Young Romanians Exploited in the West

More young Romanians left abroad through some educational or cultural exchange programmes have become cheap workforce for the occidental employers. Young people from the Eastern Europe frequently have to work in improper environments and are badly paid.

The American State Department forbids the usage of the educational and cultural exchange in order to draft cheap workforce from offshore. However, the American authorities have received more complaints concerning the irregularities of such programmes, says Brandenton Herald online, quoted by Mediafax. Last year, by granting several J-1 visas, more than 200,000 persons from the Eastern Europe reached the USA through a federal programme. The complaints of some J-1 owners show that they had to sell several products at the street corner in the Maryland state, to dig channels in Louisiana or to clean hotel rooms in Vermont.

INDIFFERENCE. According to the American legislation, the organizations that sponsorship the programmes, of the Cultural Exchange Network type, have to monitor the safety and prosperity of the foreigners that reach the USA. Bogdan V., 26 years old, left for the USA in order to improve in the management area and got to be a cook in a restaurant in Pennsylvania. He worked up to 50 hours per week without being paid for the extra hours. The restaurant’s owner denies the accusations, and the programme’s organizing agency denies any illegal facts.

SENT HOME. For Deszo Kiss, the marketing, financing and accountantship probation was really a job in a store five kilometers away from the hotel where he was housed in. Kiss has been fired after asking his boss for training in the area he had opted for when he had left Romania. The monitoring company CENET, which he informed about this, advised him to return home since he does not agree with the terms.

An American analyst form the Immigration Analysis station, Jessica Vaughan, says that the J-1 visas are only a cover. "It rather provides the access to an extremely cheap work market instead of encouraging a certain culture promotion type", stated the analyst.

TRAINING IN FRANCE. A similar situation, stated by the Ouest France online magazine, involves two young ladies: one Romanian and one Polish, left for France for a linguistic training. Gabriela B., 21 years old, and the Polish student Anna Kuzminska have signed in June a convention for a training session in Morbihan with the intellectual training organization Papillon and with a hotel chain. In exchange, the girls have worked for a hotel chain in the Auray region and got paid with a very small salary, 327 euros for a two months period. They have been housed in a little room in which, as they say, they killed six rats. I came here to improve my French and this is why I tried talking as much as I could with the clients. For that, my employer was always blaming me: "You came here to work, not to talk", stated the Polish student.
The young ladies got back in their countries through a French union representative.