Slave Labor in the US of A

Now this is a topic that should normally have been outdated ever since we abolished that very ugly thing: slavery! But it is well alive here in the good ole US of A (not that it would not also exist elsewhere, true, but I live here, so I am concerned here).

The new form, or should I say, one of its new forms, thrives on first generation immigrants. I am certain it touches more than one sector of activity and more than one ethnic group, but my immediate experience is in the group of construction and road work: sewer lines and water laterals etc... In my city, many Albanians and Bosnians, Serbs and people from other neighboring states around there, work in this line of hard labor. The company owners are mostly equally of the same original countries. They use the newcomers as cheap labor, making them work 70 hours a week in many cases, and paying them whenever they feel like it. Some of them who are my friends, have been working at that rate for 2 months or 3, and not seen a single paycheck in that time. The bosses excuse? Oh, I get my contracts from the city, they take time to pay me, so I can't pay you. You must wait... In the meantime, you can see these same bosses moving into huge mansions of million dollar value, in the best suburbs....
These workers do not benefit from any form of social advantages: no health insurance, no sick days, no 401K, nothing, zippo, absolutely nada! And not only that, even if they get injured on the job, their employer does not "allow" them to collect from workman's comp! How they manage that is beyond me, but they do! I can only imagine that this works because the worker does not know his rights, and the company does not inform them or do their legally required duty.
I also know of one case where a young man worked for a sewer contractor of that veine, and when he broke his finger during a hard job, and had to go to the hospital, the boss refused to pay the bill. The young man took a lawyer and sued the employer, and he won: The boss had to foot the bill. Three months later, as our young hero came out of his house and walked down the street, he got shot in the back. He survived, but he will be paralyzed for the rest of his long life. The shooter was never arrested! This is the kind of intimidation the slave bosses (I should call them the Albanian/Bosnian Mafia) practice in order to keep other men's mouth shut. When you have a family, 2 little kids, and your English is not good yet, what choices do you have?
Many of them work for these bosses on city contracts. The city requires that the workers be paid 34.00 bucks/hour. That sounds like a lot, but believe me, once you've seen how hard the work in this line is, you'd agree they deserve it! Well, the boss only gives then 12.00 and keeps the difference. One case of this kind of fraud was actually discovered here, and the FBI investigated. I don't know if anything has come from it yet, or will ever...
Oh, there is another nice way of defrauding your slave immigrant labor: make them work for 70 hours a week and only pay them for 40... that way, you can pay them the required 34.00 per hour, right!?!

Last week, one of these immigrant workers who has not seen a paycheck in three months, got so frustrated with his situation after his boss once more told him he did not know when he'd pay him, he drove the bosses pick-up truck down interstate I 17o and just parked it by the side of the road, called his wife to pick him up from there, and left the truck to be picked up by the bossman himself. He just had enough to be exploited! Needless to say, he won't get another job in that community for some time.....Let's hope we won't find him in a landfill in the coming year! I wish him courage and good luck!