Labor Trafficking News from November

Throughout the month, there are many cases or stories that break regarding forced labor. They are usually not on the front pages of our newspapers, rather they are buried deep and sometimes are only accessible through the internet. These are some of the stories, both headline articles and those that are not, from November.

Markus Löning, Germany's Human Rights Commissioner, criticized Uzbekistan for its use of child labor in the yearly cotton harvest. He demanded that the country allow monitors to enter the country and that it stop using children during the harvest. Each year, in September, schools are closed and students as young as seven are forced to pick cotton in the fields. The country has signed two Conventions against child labor and Löning asked them to honor their commitments. At least 65 retailers including Gap and Wal-mart, boycott Uzbek cotton.

Debates raged throughout November about whether or not carpets made in India would lose designation as being produced through child and or forced labor by the United States Government. The Deputy Undersecretary of Labor, Sandra Polaski, said that the US had not determined the status of the carpets, while India's Carpet Export Council claimed that the US would drop the designation. The Department of Labor clarified that it had not removed India's carpet industry from the list, but rather believed there was not enough suitable information to determine whether it should be kept on the list. They are awaiting the results of a study on child and forced labor in Asia to determine if India should remain on the list.

The Irish Human Rights Commission asked Ireland's Government to launch an investigation of the Magdalene laundries or asylums, where women of ill-repute were forced to undertake forms of hard labor including laundry work, even into the 20th century. The Commission said that appropriate redress should be provided to the survivors of the institutions. The findings included evidence that the State knew and was involved in the process of sending women and girls to the laundries. It is also possible that the Government violated obligations it undertook through the 1930 Forced Labor Convention by not outlawing or stopping the laundries and by trading with the convents that were running the laundries. The Government admitted as early as 2001 that the women were victims of abuse but no redress has been provided.

No agreement was reached on the future of Zimbabwe diamonds after a four day meeting of the Kimberly Process. While the Chairman, Boaz Hirsch, said he was hopeful that an agreement could be reached within a few days after the meeting, as of the end of November there still was no deal. Obert Mpofu, Zimbabwe Mine's Minister, said that despite the lack of an agreement, diamonds would still be for sale with no conditions to those who wished to purchase them. Sales of Zimbabwe's diamonds were barred last year due to human rights abuses, including the use of forced labor, in the Chiadzwa fields.

Three illegal immigrants were indicted by a federal grand jury in connection with a human trafficking scheme which forced its victims to sell CD's and DVD's. Charges included conspiracy to harbor illegal immigrants and conspiracy to force labor. Victims were recruited from Mexico and forced to sell the pirated wares. The accused are believed to have intimidated victims into working until they paid off their debts.

After Cyclone Giri, which hit Myanmar at the end of October, the Government began forcing affected villagers to assist with renovations including helping rebuild military sites without pay. This was one of the hardest affected areas by the cyclone. The villagers are staying in makeshift huts, since many people have not been able at this point to rebuild their own homes and since they are forced to work from dawn to dusk on Government/Military projects.

Photo by Kay Chernush for the U.S. State Department

What to the Slave is the 4th of July?

Frederick Douglass - July 4, 1852

Fellow citizens, pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I or those I represent to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits, and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions. Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold that a nation's sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the "lame man leap as an hart."

But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you, that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation (Babylon) whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin.

Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!"

To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world.

My subject, then, fellow citizens, is "American Slavery." I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing here, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July.

Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity, which is outraged, in the name of liberty, which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery -- the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate - I will not excuse." I will use the severest language I can command, and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slave-holder, shall not confess to be right and just. . .

What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mock; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy - a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.

Go search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

The United States' Department of State Releases the 10th Annual Trafficking in Persons Report

The US Department of State released the 10th Annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report this morning. Notably, this is the first year that the US is evaluated in this report. Access the full report here.

In a statement accompanying the release of the TIP Report, Secretary Clinton stated, "The 10th annual Trafficking in Persons Report outlines the continuing challenges across the globe, including in the United States. The Report, for the first time, includes a ranking of the United States based on the same standards to which we hold other countries. The United States takes its first-ever ranking not as a reprieve but as a responsibility to strengthen global efforts against modern slavery, including those within America. This human rights abuse is universal, and no one should claim immunity from its reach or from the responsibility to confront it.

This year’s report highlights several key trends, including the suffering of women and children in involuntary domestic servitude, the challenges and successes in identifying and protecting victims, and the need to include anti-trafficking policies in our response to natural disasters, as was evident in the aftermath of this year’s earthquake in Haiti.

Ending this global scourge is an important policy priority for the United States. This fluid phenomenon continues to affect cultures, communities, and countries spanning the globe. Through partnerships, we can confront it head-on and lift its victims from slavery to freedom."

Read the full statement here.

Qatar: How The World's Wealthiest Nation Per Capita Relies on Migrant Worker Labor

In an attempt to further expand the scope of my research, I recently attended a few meetings and conferences in the State of Qatar to better assess the human rights and migrant labor issues that this majestic city-state currently faces.

Qatar hosts the most dramatic demographic contradictions between its local population and the migrant worker community that it must outsource in order to accommodate its rapid and unparalleled Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Industry. With only 350,000 Qatari citizens inhabiting a nation that boasts the highest production and export of LNG in the world, Qatar ranks number one for the world's highest GDP per capita income and embodies a rentier welfare-state in its most basic description.

However, the wealth that Qataris enjoy is at the expense of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers that are brought to the country on two-year contracts to work in nearly every sector and industry that the country has consecrated, mostly because the Qataris have no interest in working in positions that are not managerial or administrative. They hold a reputation that is even more negatively slanted than their Kuwaiti counter-parts, attributed largely to the country's massive natural resource wealth that provides a backbone for lavish lifestyles that are serviced and maintained by the hands of poor, outsourced laborers.

However, it is unfair to immediately dismiss the Qataris in their efforts to regulate and protect their migrant worker population. Higher income for Qataris has trickled down the economic ladder and raised income levels for migrant workers to higher salaries than anywhere else in the region. Legitimacy of private sector employment contracts is upheld and regulated by the Ministry of Interior. Unlike other parts of the region, Qatar maintains a strict turn-over of migrant workers to prevent long-term residency and the potential to reap attractive welfare benefits.

As a result, sponsors are less able to withhold wages and force their employees to stay in the country longer than the 2-year period the law allows. Although issues like withheld passports, coercive employment tactics (i.e. false contracts), and rights to change employers continue to remain crucial issues for anti-trafficking and human rights advocates, Qatar has seen rapid advancements under its labor law, with many foreseeable positive developments on the horizon.

Some of these developments have already come to fruition, and include, the abolition of the Camel Jockey industry. Previous to the Qatari Government's intervention in this regionally cultural tradition, underage children or "camel jockeys" were recruited from south Asia to participate in extremely dangers recreational races for entertainment purposes. Many were seriously injured and malnourished to keep them within race-weight standards. Now, the industry has made use of electronic jockeys instead, which has allegedly stopped the flow of the children who were previously trafficked into the country and exploited.

Another major development is the incorporation of anti-trafficking statutes under the current labor law. I will underscore that there is still no anti-trafficking law (although talk of drafting one has been reported); nevertheless, statutes exist that make use of similar language and highlight relative clauses that penalize trafficking of laborers. Qataris have even been tried, convicted, and imprisoned under these statutes-something barely seen in arguably more labor-friendly countries like Bahrain.

Like its neighbors, Qatari labor law maintains a crucial fault with regard to its domestic worker population (including housemaids, drivers, cooks and gardeners) who are not offered any legal protection under the current labor law or benefits that are awarded to private sector employees. Salaries, days-off and contracts are the responsibility of the sponsor and offer considerable room for ambiguity and abuse to exploitative employers. However, in response to growing criticisms from the international communities towards Qatar and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), new interest has developed in drafting a formal labor law that will better regulate Qatar domestic worker population.

Featured on the front page of one of the country's principle English-speaking newspapers, The Peninsula, an article described the development of a new domestic labor law being drafted by a special panel tasked with finalizing the regulation of rights and duties of domestic workers. The panel will incorporate representatives from several government agencies and will review with other GCC countries. The draft law may finally provide privileges to domestic employees, like end-of-service benefits, annual leave, and free medical care. These and other formal arrangements would have to be included in contracts between sponsors and their employees and would require endorsement by the Labor Department to be considered legally valid. The law might also regulate the functioning of manpower agencies and their role in hiring domestic workers in the country, The Peninsula reported.

And finally, the sponsorship system. Found in all countries except for Bahrain officially, but actually found in all countries of the Gulf unofficially, Qatar's sponsorship system seems to be the most archaic and limited with regard to a worker's access to mobility. As is required in Kuwait, Oman, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, a sponsor must provide consent for his employer to change to a different sponsor. In Qatar, the process is further complicated with the addition of a second party that must approve a change of employment as well-the Ministry of Interior. Qatar, like Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait has embraced a new economic development model that "ization-izes" the national population and encourages locals to enter the job market. Limiting positions for expatriates is an effective way to open up the job market to locals but discourages the professional development of expatriates.

Qatar presents an intriguing case study for human trafficking and migrant worker issues in the Arabian Gulf. I intend to keep my attention partially focused on the peninsula as it embarks on a proactive course of action to improve its labor laws and the lives of its expatriate workforce. I am sure there will be some follow-up.

Kevin Bales: TED Talk

From TED:

In this moving yet pragmatic talk, Kevin Bales explains the business of modern slavery, a multibillion-dollar economy that underpins some of the worst industries on earth. He shares stats and personal stories from his on-the-ground research -- and names the price of freeing every slave on earth right now.

Human Trafficking and the Environment

In December, the world watched the progress of the Copenhagen United Nations Climate Change Conference. While the conference may not have been front and center in the anti-trafficking community, the impact of environmental degradation on slavery and human rights cannot be ignored.

This issue is particularly pressing in light of the recent tragic events in Haiti resulting from a 7.0 earthquake. Haiti already faced extreme hardships and poverty, making the devastation even greater. Haiti also has a significant problem with trafficking of children called restaveks for forced domestic labor, often in situations of extreme abuse and neglect.

Environmental catastrophes, from Hurricane Katrina to the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean to a cyclone in Myanmar, wreck incredible damage on people's lives. Sadly, the devastation often impacts the most vulnerable, leaving them even more susceptible to abuse and exploitation. According to the United Nations Climate Change Conference, while it is hard to predict the extent of the consequences of climate change, we can expect more droughts, more flooding, and increased incidence of extreme weather, all of which could negatively impact people's lives in extreme ways.

According to Linking Human Rights and the Environment, by Romina Picolotti and Jorge Daniel Taillant, "victims of environmental degradation tend to belong to more vulnerable sectors of society - racial and ethnic minorities and the poor - who regularly carry a disproportionate burden of [human rights] abuse. Increasingly, many basic human rights are being placed at risk, as the right to health affected by contamination of resources, or the right to property and culture comprised by commercial intrusion into indigenous lands." Such people are also extremely vulnerable to trafficking.

In The Slave Next Door, Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter make the link between the environment and human trafficking even more explicit with a slightly different perspective. In their discussion of slavery and consumer goods, they point out that trafficking victims are often forced to contribute to environmental degradation to produce products. Bales and Soodalter describe teh horrific conditions endured by slaves in charcoal camps in Brazil: "slaves suffer burns and cuts, the heat is ferocious, and their flesh wastes away. . . Unknowingly, the US consumer provides the incentive for this destruction of both human life and the environment" (146).

A report entitled Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States by the Southern Poverty Law Center, shows another point of intersection between environmental issues and human trafficking. They highlight a trafficking case where a company exploited guestworkers from India to fill hotel positions vacated by people who evacuated after Hurricane Katrina. Threatened with massive "debts" and unable to leave their employee because of visa restrictions, they were ripe for exploitation.

Environmental degradation and slavery exist in a vicious cycle where people can be trafficked for labor that harms the environment or as the result of environmental issues, and where such environmental degradation places additional burdens on those who are already the most vulnerable to trafficking. Ending slavery and promoting human rights will require addressing this cycle.