They said, however, they were told to return to Vietnam recently because their visas had expired and extensions had been denied. They had been granted H-2B visas that allow foreign workers to stay for up to 10 months.

One of the workers, Luu Hong Thang, said he wanted to keep working in the US to pay off the loan on his parents’ home in Vietnam, which he used to pay the labor brokering fees to work abroad.

He said the companies collected from him and other workers a fee of between US$6,500 and $15,000 apiece and overcharged them for accommodation and transportation.

Thang said through an interpreter, Tammy Tran, who represents the workers to file the lawsuit, that there was a lot of injustice and deception that he didn’t understand.

According to Tran, if Coast to Coast knew about the visas’ validity, it shouldn’t have offered the 30-month contract, adding that the workers do not speak English and all they knew was they were being promised work.

According to the Houston Chronicle, chairman of ILP, Vu Quoc Hung, hadn’t replied to their email or phone requests, while Scott Funk, a Houston attorney for Coast and Coast, said the company rejected the accusations.

Funk said Coast to Coast did not promise visas to the workers and if ILP did, they did it without Coast to Coast’s knowledge or consent.

The Houston newspaper also reported Southwest Shipyard, where the welders had worked, was not named in the lawsuit and quoted a comment from the company’s president, Sanjay Rao, saying that “they are good workers.”

Source: Agencies