As Western Pennsylvania's population continues to age, and the region's workforce continues to contract, the region will need increasing numbers of caretakers, more than the region can supply.

In recent years, immigrants have emerged as a reliable way to bolster this workforce, but an ongoing National Labor Relations Board case reveals exactly how these migrant workers are exploited by unscrupulous employers and staffing services.

In fact, it can be — and seems to be in this case — a modern form of indentured servitude that treats migrant workers like nothing more than cheap and expendable economic inputs that help reduce the wages of U.S. workers. And it's all the worse when the companies doing this are supposed to be in the business of care.

In 2020, Cincinnati-based for-profit healthcare operator CommuniCare Health Services, whose facilities include Baldwin Health Center in the South Hills, sponsored the legal residency of foreign workers. The company offered them incentives and relocation assistance of $16,000 per worker, a loan which would be forgiven after three years of service to the company. Workers agreed that if they parted ways before the 36 months were up, they would repay these costs.

This kind of arrangement isn't bad in itself. After all, we have supported programs that would provide similar incentives to out-of-state students to supplement Pennsylvania's workforce, especially in health care and education. But when the company is also responsible for migrants' legal status in this country, workers owe everything to their employer, and lack recourse if the company doesn't hold up its end of the bargain.

Within months of starting their contracts, workers reported inadequate training, non-existent COVID-19 safety protocols (this was during the first year of the pandemic), and understaffing that led to crushing workloads. Naturally, some resigned.

Workers who resigned immediately received notices of breach of contract, including demands for repayment of the $16,000 in support. Yet, the NLRB's complaint states, when workers attempted to repay CommuniCare — at least one worker did so successfully, and in full — they received no acknowledgment from the company. Instead, CommuniCare sued the workers for $50,000 each, alleging they took the jobs intending to take the money but not fulfill their agreements.

Eric Taylor, NLRB regional director, said in a statement that the lawsuits were intended not only to get money from the caretakers but to make an "example out of the employees to coerce similarly situated nurses into staying."

While it is important that the U.S. — and this region in particular — remain open to people from other countries who look to build better lives here, the country must also ensure that they are not turned into, in essence, indentured servants.

In a world where goods and capital move relatively freely across borders, corporations are apt to see human beings as nothing more than human capital, also moved across borders with ease. It is too easy for them to use legal obligations and financial threats to trap migrants into bad working conditions with no recourse, as in the NLRB allegations here.

Enforcing existing laws protects these migrant workers, while dissuading unscrupulous corporations from using these workers as cheap labor. At the same time, the U.S. needs to continue to improve its own workforce development systems, so these companies don't feel the need to recruit workers — or ensnare them — from abroad.

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