and Quezon City-based PARS International Placement Agency, to recruit the teachers.
The school districts hired Navarro even though she was a convicted swindler who served time for defrauding the California Medi-Cal system of more than $1 million. She also pleaded guilty to money laundering in New Jersey, according to the August 5, 2010 complaint.
Tricked and Indebted on Land, Abused or Abandoned at Sea unveils abuse of Filipino seafarers
When Eril Andrade left this small village, he was healthy and hoping to earn enough on a fishing boat on the high seas to replace his mother’s leaky roof.
Seven months later, his body was sent home in a wooden coffin: jet black from having been kept in a fish freezer aboard a ship for more than a month, missing an eye and his pancreas, and covered in cuts and bruises, which an autopsy report later concluded had been inflicted before death.
Story from Ian Urbina, New York Times.
Men on Kalaw Avenue in Manila advertised seafaring jobs in September.
Photo credit: Hannah Reyes for The New York Times.
By Ian Urbina, New York Times
When Eril Andrade left this small village, he was healthy and hoping to earn enough on a fishing boat on the high seas to replace his mother’s leaky roof.
Seven months later, his body was sent home in a wooden coffin: jet black from having been kept in a fish freezer aboard a ship for more than a month, missing an eye and his pancreas, and covered in cuts and bruises, which an autopsy report later concluded had been inflicted before death.
“Sick and resting,” said a note taped to his body. Handwritten in Chinese by the ship’s captain, it stated only that Mr. Andrade, 31, had fallen ill in his sleep.
Mr. Andrade, who died in February 2011, and nearly a dozen other men in his village had been recruited by an illegal “manning agency,” tricked with false promises of double the actual wages and then sent to an apartment in Singapore, where they were locked up for weeks, according to interviews and affidavits taken by local prosecutors. While they waited to be deployed to Taiwanese tuna ships, several said, a gatekeeper demanded sex from them for assignments at sea.
Once aboard, the men endured 20-hour workdays and brutal beatings, only to return home unpaid and deeply in debt from thousands of dollars in upfront costs, prosecutors say.
Thousands of maritime employment agencies around the world provide a vital service, supplying crew members for ships, from small trawlers to giant container carriers, and handling everything from paychecks to plane tickets. While many companies operate responsibly, over all the industry, which has drawn little attention, is poorly regulated. The few rules on the books do not even apply to fishing ships, where the worst abuses tend to happen, and enforcement is lax.
Illegal agencies operate with even greater impunity, sending men to ships notorious for poor safety and labor records; instructing them to travel on tourist or transit visas, which exempt them from the protections of many labor and anti-trafficking laws; and disavowing them if they are denied pay, injured, killed, abandoned or arrested at sea.
“It’s lies and cheating on land, then beatings and death at sea, then shame and debt when these men get home,” said Shelley Thio, a board member of Transient Workers Count Too, a migrant workers’ advocacy group in Singapore. “And the manning agencies are what make it all possible.”
Read the full story here.
Story from Ian Urbina, New York Times.