The most controversial part of the Senate’s now stalled sweeping immigration reform package is the proposed amnesty for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S. Overshadowed by amnesty’s storm, other immigration policy pieces have been relegated to the discursive and media-coverage sidelines. And so it went widely unnoticed that immigrant workers in New Orleans recently won a small, but significant victory in the fight against what some call a modern-day slavery system—temporary guest worker programs.

On May 15th, Eastern District of Louisiana court Judge Eldon Fallon ruled in the case of Castellanos-Contreras vs. Decatur Hotels in which 82 Bolivian, Peruvians and Dominicans brought to the U.S. on temporary non-professional, non-agricultural H-2B visas demanded to be afforded the same rights as those who entered on H-2A agricultural visas, such as migrant farm workers.

Fallon did just that, and then went further. “By its own terms, the [Fair Labor Standards Act] FLSA applies to all ‘employees,’ that is, to ‘any individual employed by an employer’,” he writes in the 12-page opinion. “If undocumented workers are entitled to the protections of the FLSA, the Court sees no rational reason to preclude documented H2B guestworkers from asserting their same rights under the Act.”

Oral arguments were heard in December 2006 in the case brought by workers who came to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to work in housekeeping and at the front desk in local magnate Quinn’s 15 luxury hotels throughout the city. Shouldered with enormous debt, workers arrived to find that working conditions, living arrangements and hours were nothing like what their contracts had promised. They organized and, with the help of the New Orleans Workers Center and the Immigrant Justice Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) launched the suit. (See this Time.com article for full story)

“This is a seminal decision,” says Rebecca Smith of the National Employment Law Project, a national advocacy organization for employment rights of lower-wage workers. “The workers in the case are now free to go back to court and argue for unpaid wages and damages.” Indeed, a follow-up suit demanding reimbursement for visa and travel fees (which at peak at $5,000 per person) is expected.

Decatur owner Quinn’s lawyers have expressed their dismay with the ruling and claim the case is part of a “political agenda” by immigrants’ rights lawyers to influence the current policy debate, according to New Orleans news reports.

They may be partially right. The suit is the latest blow to what President Bush and his allies hail as the cure-all for the nation’s immigration woes. Guest worker programs allow employers to bring in foreign workers for about a year, should there be no willing local labor force. Up to 100,000 workers annually enter the U.S. on H-2B visas —and are then required to leave. The workers must work only for the employer who contracted them; violators risk deportation.

Characterized by business as vital to the country’s employment structure, guest worker programs have come under fire recently as tales of abuse have come to the fore. In April, the Southern Poverty Law Center released its alarming report Close to Slavery. Citing consistent problems such as subcontracted recruitment agencies’ exorbitant fees, bondage-like regulations that bind employee to employer and the lack of protections afforded to workers, the group found the entire guest worker system to be “fundamentally flawed.”

In the political ring, businesses rely on the program instead of trying to attract local workers by raising wages or offering better benefits, claim immigrant rights advocates. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 only allows the Department of Labor (DOL) to grant H-2B permits “if it can be shown that the use of such foreign labor would not aversely affect the wages and working conditions of domestic workers similarly employed,” but experts find DOL enforcement lax at best.

Last week, the Senate granted guest worker programs continued life. Part of a backroom bipartisan bargain, the new legislation would allow entry for almost half a million new H-2B workers. The bill was tweaked to appease critics, permitting workers to move from one DOL approved employer to another and enacting a 5 year limit on the program rather than grant its indefinite extension. But these adjustments do little to console immigrant rights advocates.

“The fundamental problems remain,” says NELP’s Smith. “Virtually all alternatives or adjustments to guest worker programs being discussed in Congress still suffer from a lack a path to citizenship, lack of portability, lack of protection standards and lack of enforcement.”

It’s unclear what impact Fallon’s ruling will have on either policy or on workers’ experiences with home-country recruiters and U.S. businesses. Enforcing workers’ Fair Labor Standards Act rights falls on the DOL and many fear that H-2B experience will repeat H-2A history: virtual neglect on behalf of government officials.

Either way, the case will go down as a step forward for immigrant workers and their allies.

“This is a great victory for the Decatur workers and a great first step in fighting against the abuses of all the H2B employers,” stated Jacob, a member of the Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity Alliance (a guest worker-led organization dedicated to challenging the rampant abuse in the guest worker program and to fighting for the rights of all workers in post-Katrina New Orleans that grew out of the Decatur worker organizing) in a statement released by the group. “[This decision] will help all of us guestworkers being exploited and enslaved by these corporations.”

*Click here to download Judge Fallon’s ruling

*Click here to download SPLC’s Close to Slavery