Court rules in favor of guest workers.(NEWS)(Daniel Castellanos-Contreras, Oscar Ricardo Deheza-Ortega and Rodolfo Antonion Valdez-Baez)

AFTER NEARLY A YEAR OF COURT PROCEEDINGS, a United States District Judge based in New Orleans ruled recently that "nonagricultural" guest workers are entitled to the same rights as all U.S. workers under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act.

The case involved three men--Daniel Castellanos-Contreras, Oscar Ricardo Deheza-Ortega and Rodolfo Antonio Valdez-Baez--who had been recruited post-Katrina from Bolivia, Peru and the Dominican Republic to work in luxury New Orleans hotels. In August 2006, attorneys for the three men filed a lawsuit against the hotel chain employer, Decatur Hotels, and its president Patrick Quinn.

"I worked in Mr. Quinn's hotels for next to nothing because I had to earn enough money to make back what I paid to get here," said Castellanos-Contreras. "Even though I was so tired at the end of the day, I would go to the meetings at night to help bring this lawsuit because I knew that this was important not just for our group, but for all guest workers in the U.S."

The three men's cases were advocated by the group Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity, which has been organizing hundreds of guest workers in New Orleans and trying to negotiate with employers like Decatur for more than a year. The attorneys came from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the National Immigration Law Center and the Louisiana Justice Institute.

According to the lawsuit, the workers were promised high wages, 40-hour work weeks with overtime and good living conditions in exchange for housekeeping and maintenance jobs. Instead, the workers say they were given only part-time work at the same time that the unscrupulous labor recruiters hired by Decatur were charging them as much as $5,000 to get their H-2B visas. (More than 100,000 guest ...