J-1 cultural exchange visas supplied indentured student labor to major US logistics firms

Evidence

That’s the pitch on the flashy CETUSA website recruiting young college students from around the globe to work shit jobs in the US, on J-1 visas ostensibly for cultural exchange. In this case, CETUSA [Council for Educational Travel in the U.S.] delivers the students to SHS Onsite Solutions, a temp agency furnishing workers to Exel North American Logistics Inc. The latter, a subsidiary of Deutsche Post DHL, manages all the labor and operations at the big Hershey warehouse, packing and distribution center. The students pay around 3,000 to get into the program, then earn around 8 an hour, from which exorbitant rent and other fees are docked till they get down to somewhere between 140 and 40 PER WEEK of intense factory labor. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 402

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Elizabeth Povinelli’s ‘Economies of Abandonment’ and the broader literature on guest-worker programs as labor arbitrage, plus the gig-economy scholarship on subcontracting as liability-shifting. — connects to: Contemporary migrant labor contracts structurally echo nineteenth-century indenture; Contemporary labor migration parallels nineteenth-century indentured labor in exploitation — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in…, 81
• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone studying labor arbitrage or modern indentured labor — the CETUSA/Exel/DHL chain showing a ‘cultural exchange’ visa yielding $40/week wages is a concrete instance of legalized labor exploitation.

Broader Connections

• Contemporary labor migration parallels nineteenth-century indentured labor in exploitation #corroborates (0.90) — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 81
• Contemporary migrant labor contracts structurally echo nineteenth-century indenture #corroborates (0.85)