Mexican guestworkers who were subjected to involuntary servitude in the strawberry fields of Louisiana from 2006 to 2008 brought a major civil litigation against their former employer Thursday.

The workers were recruited in Mexico to work in Louisiana on temporary H-2A visas as strawberry pickers for Charles "Bimbo" Relan and his company, Bimbo's Best Produce. Upon their arrival in Amite, Louisiana, Relan illegally confiscated their passports in order to prohibit them from escaping from his fields, according to a press statement from the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice. Workers charge that Relan then held them in forced labor, subjecting them to humiliation and degrading treatment, according to the press release. The guestworkers say Relan violated several federal laws including those prohibiting forced labor; trafficking with respect to peonage, slavery, involuntary servitude, or forced labor; and subminimum wages.

The guestworkers are members of the Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity, a membership organization of guestworkers in the Gulf Coast and a project of the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice. "These kinds of abuses are unconscionable, but not uncommon," Saket Soni, Director of the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice said in the press release. "Employers have consistently manipulated the U.S. guestworker program to subject workers to involuntary servitude in Louisiana and across the South."

According to the complaint, Relan made brutal and theatrical demonstrations of his power over the guestworkers, firing his shotgun over their heads, spraying them with pesticides, and physically assaulting at least one worker. The complaint also details how Relan threatened the workers with unlawful arrest, eviction, and deportation and paid below the federal minimum wage.

Strawberry pickers are part of an industry where more than 20,000 workers toil in some of the harshest working conditions in the country. Workers are stooped over berry plants for up to 12 hours/day and work amidst some of the most dangerous pesticides in use.