Labor Trafficking and Trade
Victory: Chipotle, Tomato Growers Commit to End Slavery
Published September 11, 2009 @ 06:20AM PT
Once again, Change.org members have spoken and a company has listened! Yesterday marked a huge victory for workers in the Florida tomato industry -- both the East Coast Growers and Packers company and Chipotle have agreed to work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) to implement penny-per-pound wage increases, supply chain transparency, and a code of conduct that prevents slavery. Thanks to the hundreds of Change.org members who sent letters to Chipotle asking them to take a stand against slavery!
Last week, Chipotle gave a detailed response to the petitions Change.org members were sending them, which was both sophisticated and honest (and therefore rare to hear from a corporate PR statement). They explained one of the problems in the very complicated tomato industry was that the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange (FTGE), a special-interest group for the industry, was blocking the payment mechanism, so Chipotle had no guarantee their extra money was actually reaching the workers. This week, however, East Coast Growers and Packers, one of Florida's largest tomato growers, agreed to pass on the cash and work with Chipotle and CIW. FTGE, which controlls massive portions of the industry, still hasn't removed their heads from their butts in order to talk with CIW, but I'm hoping the smell -- or a little more Change.org activism -- will drive them out soon.
This victory is huge not just because it will help prevent slavery and exploitation of tomato harvesters, but because the engagement of growers means that many companies have lost their excuse for inaction -- the claim that they couldn't know if they money was actually getting to the workers. Now, companies like Publix, Kroger, Sodexo, Aramark, Wendy's, Quizno's, Costco, and WalMart who have been shirking their basic responsibilties to support human rights and fair pay are on the hook for real; they better stand up against slavery or face the floods of petitions coming from the Change.org community.
You can thank and congratulate CIW, East Coast Growers and Packers, and Chipotle with a comment here. And you can also enjoy a thick, juicy burrito knowing that you're buying and biting into a company that stands with workers and against slavery ... with integrity.
Photo credit: Chipotle by Sunset by Soundman1024
Department of Labor Releases List of Slave-Made Goods
Published September 10, 2009 @ 09:13AM PT
After receiving over 6,200 letters from Change.org community members, the Department of Labor released their long-awaited report on goods produced by child labor and forced labor today. Thank you all for urging DOL to release this important tool for consumers!
This list was mandated by anti-trafficking legislation back in 2005, but the Bush administration dragged their feet for years. Now, thanks to your voices and the hard work of NGOs like Polaris Project and the International Labor Rights Forum, it's finally here. This list is a huge boon for consumers who want to choose slave-free products. With this list, we as consumers can finally hold companies and countries accountable for the slavery they use in making the goods we buy, and we can decisively take action to prevent slavery in the production of consumer goods. Today, we as consumers are more powerful to end slavery than ever before. And you, through Change.org, helped make that happen.
The report tops out at a daunting 194 pages, and can be read in it's entirety here. But let's face it -- no one wants to read 194 page government report, no matter how useful it may be. So here are some of the highlights I've found in my initial read-through:
- The most common goods which have significant incidence of forced and/or child labor are cotton, sugarcane, tobacco, coffee, rice, and cocoa in agriculture; bricks, garments, carpets, and footwear in manufacturing; and gold and coal in mined or quarried goods.
- 122 goods in 58 countries are produced with a significant incidence of forced labor, child labor, or both.
- More goods were found to be made with child labor than forced labor.
There's a long, detailed list that's a little blandly formatted, but it indicates whether goods in a certain country are made with child labor, forced labor, or both. It's important to keep in mind this doesn't mean all goods from that sector in that country were produced with exploitation. Here are some of the worst offenders for forced labor or slavery specifically:
- Bolivia: nuts, cattle, corn, and sugar
- Burma: bamboo, beans, bricks, jade, nuts, rice rubber, rubies, sesame, shrimp, sugarcane, sunflowers, and teak
- China: artificial flowers, bricks, Christmas decorations, coal, cotton, electronics, garments, footwear, fireworks, nails, and toys
- India: bricks, carpets, cottonseed, textiles, and garments
- Nepal: bricks, carpets, textiles, and stones
- North Korea: bricks, cement, coal, gold, iron, and textiles
- Pakistan: bricks, carpet, coal, cotton, sugar, and wheat
I'm sure in the coming weeks and months there will be additional levels of analysis of the data the DOL has collected. For example, I would be extremely interested in the most natural next step -- finding out what companies source problem products from problem countries and ship them to the U.S. I'd also be interested in seeing the breakdown for services, which is not included in this report. Hopefully, we can look forward to that level of analysis coming soon. And if not, I might just go ahead and do it myself.
In the meantime, this report gives consumers a lot to keep in mind as they try and shop responsibly. I know I'll be checking to see if my Christmas decorations were made in China a little more closely this year.
I urge you all to write a quick note of thanks to the DOL for this report in the comments section to let them know how happy we are to have this information.
Photo credit: DOL.gov
Help End the Wage Theft Epidemic
Published September 09, 2009 @ 11:24AM PT
In the United States, wage theft -- employers illegally underpaying or financially exploiting employees -- has become an epidemic. This form of labor exploitation affects low-income workers, women, and immigrants disproportionally. For years the wage theft epidemic has spread, but now we have some hopeful opportunities to protect workers from exploitation.
Author and founder of Interfaith Worker Justice Kim Bobo describes the startling rates of wage theft in the U.S. in her book Wage Theft In America. Some of the harsh realities she shares are:
- 60% of nursing homes stole workers’ wages.
- 89% of non-monitored garment factories in Los Angeles and 67% of non-monitored garment factories in New York City stole workers’ wages.
- 25% of tomato producers, 35% of lettuce producers, 51% of cucumber producers, 58% of onion producers, and 62% of garlic producers hiring farm workers stole workers’ wages.
- Almost 50% of day laborers, who tend to focus on construction work, have had their wages stolen.
How has wage theft become an American epidemic? One reason is that labor laws preventing wage theft are rarely enforced. In part this is due to the Department of Labor's failure over the past decade to address the issue and the Bush administration's unabashed pandering to big business interests. In part it was due to government processes and policies that ranged from inefficient to outright deceptive. And it part it was due to a lack of resources and agents to enforce penalties for wage theft. In short, enforcement of labor laws has been about as tidy as a four-year-old eating ice cream on a tilt-a-whirl. But the good news is the Obama administration and Secretary Solis can (and I believe will) do something about it.
Secretary Solis has already proclaimed her commitment to reducing wage theft in America, in part by hiring 250 new agents to enforce labor violations. This is a huge improvement and a great start. However, you can make an even bigger dent in the wage theft epidemic by supporting the Employee Free Choice Act. The Employee Free Choice Act will allow workers to form a union when most of them want one and will help protect workers against wage theft and other exploitative violations, including human trafficking. It's important not to let the great strides toward protecting workers fall off the national agenda, or the wage theft epidemic will spread until it makes the swine flu look like a hangnail.
Photo Credit: Worker wearing protective gloves by NIOSH
4500 Filipino Child Laborers Harvest Sugar for U.S. Markets
Published September 07, 2009 @ 08:06AM PT
This week, over 6800 child laborers were rescued in the Philippines. They were exploited in a number of industries, from domestic service to commercial sex to selling drugs. But the vast majority -- over 4500 -- were being exploited on sugarcane plantations. Filipino authorities say these kids are only a tiny fraction of the over 4 million estimated to be enslaved or exploited in labor in the Philippines, in part to sell cheaper sugar to the U.S.
Sugarcane plantations can be extremely dangerous for children, and many work brutally long days with no breaks and little to eat. They cannot go to school, thus ensuring the plantation owners whole generations of workers who have no options other than the plantation and feel increasingly trapped in their situation. They are often take away from their families and forced to live on the plantations. Some of the children are slaves -- trapped by debt or the threat of violence and unable to leave. Others have the freedom to leave, but nowhere to go and no other viable ways to feed themselves and their families. Either way, it's exploitation of children that allows plantations to churn out cheaper sugar.
So where is all this sugar harvested by these Filipino kids going? Well, at least 500,000 metric tons of it are going to the U.S. every year. In fact, earlier this year the U.S. agree to import more sugar from the Philippines than ever before. This was good news for Filipino Sugar Regulatory Administration (SRA) head Rafael Coscolluela, who said in December 2008 that the Philippines is "in for hard times in the next two years and it’s time for belt tightening for the sugar sector.” He also said the Philippine sugar industry must “become more efficient to lower production cost.” I have to wonder if there is a connection between the "belt-tightening" measures the Filipino sugar industry put into place last year in order to sell more to the U.S. and the 4500 kids who were rescued from plantations several months later. How many plantation owners and operators cut costs by cutting the pay or food of children? How many cut costs by firing paid adult workers and enslaving children to take their places?
Filipino sugar is grown by exploited child laborers, and sold to U.S. markets. This isn't abuse taking place overseas and far away, it's abuse being packaged into a bag of sugar and sold in U.S. supermarkets. Maybe it's being sold in your supermarket. This is exactly why it's important to know where your products come from and ask pointed questions of companies and governments. You have a right to demand sugar produced without exploitation of children. And when you exercise that right? Well now that's sweet.
Photo credit: Raw sugar bowl by Ayelie
A Video Guide to Fair Trade Grocery Shopping
Published September 05, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
Grocery shopping can be a daunting task, especially when you're trying to make more ethical purchases. That's why I've created a short video guide to looking for a few, basic Fair Trade items at your local grocery store.
Specialty stores and high-end grocery stores like Whole Foods often have a better selection of Fair Trade items. However, I went to a store in a middle-class neighborhood. They didn't have a lot of Fair Trade choices, but they had a few. Watch the video below to see what I found.
As this is my first big step into the world of vlogging, I'd love your thoughts and feedback. What sort of videos would you like to see on this site?
Beef Tacos and Forced Prostitution
Published September 03, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
La Cabana, a Mexican restaurant in Atlanta suburb Woodstock, GA, was famous for two things -- the beef tacos in the front of the house and the young women and teen girls selling sex in the back. That's because this Mexican restaurant was a front for a human trafficking operation from Central and South America to metro Atlanta. Selling ethnic foods by day and human beings by night is a trend among traffickers all over the country.
At La Cabana, women and girls as young as 15 were smuggled from Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador into the U.S. While the restaurant was open, they served customers plates of Hispanic delicacies. But after the kitchen closed, the restaurant became a gentleman's club, and they serviced the mostly Hispanic male audience sexually. In a back room, the women and girls were forced to engage in prostitution to pay off their smuggling debt. Interestingly enough, none of the news reports I found on this case called it human trafficking. But if this isn't human trafficking, then I'll buy Rush Limbaugh's greatest hits tape.
Keeping trafficking operations within one cultural, racial, or ethic group are one technique traffickers use tp avoid detection by the police. The philosophy is that operating a criminal enterprise within a community of "friends" is safer. This happens often with suburban brothels in private homes that sell cater exclusively to Korean men, Hispanic men, East African men, etc. But large numbers of men going in and out of a private home at odd hours might look suspicious to neighbors. Therefore, an ethnic restaurant provides an ideal cover for the traffickers. Plus, they have two sources of income from the women they are exploiting: their labor in the restaurant and their sexual exploitation. In this case, fortunately, the police were a couple steps ahead.
The La Cabana trafficking ring got busted because someone, presumably who lived in the area, called in a tip about the loud music late at night and Hispanic women going in and out of the building frequently. This is one more example of how people like you, just by being aware of your surroundings, can help trafficked people to safety. If you see something suspicious, don't trick yourself into believing you're the Dark Knight and go running in guns-or-video-cameras-blazing. But do call the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-3737-888 or call local law enforcement.
Photo credit: Loco beef taco by jasonlam
This Labor Day, Support Unions to End Human Trafficking
Published September 03, 2009 @ 07:00AM PT
Labor Day traditionally marks the end of summer across the country, but it's also a time to honor the contributions of working people and unions in the U.S. and around the world. While child labor and trafficking continue in the U.S., unions in this country have historically played a critical role in both calling for stronger legal protections for young workers and in improving conditions for adult workers.
As I have argued here on Change.org before, unions are a very important part of efforts to reduce child labor, forced labor and trafficking. When workers have a voice on the job, they can negotiate with their employers for better conditions so that they can support their families. Better wages for parents means that children are less likely to need to work. High rates of unionization improve standards for non-union workers as well by raising the bar for worker rights as opposed to contributing to a race to the bottom. This improvement reduces the need of workers to end up in situations of trafficking and forced labor.
Because of the benefits unionizing has for workers, employers often use a number of forms of intimidation to keep them from exercising their rights to join unions. For example, in countries like Colombia and the Philippines, union leaders are often targeted for murder, false arrest and death threats by paramilitary groups. Other workers are fired or blacklisted by companies when they start to organize. Corporations like Wal-Mart are infamous for forcing employees to attend anti-union forums and distributing anti-union pamphlets or even closing down entire stores when there is a rumor of union organizing efforts underway. Many companies institute employment schemes that greatly reduce the number of workers who are eligible for union membership under labor law. These are just a few examples of how workers see their freedom of association violated on a regular basis.
The International Labor Rights Forum has been fighting the most exploitative labor conditions like child labor, forced labor and trafficking for years. We created a new toolkit that we launches today to explain the importance of unions to reducing these abuses and highlighting different case studies of how the right to organize is violated around the world. Most importantly, we have lots of ideas of how you can support workers who are organizing to improve their living and working conditions. For example, what better way to celebrate Labor Day than to send a quick e-mail to some of the big companies named in our report for violating worker rights? Click here to take action.
We hope that you will check out the new toolkit to learn more about the right to organize. Make sure to share this resource with your community groups, friends and co-workers because when we all work together we CAN create a just world for workers!
Photo credit: ILRF
