Trafficking and Human Dignity

HUMAN TRAFFICKING IS the slavery of our time. Exactly 200 years ago, Britain and the United States formally outlawed the transatlantic slave trade. A few decades later the practice of slavery was expunged from North American (with a heavy dose of justice enforced by the British Navy and of bloodshed in the American Civil War). While much has changed since the days of the transatlantic slave trade, the lie which fueled that horrific chapter in history is at the root of sex trafficking and slave labor today--a belief that some people are less than human. Consider Carlo, a 27-year-old man from a rural area of the Philippines, recruited along with ten other men and women for a highly valued job in an American Midwestern hotel. The men were promised higher wages, reasonable hours, and benefits. Filipino recruiters charged each worker $1,200 as a "processing fee" for securing the jobs. Hotel mangers added new non-negotiable charges for "rent." This debt was used to coerce Carlo and the others to work endless hours. Carlo's passport was confiscated by the traffickers to keep him from fleeing, which also rendered him undocumented and subject to potential arrest and deportation if caught by immigration officials off hotel premises. Toiling for 16 to 18 hours a day, Carlo and the other Filipinos endured total control by hotel managers over every aspect of their lives--what they ate, where they lived, and the hours they worked. Debt bondage CARLO'S STORY INCLUDES several threads which I increasingly see in my work at the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons Carlo is a migrant. His nightmare began at the hands of a recruiter who used fraudulent offers of employment and extracted a large recruitment fee which Carlo could only pay by taking a loan. Carlo was uniquely vulnerable to exploitation once in the destination country, the U.S., due to the debt he carried as a direct result of recruitment. This home-country debt exacerbated by fraudulent expenses, such as "rent," added by an exploitative U.S. employer. Carlo's debt led to debt bondage. Lacking any form of power, not to mention identification, in a country not his own, Carlo was robbed of his dignity as a victim of forced labor. Current trends fleshed out in the 2008 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report released by the Secretary of State in June, and produced by my office, paint a grim picture of the diffuse and diverse factors which contribute to the vulnerability of more than 175 million migrants in the world today--vulnerability not just to minor labor infractions but to gross exploitation. Among these factors is the flagrant use of excessive debt as a tool of manipulation, the fraudulent practices of some middle-men brokering the movement of millions across international borders, weak laws--and weak enforcement of laws--governing labor exploitation, some aspects of sponsorship laws in Persian Gulf states, and a fundamental lack of understanding about human trafficking. Debt bondage is a frequent form of forced labor. Too often, people are enticed into fraudulent offers of work abroad that require a steep payment up front for the services of a labor agency arranging the job or a payment that goes straight to the future employer. To pay such fees, workers in poorer counties either become indebted to the recruiter, or take out a formal or informal loan in their country of origin, with the expectation of payment based on future wages earned abroad. Often, worker expectations and repayment terms are based on exaggerated and false representations by recruiters regarding wages the workers can expect to earn in their new jobs. Once at an overseas worksite, such high levels of indebtedness can make workers vulnerable to exploitation by unscrupulous employers who subject workers to terms much less favorable than promised at the time of recruitment (such as much longer hours, less pay, and harsher conditions). …