Barbara Shailor

Director, International Department

American Federation of Labor Congress and Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO)

 

Thursday, October 18, 2007

 

House Committee of Foreign Affairs

International Trafficking in Persons: Taking Action to Eliminate Modern Day Slavery

 

 

            Thank you for the opportunity to present to you a view of human trafficking from a labor perspective, and to make recommendations for effective responses to this modern form of slavery.

 

My name is Barbara Shailor.  I am the Director of the International Department of the American Federation of Labor – Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and a Board Member of its allied organization, the Solidarity Center.  The Solidarity Center strives to promote and protect worker rights in over 60 countries, and is currently implementing programs to combat human trafficking in several of these places.  Organized labor has a long history of fighting on a global scale a range of worker rights abuses, including forced labor, debt bondage, and involuntary servitude, which are the end result of trafficking in persons.  It is from within this context that the AFL-CIO offers its perspective of the international scope, nature, and responses to trafficking in persons.

 

Seven years after the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA), often in reaction to pressure from the United States, governments around the world have responded to the problem of human trafficking by passing criminal anti-trafficking laws on the regional, national and local level.  These laws tend to focus on law enforcement, through prosecution, to combat trafficking for forced prostitution or other forms of sexual exploitation, and to a lesser extent the protection of victims. While effective law enforcement is a key factor in combating trafficking, such an approach overlooks the underlying causes of trafficking, and as such is ineffective in isolation to prevent the problem. 

 

Such an approach also ignores a major aspect of human trafficking:  trafficking for labor exploitation.  There is still both a misunderstanding of trafficking in sectors such as agriculture, construction, domestic work, manual labor, and manufacturing, and a lack of will to effectively combat it.  We acknowledge the work of the Dept. of State Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons in its efforts to delve more deeply into the issue of trafficking for labor exploitation, as is evident by the latest Trafficking in Persons Report.

 

Confusion however remains.  The definition of trafficking clearly includes slave labor.  Policymakers and the general population, however, still conflate trafficking only with forced prostitution, and may regard workers exploited into forced labor, debt bondage or involuntary servitude in sectors other than the sex industry, as mere worker rights abuses.  In a 2005 study, the International Labor Organization (ILO) estimated that 9.5 million people in Asia are victims of forced labor, but less than 10 percent of these victims are trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation.  Yet, many anti-trafficking initiatives focus exclusively on trafficking for sexual exploitation.  Another reason for this may be narrow, inadequate definitions of trafficking and undependable statistics.  As noted by David Feingold, a renowned authority on trafficking issues in S. E. Asia, “statistics on the ‘end use’ of trafficked people are often unreliable because they tend to overrepresent the sex trade.  For example, men are excluded from the trafficking statistics gathered in Thailand because, according to its national law, men cannot qualify as trafficking victims.” 

 

Governments have been reluctant to broaden their view of trafficking to include such trafficked workers.  Examples abound, however, both in the United States and globally of workers who have been caught in the trafficking trap:

 

·        In 2006, 48 Thai welders were brought into the U.S. under H2B visas to work for a steel company in Los Angeles, California.  These workers were held against their will, had their passports confiscated and their movements restricted, and were forced to work without pay.[1] The workers were told that if they tried to leave the location were they were being forcibly held, the police and immigration officials would be called to arrest them.  The experience of these trafficked Thai workers in the United States is not unique.  The Southern Poverty Law Center released a report earlier this year, entitled “Close to Slavery,” which documents systematic immigrant worker abuse, including debt bondage and forced labor, which rise to the level of human trafficking.[2]

·        A police raid on a shrimp processing factory in Thailand last year uncovered some 800 Burmese immigrant workers trapped in a fortress-like factory and subject to forced labor as well as physical, emotional, and sexual intimidation.  These trafficked workers processed shrimp that was exported to the United States.

·        Male construction workers, from countries such as China, India, and Bangladesh, have been trafficked in the United Arab Emirates, through debt bondage and involuntary servitude where they are forced to work in dangerous conditions, live in squalid housing, have their documents confiscated and their wages withheld.

·        Women and children immigrant domestic workers from places such as Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Indonesia who migrate to Malaysia are easy prey for traffickers given their isolation within people’s homes.  These workers often face extreme conditions of abuse, including physical and sexual violence, confiscation of passports, illegal confinement, and non-payment of wages.

·        Kenya children have been sold or forced to work on tea plantations that export products to the United States.  These children work extremely long hours under dangerous conditions.

·        In the Dominican Republic, women union members who worked in Export Processing Zones, after being either laid off or tired of working under sweatshop conditions have migrated abroad, only to end up in forced prostitution.

The lack of understanding, inadequate statistical information, and the lack of political will contribute to the continued trafficking of workers for the purpose of labor exploitation.  To remedy this situation, government policies and anti-trafficking initiatives must be reframed to include worker rights.

 

Human trafficking is a labor issue for three key reasons:

 

·        It is often linked to exploitation in labor.

·        It is one of the worst forms of labor exploitation.

·        Many of its root causes relate to violations of worker rights, lack of labor standards and protections for workers (especially migrant workers), and globalization forces that displace workers and encourage competition for jobs.

 

Let me take each one of these separately:

 

Trafficking is often linked to exploitation in labor:  A key component of trafficking is the demand for cheap labor.  Failure of countries to enforce their labor and employment laws creates an incentive for employers to recruit vulnerable workers from abroad who often end up in forced labor or debt bondage.  Immigrant workers have a particular vulnerability to trafficking.  More often than not, trafficking victims, whether they are trafficked for the purpose of forced labor or sexual exploitation, start out as a worker who has left her home to find a job.  It is the process of migration and the lack of protections for immigrant workers that make them an easy target for traffickers in the form of unscrupulous labor recruiters and employers.

 

While some advocate restrictive immigration policies as a way to reduce human trafficking, there is significant evidence to show that focusing on restrictive immigration policies alone, without regard to labor standards and worker rights, may only end up making workers more vulnerable.  For example, the Malaysian government instituted a new immigration law in 2002 that resulted in the mass deportations and exodus of an estimated 300,000 undocumented immigrant workers.  Workers were forced to leave without much preparation, sometimes foregoing the wages due to them, exacerbating their indebtedness.  Hundreds of thousands of Indonesian, Indian and Bangladeshi workers were vulnerable to abuse and exploitation by agents, employers, and traffickers who took advantage of their precarious situation.  Restrictive immigration polices do nothing to address the economic incentives that employers have to continually recruit and traffic workers.  Given the inequalities created by globalization, employers will always have a supply of vulnerable workers available to fill their demand.  The remedy is to remove the economic incentive to exploit by enforcing labor standards and other worker protections. Immigration policies that fail to protect worker rights result in economic exploitation of workers and lead to unsafe, illegal immigration, increasing workers vulnerability to trafficking.

 

Moreover, many trafficking victims end up in situations of forced labor or debt bondage, for example, even when they migrate through legal channels.  Large numbers of immigrant workers internationally accept contracts to work in low-wage jobs in construction, agriculture, domestic work, and manufacturing.  These workers are recruited in their home country, and they travel and enter the destination country through legal channels.  Often, it is only after arrival that these workers are trafficked.  The Southern Poverty Law Center’s report documents experiences of workers who entered the United States legally, under the H2B program, and had to endure conditions that in some instances were, in Congressman Rangel’s words, “the closest thing [he’s] ever seen to slavery.”  This pattern is unfortunately emulated throughout the world.  For example, hundreds of thousands of female domestic workers are recruited and transported abroad completely legally, but still end up in conditions akin to slavery.

 

While many people have an image of a trafficked person as someone who was “kidnapped or coerced into leaving their homes, more often than not the initial decision to migrate is a conscious one.”[3]  In fact, many women and children who were trafficked into forced prostitution or other forms of sexual exploitation, started out as someone who left their home in search of a job.

 

As expressed by Professor Janie Chuang of the American University Washington College of Law, “The problem of trafficking begins not with the traffickers themselves, but with the conditions that caused their victims to migrate under circumstances rendering them vulnerable to exploitation.  Human trafficking is but ‘an opportunistic response’ to the tension between the economic necessity to migrate, on the one hand, and the politically motivated restrictions on migration, on the other.”

 

Second, trafficking is the worst form of labor exploitation:  The nature of labor migration in today’s global economy makes workers vulnerable to debt bondage.  Immigrant workers increasingly rely on employment agencies or labor recruiters to help them to find work and to migrate.  Agents and employers have shifted the burden of recruitment and migration fees, including transportation costs, travel documents, medical tests, and housing and meal expenses during training or while in transit, to the workers themselves, reducing the costs to the employer.  In order to pay these fees, workers may take out loans at exorbitant interest rates or their wages may be withheld for months or even years.  Workers who face exploitation in their job are often reluctant to leave or report such abuse because of the high debt.  Many countries have laws that regulate labor recruiters and employment agencies, yet those laws go unenforced.  ILO Convention 181 states that with few exceptions private employment agencies “shall not charge directly or indirectly, in whole or in part, any fees or costs to workers.”  The practice however continues not just internationally, but also in the United States.

 

Many sending countries rely on migration as a means of development through remittances.  They are reluctant, therefore, to negotiate strong bilateral agreements with destination countries to protect their workers, as they fear that the demand for their workers will be reduced.  There is always another developing country that can provide cheap workers.  For example, the Philippines government is a model of a country that strives to protect its workers abroad. Countries such as Indonesia provide much less protection to their immigrant workers, and the demand for workers from Indonesia has increased steadily over the years.  To combat this “race to the bottom” mentality, multi-lateral agreements, for example between all of the countries of origin in South and South East Asia with all of the destination countries in the Gulf, must be negotiated to create minimum standards that protect all workers regardless of which country they come from.

 

Third, many of the root causes of human trafficking relate to violations of worker rights, lack of labor standards and protections, and the forces of globalization.

 

Income inequalities caused by forces of globalization also push and pull workers to migrate.  As noted above, the lack of safe migration processes make such workers vulnerable.

 

An important aspect of globalization that exacerbates trafficking in persons is the erosion of conditions of work and benefits due to global economic policies and fewer social safety nets to catch vulnerable workers.  Workers are increasingly moving from the formal to the informal economy and from permanent to contract jobs.  This “degradation of work” as the ILO refers to it, is an important factor in human trafficking.  Whether workers migrate from rural to urban areas within their country or from one country to another, globalization has contributed to an environment that makes them more vulnerable to exploitation and trafficking.

 

In many countries, immigrant workers are denied the protection of labor laws and regulations.  Workers, who work in the informal economy, including contract workers in more formal industries such as construction work, are specifically exempt from national labor laws.  In some countries, including in the United States, domestic workers are not even considered “workers” under national laws.  Immigrant workers are often denied the freedom of association and the right to organize.  As the ILO has noted, “Where labor standards are rigorously adhered to, workers are well unionized and labor laws are monitored and enforced – for all workers, indigenous or migrant – the demand for trafficked people and services is likely to be low.”

 

By understanding the underlying labor aspects of human trafficking, we can develop effective strategies to fight modern-day slavery.  Some key initiatives include:

 

1.      Ensuring safe migration for workers by: 

 

·        Requiring pre-departure rights training for workers

·        Allowing immigrant workers to change jobs in a way that preserves labor standards.

·        Prohibiting employers from using legal labor migration schemes to evade U.S. civil rights, employment or labor laws.

·        Providing information to workers at Consulates when they apply or are interviewed for a visa about the illegality of slavery and other forms of exploitation, the laws and regulations related to labor recruiters or employment agencies, and the availability of services to assist them in case of problems. 

·        Striving to end corruption in the procurement of birth certificates, IDs and travel documents

 

2.      Regulation of labor recruiters and employment agencies.  Specifically, the elimination of recruitment fees to workers, shifting costs back to the employer.  Labor contractors should not be able to participate in worker visa programs, and should be barred from petitioning for workers.

 

3.      Recognition and enforcement of ILO core labor standards and the “Decent Work” agenda for all workers regardless of nationality or status, including the freedom of association and the right to organize.

 

4.      Inclusion of all workers, indigenous or foreign, documented or undocumented, under the protections of labor laws, regulations and standards.   

 

5.      Include labor inspectors in law enforcement initiatives to combat trafficking.  In particular, labor inspectors may be trained and tasked to monitor workplaces, including homes that employ domestic workers, to find trafficked workers.

 

6.      Increased scrutiny of imports to the United Sates to ensure that goods made by slave labor are not bought or sold here.

 

7.      Strengthening enforcement and penalties against employers who are found to have trafficked workers or to companies who have bought products made by slave labor.

 

8.      Ensuring that trafficked workers receive monetary compensation, including payment of withheld or back wages.

 

9.      Extending meaningful whistleblower protections to trafficked workers, which allow workers and their representatives to sue to enforce all state and federal labor and employment laws as well as the conditions in workers’ contracts without having to face deportation or removal.  Ensure confidentiality so that victims can access public services as mandated by the TVPA without fear that their traffickers or another entity may find out and seek retribution.

 

10.  Increase pressure and monitoring on states to develop more effective initiatives to respond to trafficking for labor exploitation in sectors outside of the sex industry such as agriculture, construction, and domestic work, and not just trafficking for forced prostitution or other forms of sexual exploitation.

 

11.  Promote cooperation between states through multi-lateral / regional agreements to protect migrant workers and develop standards for labor migration, which include the core ILO standards.

 

12.  Consider the forces of globalization that inherently create more insecurity for workers, and increase their vulnerability to forced labor and other forms of human trafficking.  This includes considering the impact of trade agreements globally.

 

Finally, strategies to combat human trafficking must include organized labor.  The

AFL-CIO, the Solidarity Center, and unions around the world, such as the Malaysian Trade Union Congress and the Jordanian General Trade Union for Workers in Textile, Garment, and Clothing Industries, are fighting human trafficking through activities such as raising awareness about the danger signs of trafficking to potential migrant workers, advocating to governments for the passage of anti-trafficking laws and the development of safe migration processes, organizing immigrant workers, providing legal aid and other services to trafficked workers, and using their networks, such as through truck driver unions, to serve as watchdogs to identify trafficked persons.

 

In conclusion, the AFL-CIO advocates that the problem of human trafficking be reframed as a problem of the vulnerability of immigrant workers in our globalized economy, and that strategies to combat trafficking must also address the underlying causes of the problem that are rooted in worker rights.  Effective counter trafficking strategies must include more effective labor laws, standards, and protections.

 

Thank you again for the opportunity to testify.  I welcome your questions.

 


[1] See http://www.eeoc.gov/press/12-08-06.html

[2] The report is available at www.splcenter.org

[3] Chuang, Janie, “Beyond a Snapshot: Preventing Human Trafficking in the Global Economy,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies (2006), Vol. 13, No. 1.