Blog

Neha Misra
Solidarity Center Senior Specialist, Migration and Human Trafficking

Trafficking in persons has become a big business. Globally, it’s a $32 billion industry involving 161 countries — including the United States. Trafficking in persons involves activities where one person obtains or holds another person in compelled service. While many people are aware of sex trafficking, human trafficking that involves forced labor is far more prevalent. Some 78 percent of forced labor is based on state- or privately-imposed exploitation, not forced sexual exploitation.

It’s likely you have encountered at least one of the 21 million people in forced labor. In developed economies such as the United States, Europe and Japan, we are seeing an increase in cases of trafficked immigrant teachers, nurses, construction and service workers — all who hold valid visas. Their presence shines a light on the structural failures within our economic and employment systems that increase immigrant workers’ vulnerability to severe forms of labor exploitation. Multinational corporations, employers, businesses, labor recruiters and others exploit these failures.

In other words, human trafficking is not only a big business. Trafficking in humans is increasingly a legitimate business.

While the media portray traffickers as organized criminal syndicates or underground blackmarketeers who exploit undocumented workers, today’s traffickers can also be licensed labor recruiters — those who solicit workers for jobs in other cities or countries — employers or even government officials. Trafficking for labor exploitation occurs within the legal framework of employment and business and through documented visa programs.

Trafficking for labor exploitation often goes undetected and gets little attention. Immigration officials may categorize immigrant workers who are trafficked as undocumented workers and deport them. Police and labor inspectors may view involuntary servitude or debt bondage in sectors such as agriculture, construction, manual labor and manufacturing as “mere” worker rights abuses, and so not justifying a remedy. Prosecutions for forced labor are far fewer than those for trafficking for sexual exploitation (and even those are low).

When such cases do make it to the justice system, they provide a rare look into the struggles of these exploited workers. In 2010, the U.S. Justice Department investigated the case of 400 Thai migrant workers who were allegedly trafficked to the United States under the H-2A visa program through false promises of decent work. The Thai workers “took on crushing debt to pay exorbitant recruiting fees,” ranging from $9,500 to $21,000. After they arrived in the United States, according to the indictment, their passports were taken and they were set up in shoddy housing and told that if they complained or fled they would be fired, arrested or deported. (more…)

Prison inmates are doing manual labor in Racine Wisconsin because Republican Governor Scott Walker took collective bargaining rights from public workers in his state to bust the unions. Michael Shure and Jayar Jackson discuss.

Robert Kuttner

By Robert Kuttner
Co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect

On this, the commemoration of the 82nd anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birth, we can take some solace from what Dr. King did in the face of forces far more annihilating than the ones that progressives face this cold January.

Impossibly enough, he built a movement.

He did so in an era when the consequences for challenging the racial order in the American South were swift and brutal. You lost your economic livelihood, or your life.

In 1955, when Dr. King led the Montgomery bus boycott, the chances of such a movement seizing the nation’s conscience, and within less than a decade including the full moral authority of an American president, were just about inconceivable. He was a minor 26-year-old radical, hardly known outside his own circle.

In 1955, except for a recent Supreme Court decision on school segregation widely held to be unenforceable, there was no support from the government to end the racial order in the South. The Democratic Party was fatally dependent on the votes of Southern racists. The Republican Party of Lincoln was failing to lead even on something as rudimentary as a federal anti-lynching law.

Yet within a decade, the legal foundations of what Pulitzer Prize winning author Douglas Blackmon called “Slavery by Another Name” had crumbled. Half a century later, public attitudes were continuing to evolve, glacially to be sure, but in the direction of Dr. King’s arc of justice. Far sooner than he might have expected, our country elected an African American president. (more…)

Mike Lux

By Mike Lux
Author, “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be”

As I wrote a few weeks back, when I sat down to write my book The Progressive Revolution on the history of the American political debate, I knew that the themes that animated our current political debate would be the same as in the past.

What I underestimated was that we would start to re-fight some of the exact same issues that have been fairly settled for the last 50 years or even longer. It is a sign of how radical conservatives in the last couple of years have become that they are raising issues that have seemed settled for so many decades. Republican nominees and elected officials for major offices have, over the last few months, made open arguments for:

-the privatization or outright phasing out of Social Security and Medicare

-the repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act

-the secession of states from the union

-the nullification of laws passed by the Congress and signed by the President

-the repeal of the 17th amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1914, allowing people to vote directly for their Senator rather than have them appointed by the state legislature

Now comes the most radically extreme proposal yet: Senate Majority Leader McConnell and other Republicans are now calling for amending or even outright repeal of the 14th amendment to the Constitution. To understand how profoundly reactionary this proposal is, let me refer to my book:

The 14th Amendment was passed at the height of the Radical Republican frustration at Johnson’s alliance with Southern conservatives on Reconstruction. Section 1 asserted that the federal government, not the states, decided who US citizens were and gave that citizenship to all those born in the United States or naturalized by the federal government. The states were prohibited from denying those citizens their civil rights and “the equal protection of the law.” It was the first time the Constitution created a definition of national citizenship as opposed to just leaving it to the states. Section 2 stated that any state denying the right to vote to any of its (male) citizens was to proportionally lose seats in Congress and the Electoral College. Sections 3 and 4 denied Southerners who had held federal office before the war and then served the rebel cause the right to run for federal office again, and ensured that the debts that the Confederacy had incurred would never be paid by either federal or state governments. The 14th Amendment was designed by progressives to be a long term stake in the heart of states’ rights and slave power by asserting that the federal government, not the states, had the right to guarantee American citizens their civil and political rights under the law. It literally extended the Bill of Rights to all American citizens, no matter what state they lived in, and gave the federal government the power to enforce those rights. (more…)

Dave Johnson

By Dave Johnson
Fellow with Campaign for America’s Future

Conservatives seem to think of America’s citizens as “the help.”“Everyone knows Americans are lazy, shiftless, always looking for a way to shirk their responsibilities. People don’t want to work so we have to make them work. And good dose of humiliation is good for the soul. If you let them have any dignity they might get uppity.” That is what conservatives sound like when they talk about the long-term unemployed — who, by the way, are out of work because of conservative policies. For example, from Tuesday’s WaPo, No extension of unemployment benefits in sight for the long-term jobless,

“Workers are less likely to look for work, or accept less-than-ideal jobs, as long as they are protected from the full consequences of being unemployed,” said Michael D. Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “That is not to say that anyone is getting rich off unemployment, or that unemployed people are lazy. But it is simple human nature that people are a little less motivated as long as a check is coming in.” 

That’s right, you have to make them work, or they’ll just sit around and wont be “productive.” They wont face up to the “consequences” of unemployment. These parasites will just suck the blood out of the producers. You hear language like this all the time from conservatives. The unemployed are “lazy,” or “on drugs” etc. They are not “productive.” They are mooching off the rest of us. (more…)