Labor Trafficking and Trade
Reader Challenge: Can You Find 10 Slave-Free Consumer Products?
Published July 30, 2009 @ 01:08PM PT
This post is part of a challenge in tandem with the Human Trafficking Project. You can check out the other half of the challenge there.
The Reality: My name is Jenn Kimball, and I am a contributing writer for the Human Trafficking Project blog. Earlier this month, I wrote a post about slavery and the products we buy and use every day. Amanda Kloer wrote a post for this site about fair trade and "the slave behind your bargain" as well. Sadly, even without intending to, we can be promoting slavery through our habits as consumers.
We decided to cross post this week to continue this conversation and to challenge readers to research options for buying products that were not made with slave labor.
As more people are becoming aware of the ways that the products we buy may be made in exploitative conditions and/or by slaves, more people are demanding fair trade products. Fair Trade products are made in non-exploitative, sustainable ways that pay their producers a fair, living wage. Yet, despite increased attention to the need for fair trade products, many industries still use slave labor; it can be incredibly difficult to know for sure if the t-shirt you bought was made by someone laboring in terrible conditions (and the "Made in the USA" label is no guarantee). While the role slaves play in the coffee and chocolate industry has garnered a great deal of attention, many other products we buy and use daily are also tainted by slavery, even if we do not realize it.
The Challenge: Find places to buy all of the items on the shopping list from fair trade or other slave-free sources.
Perhaps because I am in the midst of moving, I am particularly struck by the fact that the furniture and household goods that I buy (or hopefully pick up for free. . .) may be available to me because someone else was exploited in their production. Electronics, furniture, and other basic household items do not get the kind of fair trade/slavery free attention other types of items do.
Here is the shopping list:
- Couch
- Stereo
- TV
- Flowers
- Rug
- Lamp
- Rice
- Curtains
- Coffee Table
- Coffee
The Reward: Amanda and I will post the best list/resources that we receive and credit the authors. In addition to being credited on our sites, your work will help others find and buy products that do not support slavery.
Image from gsl.uml.edu
Italian Trafficking Ring Busted, 17 Arrested
Published July 30, 2009 @ 08:02AM PT
Italian law enforcement agents are patting themselves on the back today after busting a huge country-wide and international human trafficking ring. Police have arrested 17 men on charges of human trafficking and aiding illegal immigration.
This particular trafficking ring brought men from Asia, primarily Bangladesh and Pakistan, into Italy to work in agriculture. The men had to pay 10,000 Euros to their captors in order to be smuggled into the country and placed in a agricultural job. Afterwards, they found they had a debt which could not be paid off.
This story is a great example of how sometimes international trafficking rings are highly specialized, moving people from one country into one country to work in one industry. A specialized criminal enterprise such as this one can be easier to operate, because you can perfect your techniques and pay off a minimal number of corrupt officials in order to succeed. It's also important to keep in mind that several human trafficking operations can be taking place in the same country at the same time. If they move in different industries, they may not know about each other. Apparently, this ring was operating for years. Here are some of the other, unrelated operations which existed simultaneously:
- Women and girls from Albania were brought in to Italy via boat and trafficked into commercial sex.
- Nigerian women were brought in via Spain and trafficked into Italian brothels and private homes as domestic servants.
- Chinese men and women were trafficked in Italy in forded labor.
- Roma children were trafficked for sexual exploitation and forced begging.
The kicker is, Italy actually has it's act together as a country and is identifying and prosecuting trafficking. And if all these unrelated trafficking rings can operate in a wealthy, educated, politically motivated country like Italy, just think what they can do in poor countries like Bangladesh and Bolivia. Or developing countries like Honduras and Namibia. Or dictatorial countries like Burma and North Korea. This list of co-occuring trafficking rings would be much longer.
National political will, national resources, and training and education for law enforcement remain some of the best tools we have for combating trafficking. Congratulations to Italy for their recent success.
Image from animalphotos.info
Where's the List of Slave-Made Goods the Department of Labor Promised?
Published July 27, 2009 @ 12:31PM PT
In December 2008, I had the honor of attending the signing of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act reauthorization - named after British abolitionist William Wilberforce - in the Oval Office. When the original 2000 Act was revised by Congress in 2005 our legislators mandated that the Department of Labor create a list of products made by forms of human trafficking: forced labor and onerous child labor.
The list would identify problem products (such as seafood, steel, textiles, etc.) and the countries where they were produced. Some such products would not be for export; other products listed would be exported, and of those a good number exported to the United States.
Such a list of slave labor products would provide consumers and shareholders leverage to fight slavery. If informed of which products coming into the United States might be tainted by slave labor, consumers could use their buying power and stockholders in companies importing such goods could use their voice to fight the problem. Both remain powerful forces even with a worldwide recession and the shrinking of citizens' investment nest-eggs.
Still, four years later - four! - there's no list.
Why? The Department of Labor, under the leadership of Secretary Elaine Chao until last January, said the requirement was an unfunded mandate - as they didn't have enough people to put on the task absent any extra funding from Congress.
Congress unwisely put no deadline on the mandate in the 2005 legislation, then gave the Department a luxurious one year to produce it with the enactment of the latest December 2008 revision of the landmark 2000 anti-slavery act.
But the list exists. While I was still the anti-trafficking ambassador, a public hearing had been held for information and a draft list was fashioned.
Unenthusiastic about anything unhelpful to business, Chao made sure that list didn't get finished on her watch.
I saw the draft list before I left government in January. I know the list has been examined by US Embassies and US diplomats loathe to complicate our relations with other governments by suggesting slave labor exists in certain sectors of their economies.
Some businesses won't like that the list identifies products and source countries, but not businesses names. So if Companies X, Y, and Z use slave labor in a producing Product P in Country C, they'd besmirch the reputation of all other companies producing Product P in Country C.
Yet that's great. It puts pressure on all companies in a sector to make sure they don't have slave labor in their supply chain.
There is every reason to think that the new Administration will set things right. But every citizen who wants to see slavery stamped out should want the earliest release of this list - mandated no less by a pro-business Republican-controlled Congress in 2005.
Please email the new Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis. Tell her it's high time to reverse the foot-dragging of the past. Ask her and the public servants of her Department to give the American people this list - to empower them to insist on a marketplace clean of goods made on the backs of slaves.
Then instead of fearing that globalization leads inexorably to people being turned into mere commodities, dehumanized, the obverse will occur. Market forces can be applied to force the globalized economy to transparently find slavery and root it out.
What's the next step after the list? Sticks and carrots. If slavery is found in the supply chain, the producer needs to be in danger of losing profit, going out of business and, if complicit, of going to jail. Steel and biofuels from Brazil, rubber and shrimp from Thailand, cotton from Uzbekistan - these all deserve scrutiny, among dozens of sectors and source countries.
Yet, much can be done by rewarding sectors free of slavery - even those more complex than manufactured goods. We must find a way to certify that cocoa from West Africa, migrant labor recruiters in South Asia, and hotels in havens for sex tourists from Costa Rica to Kenya to Cambodia are all free of slavery.
Hopefully those certified would receive a leg up from decent consumers rewarding them. This too would drive their competitors to make sure their sectors are not just clean because they will otherwise be held accountable, but because they'll make more money if they do the right thing.
However, a good first step is the list. Let Secretary Solis know you want it public and pronto.
The Child Who Makes Your Makeup
Published July 26, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
You know that shimmer eye shadow that you wear on date or to special parties? Well, that shimmer comes from the mineral mica. And much of the world's mica comes from India, where children as young as six work long, arduous days for as little as a single meal of rice. And their labor is what fuels the Western cosmetic industry.
According to one Indian child rights NGO, after garments, sporting goods, and fashion accessories, cosmetics is the fourth largest industry employer of child labor. As one child laborer testified,
I used to go to school and I learned how to write my name in English and some maths. Now I just collect mica with groups of children. We work in a 5ft to 10ft hole, and loose earth falls down all the time. Last year one girl was buried.
Mica is not only used in cosmetics, but also in paints and in some electronics. It is actually a surprisingly common material in a number of consumer products. Just for fun, I decided to check some of my own cosmetics, specifically one that I thought was safe from being tainted by exploitation. My Burt's Bees Lip Shimmer? Contains mica. Since my Burt's Bees was made in North Carolina (at a factory near where I went to college), I thought for sure there could be no exploitation in it. It even says "100% Natural" on the label, which must mean something! But supply chains can taint products, even those made in America in fair factories.
The moral of this story is bigger than mica. Slavery and exploitation sneak into products via supply chains. And when a product like my Burt's Bees Lip Shimmer has up to 20 ingredients, it can be very difficult to track the source of each one. Maybe the mica in my tube was mined by poor, desperate and exploited children and maybe it was not. But as a very loyal customer, I want to ask Burt's Bees (and all the many, many other cosmetic companies who use mica) to find out.
Image from indiansari.blogspot.com
Labor Trafficking Explained in Film
Published July 25, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
The Anti-Slavery Project recently released a very simple, and very well-executed video on labor trafficking. It begins by asking "what is the difference between a bad job and...human trafficking?" While the video, which is Australian, doesn't go into the legal differences between exploitation, bad working conditions, and slavery, it does provided a simple and succinct summary of what labor trafficking is. Here's the video.
One of my favorite features of this video is that they include some of the many industries victims are trafficked into. Places like restaurants, salons, and retail stores are not the places most people think of when they think about trafficking victims. The juxtaposition of these locations with the description of the experience of a trafficking victims is powerful.
Life Inside a North Korean Labor Camp
Published July 22, 2009 @ 07:00AM PT
If you thought the era of the forced labor camp was over, think again. Today, over 200,000 North Koreans face conditions and abuses similar to those of the Soviet gulag, the Nazi concentration camp, and the U.S. Japanese internment camp.
Official accounts from inside North Korean labor camps are few, and most have not been officially documented. But reports from released and escaped inmates indicate that prisoners are forced to work 12-15 hour days, and are fed a measly portion of sugared corn as their only meal. Women are raped with impunity and denied access to sanitary napkins. Relatives of prisoners who commit suicide are punished. The labor camp is one of the few forms of modern-day slavery sanctioned by a government.
For most people in the camps, there is no hope for an end to their slavery. A few lucky individuals may undergo years of remedial socialist indoctrination, to be released under parole-like conditions. The rest, however, will die working in hard manual labor. And when the guards are taught to look at the inmates as pigs and prisoners are forced to view assassinations as lessons, death is sometimes welcomed.
International human rights and anti-trafficking activists have been trying to fight the North Korean slave camps for years, often with little help from foreign governments. The fact that most of the world has ignored this form of slavery officially sanctioned by a government is inexcusable. And yet, the U.S. and Europe remain so focused on issues of nuclear proliferation they forget entirely the suffering and slavery of the North Korean people.
If life is bleak for slaves in countries where there is political will and resources to combat slavery, how hopeless must it be for those forced to endure government-sponsored slavery as a prison sentence? And more importantly, what can we possibly do to end such abuses?
Image from ri.net
Nigerian Baby Farms Breed Slaves from Slaves
Published July 21, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
I wish this article were a joke, and that the term "baby farm" was an exaggeration for what is happening to teen girls and their children in Nigeria. It's not. Nigerian girls are being trafficked to breed children in factory farm-like conditions to then be harvested and sold. Both the teens and their children are victims of the baby harvesting industry.
Here's how the baby farm operation works. Poor teen girls are lured into traffickers' hands in many of the ways traffickers lure teen girls for sex- promises of jobs, money, love, or stability. But instead of simply enslaving these girls in a traditional brothel, the traffickers bring them to an illegal clinic where they are raped until they become pregnant. During the pregnancy, they are cared for medically. After they give birth, the babies are sold into slavery for anywhere between $2,500 and $3,800 and the girls are paid $170 for their baby and their "work".
These clinics operate like a factory farm- the seeds are sown via rape into the teen mothers. The babies are then allowed to germinate, are harvested, and are sold as a commodity. I have rarely in my years working with human trafficking systems seen a process so completely dehumanizing to all the people involved. The girls are treated not just as objects but as factories, and the babies are treated as a product. A disturbing addition to this already disturbing story is the fact that some of these children are adopted by well-meaning parents, who believe the clinic is a legitimate adoption agency. They see the payment as an adoption fee and don't realize their child was created via human trafficking and rape in order to turn a profit. Other children, however, are not sold to well-meaning parents at all. Some are sold into slavery.
Thus far, I don't know of any confirmed cases of baby farms outside of Nigeria where the teen mothers were trafficked into the situation. There have been reports of baby farms in other countries like India where the women were all supposedly participating of their own free will. But I cannot help but believe that where there is a profit to be had by the sale of human beings, there will be traffickers willing to do what it takes to make that profit. This is not a uniquely Nigerian crime- in fact, Nigeria has laws preventing the sale of children in the same way the U.S. and the UK and many other countries do.
The photo above is a little tongue-in-cheek, but the reality of these girls' experiences is bleak. The outlook for some of their children is no brighter.
