Human Trafficking Around the World Read Online Free PDF

[Million Express] Manpower, Inc., began to pitch its labor force as more inclined to work hard because they were so far in debt,” Johnson said.
    In August 2005 the traffickers brought the victims to the United States with temporary H-2A visas. Upon arrival, armed guards confiscated the victims’ return tickets, visas, and passports. The victims spent the first month primarily working on Howell Farms, Inc. in North Carolina before they were taken to perform demolition on Katrina-ravaged buildings in New Orleans (Asanok et al., 2007). “One indicia of trafficking is that the victims are moved from place to place, so that they are kept in disorientation,” Johnson said. “They were moved around within New Orleans; each place was worse than the previous. They were housed in the buildings that they were demolishing. The Capri Hotel was the final, and the worst, stop.” While in New Orleans, the victims were not paid and were closely supervised by an armed guard to ensure that they did not try to escape. The same guard charged the victims for purchasing their food, but without pay the workers began to go hungry (Asanok et al., 2007). As a result of pressure brought by the Thai embassy, the traffickers had to return the victims to North Carolina in order to meet with embassy representatives—who were beginning to question the victims’ whereabouts. “Unable to fit all of the victims into their vehicles, the traffickers left seven in New Orleans with a guard,” Johnson said. There were other victims related to this case, some of whom had arrived on a different and previous order. Their whereabouts remain unknown. Others were simply too fearful to participate in the legal proceedings again Million Express Manpower and disappeared before social service providers were able to gain their trust.
    Johnson believes that the post-Katrina setting, in which normal community networks had been compromised and the population was in flux, created ideal trafficking conditions. Devastation from a natural disaster, Johnson says, creates a sudden high demand for low-wage and largely unskilled labor. Disruption of the traditional labor supply leaves room for illicit contractors to move in, and new workers can be brought in unnoticed. Additionally, law enforcement personnel are overextended and do not have the resources to monitor a trafficking scenario.
    On September 5, 2005, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration of the U.S. Department of Labor temporarily suspended the enforcement of job safety and health standards in hurricane-impacted counties and parishes in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Affirmative-action requirements were also suspended. Within the next several days, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) suspended for 45 days the requirement that employers confirm employee eligibility and identity, and then-president Bush temporarily suspended the Davis-Bacon Act, lifting wage restrictions for nearly 2 months. Under the act, construction workers are guaranteed the prevailing local wage when paid with federal money (Donato & Hakimzadeh, 2009). These changes, intended to speed recovery in the disaster-ravaged region, also opened the floodgates for worker exploitation and human trafficking. For instance, the number of Department of Labor investigations in New Orleans dropped from 70 in the year prior to Katrina to 44 in the year after—a 37 percent decrease. “The Department of Labor is the federal cop on the workplace safety, wages, and hours beat,” Congressman Dennis Kucinich said. “Where was ‘Sheriff Labor’ during the early months of the reconstruction?” (U.S. House of Representatives, 2007, p. 2).
    One of the groups most affected by the lack of regulation was guest-workers. There seems to be a general misperception that all migrant workers are in the United States illegally, but nearly all—98.3 percent—of persons identified as potential forced-labor victims in the Gulf Coast region were