Dear <<First Name>>
In 2013, Pablo  Rodriguez was recruited from San Luis Potosi, Mexico as an H-2B worker for a job in the remote Sawtooth Mountains splitting granite and packing it into crates for shipment.
The H-2B program allows U.S. employers to employ foreign workers on temporary visas when they say that they can’t find U.S. workers to do the jobs. In order to get workers on H-2B visas, the employers must promise to pay the workers the prevailing wage and offer prevailing conditions in the industry so that U.S. wages and working conditions are not undercut.
According to assurances made to the Department of Labor by his employer, Pablo was supposed to be paid $9.18 per hour, with time and a half for overtime, for this physically demanding work. However, after the first pay period, he was instead paid by a piece rate per ton of rock produced. In the end, he was paid only about $4.58 per hour. Although he usually worked 60 hours a week, he was never paid overtime. The workers were housed in a remote, primitive mountain camp, where water was supplied by a tank truck that occasionally ran dry. When Pablo objected to the low pay, he was threatened with discharge. He ultimately was so threatened by the situation that he felt he had no alternative but to leave the job, though he had not yet been paid enough to repay the money he had borrowed in Mexico in order to get to the job.
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