Excellent! We’ll sign you up then. The program is a Cultural Exchange designed to give you a job at a German tourist park.1 You’ll likely be working a few hours a day talking to tourists. 2 Then you’ll have lots of time to explore all of Europe! 3 Of course, we’ll need to take a small program fee,4 and room and board costs,5 but you’ll have money left over!6
However, we don’t intend to follow the intent of the program. We’re just trying to save money
But really we have you slated to work in a boot factory in Plinsk on double shifts. Cultural Exchange? ha! You’ll meet a co-worker named Karl who will assume you are available. Hope you enjoy that.
All of Europe you can see between 1:00 am and 6:00 am that is. That’s your time off.
Gosh, jtgain, you’re right! I’m spending next summer in scenic Magnitogorsk, whiling away the lazy summer afternoons after my shifts at the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works.
The difference is, people in this country don’t have to pay $2000 for the immense privilege of working in a factory or warehouse. Then again, maybe that’s next.
Nor do these people. They are free not to participate in the program. And if you can’t afford a plane ticket back home when you don’t like it, then maybe it was a bad choice for you.
If I could pay someone $2000 and have a factory job paying $8.35 and hour I’d do it right now, and I’m not even kidding. That’s how bad the job market is in my area.
Except it doesn’t work like that. As another poster already pointed out, they just set their own salaries and do whatever the hell they want. It’s all funny money at the top.
Why in the world would the fact that they are foreign have anything to do with their human rights?
What we are claiming is that they have the right not to be swindled, not the ridiculous strawman you made up (and certain people are not seeing through.) No one has a right to a high paying job. They do have a right not to be the victims of a criminal enterprise. They have a right not to be treated like cattle because they are not American.
Yeah, I spent the summer I was 20 working at a Summer Camp in NH; if it hadn’t been for the Big Bonus Checks (one for going in “early”, one for actual good work), it would have been a financial loss… but it still would have been 11 weeks in the US for the price of a return bus ticket between San Sebastián and London.
We got paid a lot less than Americans doing the same job would have, but… 11 weeks in the US for the price of a bus ticket? Are you kidding me? It was SO worth it! I learned a lot of things about the US’s cultural background (and, in my case and because there were 12 other people from my same organization in that camp, from their countries as well) which I would never have been able to learn in a classroom.
Getting mistreated, having your passport pulled, being given a job that’s not what your contract says, and definitely the sex trafficing extreme, those are not acceptable. But the kids referenced in the OP need to go back to Arithmetic 101.
It’s a rite of passage for Irish college kids to go on the J-1. They typically end up working at resorts in New England or California or wherever and drinking and carousing. They work hard, and play hard. I don’t think many (any?) of them come back with money saved from their adventures.
A lot of the counselors from my daughter’s camp are from overseas. They don’t have a penny by the time they are done (camp counseling does NOT pay well regardless of where you are from, at least not Girl Scout camps - and they days are long and hard). These young women come in and then end up without a car an hour and a half from anything of size in Minnesota or Wisconsin. But many of them return year after year - so there is something it it for them.
My daughter has started the camp counselor training progression for Girl Scouts (she is eleven). She won’t pay for college as a camp counselor, but its a better summer job in terms of growth than living at home and working at the mall. And, on the plus side, there isn’t anywhere to spend money when you are stuck in Zimmerman, Minnesota for the summer.
For hard, low paying college jobs, my sister worked for the Forestry Department one summer fighting forest fires. Paid by the day, less than minimum wage by the time your hours are in, and if there is a fire, you’ll work twelve or fifteen hour days. If there is no fire, you sit in a camp somewhere in Colorado or Utah or California, play cards, and the government feeds you. The year she did it, there were a LOT of fires, she didn’t get any better at cards.
Untrue – the people making the decision are also CEOs who want to point to their own Boards of Directors that they should be making as much as he does. It has nothing to do with the free market – it’s basically price fixing.
I’m all for living on beans and not worrying about a high standard of living when you’re a student. But really, your examples aren’t properly comparable to the situation the striking students are talking about.
Camp Counsellor: is by its nature a real cultural exchange program. The whole point of
it is to spend time interacting with kids in the host culture, right? That is, if you come from O/S. If you’re doing it within your own country, well there’s less cultural value but you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars getting there so you do have some hope of taking some of your pay away at the end of it all.
Fighing forest fires: I’m guessing you don’t do for the cultural value. Forest fire fighting over here is largely done by volunteers, purely as a community service, so I’m guessing that for your sister there was some mixture of community service vs the need to make at least some money over the summer. But in any case, if you don’t like it, you can probably go home again fairly straightforwardly.
These students are claiming that they were not actually told accurately about their working conditions and renumeration prospects before they got there. And a lot of things in the linked articles make that highly plausible to me.
Firstly, they aren’t employed by the same organisation that recruited them. There’s at least two layers - the “Council for Education Travel”, Excel, possibly local organizations in the originating countries, and maybe you count Hersheys as well. That’s a lot of opportunity for creative enhancement of reality, at the recruiting end.
Secondly, nobody from the recruiter/employer end is actually coming forward to deny that they were misled. Hershey says “don’t blame us, they work for Excel”. Excel says “don’t blame us, we didn’t recruit them”. The recruiters say “ummm…we’re talking o them.” Nobody’s putting their hand on their heart to say all the conditions were properly laid out to all the students beforehand.
Thirdly, you’d have to be a complete loon to take the deal as described in the article. From the times article:
By my calculations, at $8.45 an hour for two months they can earn around $2,500. You can’t just get a ticket and a visa from china for less than $3,500 and just avoid the hard labour?
Also:
That’s bloody shady right there, especially as they probably don’t get any choice about where they stay and how much rent they’re paying.
Sure. You’d have to be bloody stupid. And short term summer rents are frequently more expensive than long term leases.
The world economy in a nutshell seems to be that stupid people don’t know how to look out for their financial best interest - and yet everyone is greedy. Some of those stupid people worked for big banks repackaging bad loans and ended up out of work when their divisions collapsed, and some of them take work exchanges that won’t pay for themselves. Frankly, I’m a little more outraged over the first than the second. The whole situation makes it impossibly easy for greedy people to take advantage of greedy stupid people.
Once again, there isn’t anything in a J-1 Visa that will keep you from changing your plane ticket and leaving tomorrow.
Forest fire fighting isn’t done by volunteers. Its a job through the National Forestry Service. A hard, dangerous, low paying job that suckers in hundreds of college students every year. Getting home is not anymore straightforward from a base camp where the roads are closed due to fire - and you don’t have access to cars other than the forestry service vehicles anyway - than changing your plane ticket. Its a worthwhile job, but it isn’t a volunteer easy to walk away from job.
I don’t really have a problem with the financial side of this, at least in terms of whether the students get to leave with extra money in their pocket. Most of the “cultural exchange” summer type jobs are not advertised as big money-making jobs. People who think they’re going to get rich off a program like this are kidding themselves.
But the type of job that generally comes to mind when you think of these programs is NOT working a graveyard shift in a factory, and if the students were misled about the type of work they were going to be doing, and the type of hours they were going to be working, then i think that sucks, and that they should have some recourse, and the people who misled them should be forbidden from using the program again.
I’ll have to look for the cite but IIRC students were claiming this was an overall money loser for them (all costs to them considered..travel and so on).
Sounds like the old company town model from the early 1900’s. You earned a wage but magically found yourself in debt to the company so were stuck.
"The CETUSA J-1 Visa Trainee and Internship Programs provide international participants with opportunities for professional development through employment in an American workplace. Interns and trainees gain professional experience and insight into American know-how in the field of their education along with a greater understanding of American society, life and culture. "
From the NYT article, you’ve got 2nd and 3rd year medical students, paying $3000 to get “American know-how in the field of their education”…and you think they’re unreasonable to complain that the actual job they’re presented with is packing chocolate into boxes?
Nope, I think they’re well within rights. I did plenty of bumming around jobs when I was younger to fund my travels, and had no complaints - but then no-one was trying to charge me for the privilege of packing boxes, under the pretense it was professional development. I hope Hershey get enough embarrassment from this that they are forced to cough up for a proper exchange program, rather than this cheap labour sham.
A lot of the counselors from my daughter’s camp are from overseas. They don’t have a penny by the time they are done (camp counseling does NOT pay well regardless of where you are from, at least not Girl Scout camps - and they days are long and hard). These young women come in and then end up without a car an hour and a half from anything of size in Minnesota or Wisconsin. But many of them return year after year - so there is something it it for them./QUOTE]Well, you know, camp is enjoyable; in fact, kids pay for experience.
When kids are paying for the chance to work a factory night-shift, your argument is going to hold a little more water.
(Seriously, why are you so bitter that you’re happy to see people lied to and screwed over? Or is your uncle a high-level manager for Hershey or something?)
