A lawsuit alleging that foreign students attending an Iowa community college were labor trafficked as part of a racketeering network names a Missouri pet food company as a defendant.
Royal Canin is among the defendants accused of failing to pay students from Brazil and Chile and time and a half for working 40 or more hours a week.
“The Plaintiffs were going into internships as part of their educational exchange program,” said Devin Kelly, an associate attorney with Roxanne Conlin & Associates. “They were told to choose between culinary art or robotics but it turned out that Royal Canin was one of the places that these students were placed in an internship.”
While the plaintiffs were reportedly told they would study and work in an internship related to their field of study while attending Western Iowa Tech Community College, the Jan. 11 complaint alleges they were instead placed in unskilled labor positions and were paid less than American employees in the same positions.
“Some of them were carrying heavy bags of equipment or product,” Kelly told the St. Louis Record. “Some were working on a canning line packaging dog food. It was a generic labor position that didn’t require any kind of specialized training and it certainly wasn’t a culinary arts experience, such as hospitality or food safety.”
The complaint alleges that workers could not quit their job at Royal Canin or even take a sick day without fear of retaliation.
“They were told slightly different variations of one of several things, but generally, they were fearful that if they did not fulfill their hours, then they would ultimately be discharged from the program and returned back to their home country,” Kelly said.
The students demand compensatory and punitive damages in an amount that will punish and deter Royal Canin and other defendants from continuing the alleged scheme in the future.
“It indicates that this goes on around us in ways that we don't think that labor trafficking goes on and what we may think of as human labor trafficking in this day and age comes in a lot of different shapes and forms,” Kelly said. “It surprised me that an educational institution would be a part of it.”
Western Iowa Tech Community College allegedly misrepresented its J-1 Visa Program to the plaintiffs.
"The students were provided housing by the college but it was completely separate from the rest of the student body," Kelly said. "They weren't intermingled with the other students or even the other exchange students. All their classes were kept separate from the general body. They generally did not have access to the common cafeteria area. They were pretty much segregated from the other students on campus."