Traffickers in human labour: Slavery redux?

Almost 20 years ago I, along with colleagues from the Weekly Mail, Eddie Koch and Phil Molefe, investigated a case of human trafficking between South Africa and Mozambique. We found that African teenagers, some as young as 14, desperate to flee the carnage of civil war in Mozambique, were rounded up and “sold” to white farmers in South Africa, to work against their will as virtual slaves.

In some instances, when workers asked for food, or money, farmers called the police and had them deported back to their war-torn villages in Mozambique. In other instances, the workers were simply beaten into silence and complicity. If they remained quiet, spent their days in the field, their nights in camps on the farmer’s property, and foraged a living, they were allowed to stay and work, effectively as slave labourers.

As it goes, I have come to understand that the exploitation and virtual enslavement of desperate and vulnerable migrant workers has a long history in the United States. I am not talking about the anti-bellum South; I am talking about my home state, South Carolina, in the late 20th and early 21st century.

“Slavery is not a thing of the past”
In an almost mirror-image of the human trafficking and exploitation between Mozambique and South Africa in the late 1980s, the US Department of Justice (DOJ), on 9 October 1996, handed down a 25 count indictment charging four Mexican nationals, Miguel Angel Flores, Sebastian Gomez, Andres Ixgoy, and Nolasco Castaeda, with “threatening and physically abusing migrant workers in order to force them to perform agricultural Labour” in South Carolina and Florida.

In a press release issued by the DOJ and dated 14 November 1996, Deval L. Patrick, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights said, “Today’s case shows that slavery is not a thing of the past… No person should be denied the right to freedom, and we will continue to prosecute these cases for as long as necessary.”

Like the traffickers between Mozambique and South Africa, Flores and his cohorts, “provided labour to farmers to grow and harvest crops” mainly in South Carolina and Florida. The accusers allegedly recruited Guatemalan and Mexican citizens from the Mexican border, and “smuggled them under dangerous conditions to labour camps in the area of Manning, South Carolina”. The DOJ statements explained that “while working at the camps the victims were threatened, told that if they attempted to leave they would be killed, and were subjected to occasional beatings”.

According to the New York Times of 8 May 1997, three of the accused pleaded guilty to “enslaving” migrant workers in South Carolina as part of a scheme in which the workers were threatened with violence if they sought to escape. The three admitted to being part of what the Times explained as “a conspiracy in which they charged undocumented workers a steep smuggling fee for transporting them from Arizona to South Carolina and then kept them in indefinite indentured servitude while they worked to pay off the fee”.

During our investigations in Southern Africa in 1990, we heard similar testimonies; in some cases workers were beaten if they resisted being “being sold”, others simply disappeared. One refugee field worker in the region, Ms Rachel Nsimbisi, told me at the time that it was “easy to kill” migrant workers; “they have no identification and no family. Their origins are unknown and, sad as it is, nobody will miss a refugee”.

The “Disposable Workers” of the US Economy
Similar patterns of abuse and exploitation have been evident in migrant worker policies and politics in the US. The Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) found, for instance, that these workers were:

invariably tied to a single employer,

had no access to legal resources,

routinely cheated out of wages,

forced to mortgage their futures to obtain low-wage, temporary jobs;

held virtually captive by employers or handlers who seized their documents;

forced to live in squalid conditions; and,

denied medical benefits for on-the-job injuries.

These conditions were described by the House Ways and Means Committee Chairman, Charles Rangel, in the following manner: “This guest-worker program’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to slavery.” In their report on the plight of migrant workers, “Close to Slavery: Guest Worker Programs in the United States,” the SPLC pointed out that Rangel’s comments were not without precedent in the US.

“A former Department of Labour official, Lee G. Williams described the old ‘bracero’ program — the guest worker program that brought thousands of Mexican nationals to work in the United States during and after World War II, as a system of ‘legalised slavery.’ In practice, there is little difference between the bracero program and the current H-2 guest worker program.

“The H-2 guest worker system also can be viewed as a modern-day system of indentured servitude. But unlike European indentured servants of old, today’s guest workers have no prospect of becoming US citizens. When their work visas expire, they must leave the United States. They are, in effect, the disposable workers of the US economy,” the SPLC report said.

The H-2 guest worker program has always been problematic. After the bracero program was dismantled in 1964, foreign workers could “imported for agricultural work” under the H-2 sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The H-2 program was created in 1943 when the Florida sugar cane industry obtained permission to hire Caribbean citizens to cut sugar cane on temporary visas. The workers lived and worked under appalling conditions, until on 21 November 1986, they stopped work (on a large plantation in south Florida), in protest against working conditions. The workers reported at the time that the company had tried to pay a rate lower than what was promised in their contract. As was the case in the Southern African trafficking of refugees to work as virtual slaves, the Florida company called in the police, who used guns and dogs to force workers onto buses and deported them.

According to the SPLC, the H-2 program was revised in 1986 as part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which divided it into the H-2A agricultural program and the H-2B non-agricultural program. There are no annual numerical limits on H-2A visas. The annual limit on H-2B visas was 66,000 until 2005, when it was increased substantially by exempting returning workers from those limits. In 2005, the last year for which data are available, the United States issued about 89,000 H-2B visas and about 32,000 H-2A visas. The countries sending the most workers to the United States under these programs were Mexico, Jamaica and Guatemala; about three-fourths are Mexican.

Migrant workers in the US actually do have legal rights

The abuses that migrant workers face are not because of the lack of legal protection; most of the problems seem to stem from bad practices by corporations. Legally, H-2A workers must be paid wages that are the highest of: (a) the local labour market’s “prevailing wage” for a particular crop, as determined by the Department of Labour and state agencies; (b) the state or federal minimum wage; or (c) the “adverse effect wage rate.”

Workers with H-2A permits are also entitled to:

Receive at least three-fourths of the total hours promised in the contract, which states the period of employment promised. (This is called the “three-quarters guarantee.”)

Receive free housing in good condition for the period of the contract.

Receive workers’ compensation benefits for medical costs and payment for lost time from work and for any permanent injury.

Be reimbursed for the cost of travel from their home to the job as soon as the worker finishes 50 % of the contract period. The expenses include the cost of an airline or bus ticket and food during the trip. If the guest worker stays on the job until the end of the contract the employer must pay transportation home.

Be protected by the same health and safety regulations as other workers.

Be eligible for federally funded.

There is a significant difference, thus, between a legal migrant worker and those “bought and sold” by traffickers such as those we investigated in Southern Africa in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the US, today, there is, however, more insidious forms of repression and exploitation practiced by private traffickers who operate legally as “brokers” or “recruiters” operating between private companies and poor, unemployed people in countries like Mexico.

According to the SPLC study, recruitment of guest workers is a lucrative business for the companies that help US businesses employ cheap foreign labour. A deposition in a lawsuit filed by the SPLC in 2006 shows how workers pay thousands of dollars to recruiters in their countries for the right to work in low-wage jobs in the US. The lawsuit contends that Decatur Hotels and its president, F. Patrick Quinn III, violated the Fair Labour Standards Act when his company failed to reimburse guest workers for the exorbitant fees paid to aggressive labour recruiters working as agents of the hotel chain.

“When Decatur Hotels, which owns 15 luxury hotels in New Orleans, decided to import up to 290 guest workers to fill hotel jobs vacated by Hurricane Katrina evacuees, the company hired a Baton Rouge-based company called Accent Personnel Services Inc. Accent advertises on its website that it helps businesses obtain government approval to employ guest workers and also recruits them. Virginia Pickering, president and owner of the company, testified in a deposition that Accent earned $1,200 for each person recruited to work for Decatur Hotels — $300 each from Decatur Hotels and another $900 each from recruiters working in Peru, Bolivia and the Dominican Republic.

“That means that if Decatur imported the full 290 workers for which it was certified by the Department of Labour, Accent would have earned nearly $350,000. Accent did not have to pay for travel or visa costs out of those fees. Each of the workers paid between $3,500 and $5,000 to cover recruiting fees, travel and visas. Like many other guest workers, they plunged their families into debt to raise this money. For most workers, it was more than a year’s salary. The guest workers soon found out they could not earn enough to make ends meet, much less pay back their debts. The recruiters had promised a minimum of 40 hours of work per week and plenty of overtime. Instead, they found themselves working about 25 hours a week, sometimes far less. Even though desperate for wages, these workers are prohibited by law from seeking alternative employment,” the SPLC explained.

To get to the US, workers from around the world (the SPLC records similar cases of abuse by brokers in Thailand) can pay their handlers up to $5000, plus the cost of travel and the price of a visa. When they do get to the US, they may be employed in seasonal work that may last for as little as three months and for less than $1000. In short, people from countries around the world — mainly from Central and South America — pay large amounts of money to work in the US for wages that do not cover their initial outlay.

In legal terms the cases of workers whose plight we investigated in Southern Africa in the late 1980s and early 1990s differ from those of migrant workers in the US, today. In political and economic terms there really seems to be no difference between the two; in both instances, people in poor societies were exploited for their labour. In some cases they were beaten, threatened with deportation and in others they simply disappeared. Ultimately, it seems, the only ones who benefit are private businesses and the brokers, whom I shall call traffickers in human labour.