[Joint House and Senate Hearing, 112 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
LABOR TRAFFICKING IN TROUBLED ECONOMIC
TIMES: PROTECTING AMERICAN JOBS AND
MIGRANT HUMAN RIGHTS
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
COMMISSION ON SECURITY AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE
ONE HUNDRED TWELFTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
MAY 23, 2011
__________
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COMMISSION ON SECURITY AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE
LEGISLATIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
HOUSE
SENATE
CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey, BENJAMIN L. CARDIN, Maryland,
Chairman Co-Chairman
JOSEPH R. PITTS, Pennsylvania SHELDON WHITEHOUSE, Rhode Island
ROBERT B. ADERHOLT, Alabama TOM UDALL, New Mexico
PHIL GINGREY, Georgia JEANNE SHAHEEN, New Hampshire
MICHAEL C. BURGESS, Texas RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, Connecticut
ALCEE L. HASTINGS, Florida ROBERT F. WICKER, Mississippi
LOUISE McINTOSH SLAUGHTER, SAXBY CHAMBLISS, Georgia
New York MARCO RUBIO, Florida
MIKE McINTYRE, North Carolina KELLY AYOTTE, New Hampshire
STEVE COHEN, Tennessee
EXECUTIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
MICHAEL H. POSNER, Department of State
MICHAEL C. CAMUNNEZ, Department of Commerce
ALEXANDER VERSHBOW, Department of Defense
[ii]
LABOR TRAFFICKING IN TROUBLED ECONOMIC
TIMES: PROTECTING AMERICAN JOBS AND
MIGRANT HUMAN RIGHTS
----------
May 23, 2011
COMMISSIONERS
Page
Hon. Christopher H. Smith, Chairman, Commission on Security and
Cooperation in Europe.......................................... 1
Hon. Benjamin L. Cardin, Co-Chairman, Commission on Security and
Cooperation in Europe.......................................... 4
Hon. Joseph R. Pitts, Commissioner, Commission on Security and
Cooperation in Europe.......................................... 5
Hon. Steve Cohen, Commissioner, Commission on Security and
Cooperation in Europe.......................................... 6
WITNESSES
Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, Director, Office to Monitor and Combat
Trafficking in Persons, U.S. Department of State............... 7
Gabriela D. Lemus, Labor Representative to the Senior Policy
Operating Group on Trafficking in Persons, U.S. Department of
Labor.......................................................... 10
Nancy A. Donaldson, Director, Washington Office of the
International Labor Organization [ILO]......................... 23
Neha Misra, Senior Specialist, Migration and Human Trafficking,
Solidarity Center.............................................. 26
Julia Ormond, Founder and President, the Alliance to Stop Slavery
and End Trafficking............................................ 29
APPENDICES
Prepared statement of Hon. Christopher H. Smith.................. 42
Prepared statement of Hon. Benjamin L. Cardin.................... 44
Prepared statement of Ambassador Luis CdeBaca.................... 45
Prepared statement of Gabriela D. Lemus.......................... 48
Prepared statement of Nancy A. Donaldson......................... 52
Prepared statement of Neha Misra................................. 56
Prepared statement of Julia Ormond............................... 62
[iii]
LABOR TRAFFICKING IN TROUBLED
ECONOMIC TIMES: PROTECTING AMERICAN
JOBS AND MIGRANT HUMAN RIGHTS
----------
May 23, 2011
Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe
Washington, DC
The hearing was held at 2 p.m. in 2172 Rayburn House Office
Building, Washington, DC, Hon. Christopher H. Smith, Chairman,
Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, presiding.
Commissioners present: Hon. Christopher H. Smith, Chairman,
Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe; Hon. Benjamin
L. Cardin, Co-Chairman, Commission on Security and Cooperation
in Europe; Hon. Joseph R. Pitts, Commissioner, Commission on
Security and Cooperation in Europe; and Hon. Steve Cohen,
Commissioner, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Witnesses present: Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, Director,
Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, U.S.
Department of State; Gabriela D. Lemus, Labor Representative to
the Senior Policy Operating Group on Trafficking in Persons,
U.S. Department of Labor; Nancy A. Donaldson, Director,
Washington Office of the International Labor Organization
[ILO]; Neha Misra, Senior Specialist, Migration and Human
Trafficking, Solidarity Center; and Julia Ormond, Founder and
President, the Alliance to Stop Slavery and End Trafficking.
HON. CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, CHAIRMAN, COMMISSION ON SECURITY AND
COOPERATION IN EUROPE
Mr. Smith. The Commission will come to order. And I want to
welcome all of you to today's hearing, part of the Helsinki
Commission's ongoing efforts to combat human trafficking in all
of its aspects, which go back to June 1999 when I Chaired the
first Commission hearing on human trafficking--really a
tradition that continued under my good friend and colleague,
Commissioner Cardin, when he was Chairman and now Co-Chair.
This has been a bipartisan effort from the beginning, and it
continues to this day.
Today our attention turns to labor trafficking, a modern-
day form of slavery, exacerbated by the global economic
downturn. As with all forms of trafficking, we must never lose
sight of the victim, the truly human face of people caught up
unwittingly in this multi-
billion dollar criminal enterprise. Having just participated in
a conference entitled, ``Building Bridges of Freedom: Public-
Private Partnerships to End Modern-Day Slavery,'' I am acutely
aware that in order to be successful in combating the scourge
of human trafficking, we must strengthen the cooperation
between governments and the private sector, particularly with
regards to labor trafficking.
Each year, tens of thousands of victims are trafficked into
the United States from throughout the world. The United States
has been at the forefront of efforts to combat human
trafficking in all of its forms, including labor trafficking,
following adoption of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of
2000.
Our government has undertaken the vast challenge of
tracking slavery around the world. We have developed strategic
reporting tools such as the Trafficking in Persons Report, the
list of goods produced with child and forced labor, and the
findings on the worst forms of child labor. And the world has
taken notice.
I would note parenthetically, when I first introduced the
Trafficking Victims Protection Act in 1998, a landmark bill
that was signed into law 2 years later in 2000, the legislation
was met with a wall of skepticism and outright opposition.
People both inside and outside of government thought the bold
new strategy that included sheltering, asylum and other
protections for the victims, long jail sentences and asset
confiscation for the traffickers and tough sanctions for
governments that failed to meet minimum standards was merely a
solution in search of a problem.
I vividly recall raising the trafficking issue at a
gathering of parliamentarians meeting in St. Petersburg in
Russia in 1999 and was met with a similar reaction. As a matter
of fact, the Russians--several on their delegation thought that
somehow we were seeking to embarrass them. And I remember the
Ukrainian representative very dismissively--and I remember--
Ben, you would remember that--said, but they're just
prostitutes, as if somehow they were less than human. It was
really a very disturbing spectacle.
But the next year at the Bucharest OSCE Parliamentary
Assembly, not only did we have virtually every one of the
delegations joining in on the parliamentary supplementary item,
as we called it, but the Russians spoke out, and the head of
the Duma actually gave a speech in favor of the parliamentary
supplemental item combating human trafficking.
As the special rep for human trafficking in the
parliamentary assembly for the OSCE, I know full well
considerable progress has been made. I remain deeply concerned
that of the 56 OSCE participating States, 20 will rank as Tier
2, with another 8 placed on the Tier 2 Watch List.
Our efforts could not have been possible both within the
OSCE as well as here in the United States without the
invaluable contribution of civil society, who have helped us
write the laws and, frankly, all subsequent iterations of the
TPVA and other similar bills around the world.
Last week, we heard Deb Cundy of the Carlson Companies,
which manage numerous hotel chains including the Radisson and
Country Inns and Suites, explain how their employees were
trained to spot potential trafficking victims and how that
employee should notify law enforcement. Christopher Davis of
The Body Shop International detailed the extraordinary
education and awareness program that they have initiated,
coupled with a petition drive that has garnered approximately 6
million signatures worldwide.
As we reauthorize certain sections of the act--obviously
some of the act, some provisions, are permanent law; others
need to be reauthorized, and they expire in the end of
September--civil society representatives have flooded my office
and, I'm sure, Ambassador Luis CdeBaca's office, who was in
Rome at that conference and did a magnificent job, with some
thoughts as to what they think ought to be done to improve and
make more efficacious our policy vis-a-vis trafficking.
As we all know, traffickers prey upon those in poverty and
those lacking even the prospect of a job. I have visited
trafficking victims' shelters in countries throughout the
world, including Russia, Nigeria, Peru, Romania, D.R. Congo,
Ethiopia, Brazil, Bosnia, Italy, and elsewhere. I've seen the
faces--as have so many of you who will testify and so many in
the audience, and certainly Members of our Commission--seen
those faces of the victims--women and children and men--robbed
of their inherent dignity.
In Moldova, Catholic Relief Services documented that high
school aged girls were disappearing, literally disappearing
into human trafficking in large part due to the extreme lack of
job opportunities in that country. CRS created the Moldova
Employment and Training Alliance, which encourage private
sector companies to expand in rural villages. And certainly,
that has made a huge difference in that country.
As a destination country, we must recognize that here in
our very own backyard, thousands of people are trafficked from
all over the world to work on our farms, in our hotels, our
restaurants and even to serve as domestic workers. Well, even
more shocking is that many of these labor migrants enter the
country legally through their own immigration system, deceived
by their traffickers who sold them a dream.
Indeed, this afternoon we will focus on various aspects of
labor trafficking, including abusive and illegal business
practices, as well as ways to better educate potential migrants
of their rights. Among other issues to be considered will be
increased education and accountability, foreign labor
recruiting practices and enhancing supply chain transparency.
Labor trafficking remains the most prevalent form of human
trafficking in the United States.
U.S. funding for anti-trafficking efforts abroad have
brought together labor inspectors, police, prosecutors, NGOs
and faith-based organizations. Obviously, many challenges
remain. So it falls to us and likeminded people of goodwill
everywhere to meet those challenges head-on and wage an
unceasing campaign to eradicate human trafficking from the face
of the Earth.
Today we are joined by Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, Director of
the State Department Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking
in Persons. He is joined by Dr. Gabriela Lemus, the Department
of Labor's labor representative to the Senior Policy Operating
Group on Trafficking in Persons.
On our second panel, we will hear from the Director of the
Washington Office of the International Labor Organization, Ms.
Nancy A. Donaldson; Ms. Neha Misra, specialist on migration and
human trafficking for the Solidarity Center; and we have a very
special guest in actress and activist Julia Ormond, founder of
the Alliance to Stop Slavery and End Trafficking--a very
talented actress and a tireless humanitarian activist who was
absolutely instrumental in getting landmark legislation passed
in California to combat labor trafficking and to figure out the
supply systems of companies through better transparency and by
working with those companies. So we will hear from that second
panel after we hear from our very distinguished first panel.
I'd like to yield to a good friend and colleague, Mr.
Cardin, Co-Chairman of this Commission.
HON. BENJAMIN L. CARDIN, CO-CHAIRMAN, COMMISSION ON SECURITY
AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE
Mr. Cardin. Well, to Chairman Smith, thank you very much
for arranging this hearing. I think it's an extremely important
subject. I would ask that my written opening statement be made
part of the record.
Mr. Smith. Without objection.
Mr. Cardin. And I will just comment briefly. It's with
great pride that the Helsinki Commission takes on dealing with
the issue of trafficking, because it was this Commission that
first raised these issues. And in the course of that, we
conducted hearings; we sponsored resolutions at the
parliamentary assemblies in order to get more international
focus on modern-day slavery. We took a pretty tough stand. And
Chairman Smith is right. Some of the initial reactions were
less than sympathetic.
But we persisted. And with the support of our delegation to
Vienna, the United States had a united position to do
everything we could to rid our societies of trafficking, the
form of modern-day slavery. Then the permanent council started
to act, and we started to get some best practices shared by
other states. With the legislature and executive working in
tandem, we were able to make significant progress.
I remember visiting some of the shelters, where we visited
with the victims and were able to put a spotlight on the issue
that those that are trafficked are not criminals but they're
victims. And law enforcement needs to conduct its affairs
mindful of who the real criminals are. And we made more
progress and were able to get Special Representatives, both in
the Parliamentary Assembly--and, as you know, our Chairman,
Chairman Smith, is that Special Representative--and in the
Permanent Council of the OSCE.
So we've made progress. We have a game plan today to deal
with trafficking. And the United States has shown tremendous
leadership in the passage of not only our domestic laws, which
are very strong, but also the reports that are now required to
be filed. These reports, I can tell you, have a major impact--
as I'm sure Chairman Smith would agree. When Ambassadors visit
our office, that's one of the first issues they'll talk to us
about, because they don't want to be listed as a watch state.
Our primary focus has been on sexual exploitation. And I
think that reason is somewhat self-obvious. It's a very serious
situation around the globe, and we were able to make
significant progress. Labor exploitation's a little bit more
complicated, because there's an economic issue here that has
some legitimacy--at least people think there's some legitimacy
because of open borders and bringing in labor to help in your
country.
I want to applaud Chairman Smith for holding this hearing
so that we can take a look at trafficking related to labor
issues, particularly in these very difficult economic times.
I want to point out that debt bondage for migration costs
can amount to involuntary servitude or slavery. And we need to
take a look at how these matters are being financed, because
they are being used to deny people their basic human rights. I
want to congratulate the Obama administration for taking this
issue of labor seriously and the way that the Obama
administration has coordinated the work within the Department
of State and the Department of Commerce. That's what you need
to do. This is a matter that involves both of those agencies.
And I know they're working closely together.
This is a very timely hearing. For Congress, shortly will
be looking at the reauthorization of the Trafficking Victims
Protection Act. And in that act, I note that in 2008, in a
matter that I helped draft, we put into that law additional
tools for our consulate officers to be able to look at those
who are requesting visas to come into the United States. I'll
be interested in hearing from our witnesses today whether those
efforts are paying off. There's training requirements that
consular officers be able to identify circumstances that look
like they're trafficking. How has that in fact worked? Do we
need to expand that training to other border officers and law
enforcement officers? These are issues that I think we need to
take a look at as we move forward to the reauthorization
practices.
Our bottom line is, we want to see what other countries are
doing. We can learn from best practices of other countries in
dealing with these issues. And I think we need to share the
success stories so that we can, in fact, at long last get rid
of these labor abuses. Working together, we can continue to
make progress that we've made in the past so that we can
eliminate all forms of modern-day slavery. I look forward to
hearing from the witnesses.
Mr. Smith. Thank you, Chairman Cardin. I'd like to yield to
the Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Health Committee, a
Commissioner on our Helsinki Commission for many years, Joe
Pitts.
HON. JOSEPH R. PITTS, COMMISSIONER, COMMISSION ON SECURITY AND
COOPERATION IN EUROPE
Mr. Pitts. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And as an original co-
sponsor of the Trafficking in Persons Law and with you in the
OSCE, putting forth these issues, I thank you for scheduling
this hearing entitled ``Labor Trafficking in Troubled Economic
Times: Protecting American Jobs and Migrant Human Rights.'' The
issues involved in the exploitation of migrant workers, broad
and on American soil, are of grave concern to the OSCE. In the
wake of a global recession, it is important that we continue
our focus on human trafficking and migrant worker populations
now more than ever.
While the United States has taken a lead on confronting and
combating human trafficking, we must do everything we can to
end the practice. And this includes looking at ways to verify
worker practices and conditions. We must find better ways at
enforcing our own policies. Recent high-profile cases of
violations have highlighted the need for a systemic
verification process, one that is multilateral, including the
help of foreign governments and organizations, and one that
verifies from the bottom up, leaving no room for abuse
throughout the supply chain.
So, Mr. Chairman, I thank you for holding this important
hearing. I look forward to hearing the ideas from our witnesses
here today and hope that we can find concrete solutions to
dealing with the problem of labor exploitation here in the
United States. And I yield back.
Mr. Smith. Commissioner Pitts, thank you very much. I'd
like to now yield to a new Member but very active Member, Steve
Cohen.
HON. STEVE COHEN, COMMISSIONER, COMMISSION ON SECURITY AND
COOPERATION IN EUROPE
Mr. Cohen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It's a pleasure to be
here, and I'm going to look forward to listening to the
testimony. Ambassador CdeBaca was a counsel to the Judiciary
Committee, which I serve on, and has quite an honorable and
distinguished record. Good to see you again in your position.
And Ms. Lemus has been at some of the greatest universities in
this country, including the University of Memphis. So it's good
to have a Memphis denizen, even if a short tenure with us
today.
This is an important issue. Slavery in any component is
something we need to fight, and it needs to be something we do
in a bipartisan fashion, because freedom is the bottom line.
You know, there's nothing left to lose. And we had a history in
our country of slavery. And sometimes we think of slavery
simply as that form of the most heinous, direct, main line of
slavery. But there are other forms. There are temporary forms.
There are forms that we have, and we need to combat them and
make employers just as liable for looking the other way, maybe
not knowingly, but looking the other way when they're
beneficiaries of slave labor. And we know that happens in this
country and that whether they are landlords who have leased to
people who are involved in labor trafficking, whether they are
along the chain--I know we have products, and the California
law goes along the chain to make people be aware that they will
not be involved, and any producer of raw materials in the final
product if they're involved in the slave trade, that they won't
be allowed. I guess there'll be sanctions in the California
law. I'd hope so. And that's what there should be. We have that
for product. I know if you buy a guitar and it's got any kind
of a wood product in it that's on the endangered list, you get
in trouble for the final product. We should have the same
thing. If wood is important, which it is in Brazil and the
rainforests and all, it should be with human beings even more
so.
I'm Jewish. And Passover, which is my favorite holiday, not
just because of the food but because of the lesson that we were
in bondage and that we should always be cognizant of any people
who were in bondage. And that's just not building pyramids or
doing cotton. But that's the folks we're going to talk about
here today. And the Judeo-Christian ethos which we are all a
product of needs to be adhered to, and we need to pass the most
rigorous and strong laws that we can to protect everyone.
So with that, I thank the Chairman for scheduling this
Commission meeting. I look forward to your testimony. I yield
back the balance of my time.
Mr. Smith. Mr. Cohen, thank you very much. And quoting
Janis Joplin there?
Let me just introduce our very distinguished panelists
beginning with Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, Ambassador-at-Large of
the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. In May
2009, he was appointed by President Obama to coordinate U.S.
Government activities in the global fight against contemporary
forms of slavery. He serves as Senior Adviser to the Secretary,
and directs the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat
Trafficking in Persons which, as we all know, assesses global
trends, provides training and technical assistance and
advocates for an end to slavery. Ambassador CdeBaca formally
served as Counsel, as Commissioner Cohen just said, to the
House Committee on the Judiciary. And at the Justice
Department, he is one of our country's most decorated Federal
prosecutors, leading the investigation and prosecution of cases
involving money laundering, organized crime, alien smuggling,
official misconduct, hate crimes, and of course human
trafficking. He was responsible for the conviction of dozens of
abusive pimps and employers, and helped to liberate hundreds of
victims from servitude.
Then we'll hear from Dr. Gabriela Lemus, who was appointed
Senior Advisor and Director of the Office of Public Engagement
at the Department of Labor in July 2009. She represents the DOL
at the Senior Policy Operating Group in Trafficking in Persons,
the President's Task Force on Puerto Rico's Status, and various
interagency working groups on immigration policy. Prior to her
appointment, she was the first woman to hold the position of
Executive Director at the Labor Counsel for Latin America's
advancement, from 2007 to 2009, as well as the first woman to
chair the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda from 2008 to
2009. She served 3-year terms on the advisory boards of both
the Washington Office on Latin America, or WOLA, and the U.S.
Labor Education in the Americas Project from 2006 to 2009.
Mr. Ambassador, please proceed as you would like.
AMBASSADOR LUIS CdeBACA, DIRECTOR, OFFICE TO MONITOR AND COMBAT
TRAFFICKING IN PERSONS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Amb. CdeBaca. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good afternoon,
everyone, and thank you for the opportunity to shed light on
the problem of labor trafficking both here, in the United
States, and abroad. As you have mentioned, the OSCE and the
Helsinki Commission in particular has led on this issue, as on
many others.
In Rome last week at the conference that was dealing with
some of these issues, especially issues of supply chain, the
words of one of our panelists from Rabbis for Human Rights
North America reminded me and suggested what you have said, Mr.
Cohen, which is that we are in some ways in the 10th year of
this fight since the passage of the Trafficking Victims
Protection Act. But as the Western world, as people of faith
and as those who reflect the Judeo-Christian values, that we
are in year 3,500 of this fight, and we should be measured on
it in that sense.
And unfortunately, 3,500 years later, estimates on the
total number of trafficking victims in the world are as high as
27 million. We know that the United States is a major
destination, but we don't know how many victims of labor
trafficking there are specifically in this country, because
it's a hidden crime. Victims are often afraid to come forward,
or unable, sometimes because they fear the very officers that
could help them.
But the cases that have been uncovered tell us some things.
We know that labor trafficking is a problem that affects men,
women and children alike. Labor trafficking victims often
suffer ongoing sexual abuse, as well as threats of physical
violence, and that the cases now are uncomfortably identical to
cases that the United States prosecuted in sharecropping in the
1930s, the railroad gangs of the turn of the century, or the
padroni child begging cases of the 1870s.
Labor trafficking victims today are lured with the same
types of promises--a good job and a better life--only to be
trapped through their specific vulnerabilities. For foreign
workers, that's often lack of documents, language or
familiarity with their rights here in America. For U.S.
citizens, it's often homelessness, mental illness or addiction.
Whatever the hook that the traffickers use, we must bring this
cycle to an end once and for all.
As you know, the United States follows an expansive
definition of human trafficking that encompasses all of the
actions in reducing a person or holding them in a condition of
servitude, and so that means that the recruiter who feeds the
victim into the system, and the end user who knowingly or
recklessly profits from the abuse, are properly as guilty as
the employer who enslaves the victim. Our response is based on
the internationally recognized ``3P'' paradigm: prosecution,
protection, and prevention. All of these victims are entitled
to rehabilitation, and to see their abusers brought to justice.
We have seen progress over the last decade. And across
government, we are ever more united in this struggle. More
cases are being done both federally and at the state level than
ever before. And while victim identifications at time stress
and strain our victim services response, NGOs and frontline law
enforcement work to ensure a safety net when these people are
found.
In particular, I'd like to praise my colleagues at the
Department of Labor for their work both at home and abroad. In
the United States for instance, they've implemented a rule that
strengthens protections for a particularly vulnerable group,
the temporary H-2A agricultural visa holders. My colleague Dr.
Lemus will be able to highlight this and other actions that
Secretary Solis has taken to confront this scourge.
But to ensure that these efforts do not fizzle out as they
have at other points throughout the last 150 years here in
America, we need to institutionalize our capacity, maintain our
resources and ensure innovation across the whole of government.
And while every aspect can and must be addressed, I'd like to
highlight one of the most innovative things that's happening,
and that is prevention.
It's basic economics that without demand, there will be no
supply. So we're looking to engage on this aspect in both
forced labor and sex trafficking alike. The so-called sex
industry is not a valid form of labor, and it poses its own
unique challenges. But there are commonalities in these areas,
most notably the need to hold everyone accountable and to make
the cultural change necessary that undercuts the demand for
what the traffickers are using cruelty to supply.
Forced labor is prevalent in the production of a wide range
of raw materials that we all come in contact, and probably came
into contact at some point today, from cotton, chocolate,
coffee, steel, rubber, tin. Even reputable corporate citizens
can profit from the abuse.
So, as you mentioned, Mr. Chairman, the cutting edge of
anti-trafficking work is demanding that companies focus their
attentions beyond the places where their products are
manufactured and, instead, look at the source of their human
capital, the methods of recruitment, where the raw materials
are collected, harvested, or mined. Effective supply chain
monitoring means going all the way down to that level. We think
that such research will enhance our understanding of supply and
demand factors that affect those workers whose labor
contributes to the downstream profits. The aim is to find
trafficking where it occurs, and that this knowledge will allow
companies to join the Body Shop and Carlson Companies and
others in running their business in a manner consistent with
the ``3P'' paradigm.
Removing the taint of slavery is better for everyone. Take
for instance what's been reported from the berry patches of
Sweden and Finland: Asian guest workers so abused that they
were reduced to surviving on a soup made of whatever grasses
they could gather and whatever crows they could shoot. If a
consumer knew the suffering of the hands that had picked those
berries, we would hope that they would have been moved to act.
A conference last winter produced the Luxor Implementation
Guidelines to the U.N.'s Athens Ethical principles, which seek
to move beyond aspirational statements to the development of
standard operating procedures, moving beyond principles to
practice and implementation. And to date, nearly 600 companies
have adopted those guidelines. That represents the future of
the fight against modern slavery.
But of course, government's role will remain central. Our
counterparts in Europe have increasingly recognized this
problem which all too often has been confused as low-level
labor abuses of migrant workers. Today, with the leadership of
the OSCE and the E.U. anti-trafficking directive, cases are on
the rise. Countries with active rapporteurs, such as Eva
Biaudet, who used to be at the OSCE's anti-trafficking unit,
are seeing increases in trafficking prosecutions. As in the
United States, Europe has seen cases in factories, hotels,
janitorial, agriculture, forestry, landscaping and domestic
service.
Here in the United States, the State of California recently
enacted the law that you mentioned, Mr. Chairman. And we're
looking forward not only to see how that law works in the real
world, but also to hear from Julia Ormond who, without this--
her activities, the legislation would never have been possible.
We thank her for her vision and for her hard work in getting
that law passed.
And we're trying to, and we're beginning to apply those
standards to ourselves. Governments are some of the largest
consumers in the world, and the U.S. Government may be one of
the largest. We can use our leverage as consumers to curb the
demand for forced labor. We've taken steps in the U.S.
Government procurement and contracting policies to protect
against human trafficking. EEOC and the Department of Homeland
Security, through this bog, are co-chairing a working group on
implementation of the Federal Acquisition Regulation to combat
modern slavery and contributing factors like the demand for
commercial sex. And we will make sure that we work closely with
this committee and with each of you individually as we start
getting the recommendations back on how to best address the
government's purchasing to make sure that we have, as we ask of
others, a slavery-free footprint.
We're at a moment in the modern abolitionist movement when
we need to ask, what are the next steps? And over the last
decade, the important tools have been put in place. We have
before us now the long, hard road of implementation and
institutionalization. And we believe that with the engagement
of dedicated lawmakers and the commitment of the U.S.
Government, the next 10 years, both here at the OSCE and
abroad, will be a decade of delivering on that which we
promised almost 150 years ago with the issuance of the
Emancipation Proclamation. I look forward to working with you
as we continue to deliver on that promise, and we appreciate
your work.
Mr. Smith. Mr. Ambassador, thank you very much for your
testimony and your leadership.
I'd like to now recognize Ms. Lemus.
GABRIELA D. LEMUS, LABOR REPRESENTATIVE TO THE SENIOR POLICY
OPERATING GROUP ON TRAFFICKING IN PERSONS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF
LABOR
Ms. Lemus. Thank you. Chairman Smith, Co-Chairman Cardin,
and distinguished Members of the Commission, on behalf of the
Department of Labor and Secretary Solis, I thank you for the
opportunity to discuss the Department's efforts to combat human
trafficking both domestically and internationally.
Under the Secretary's leadership, the Wage and Hour
Division, the Bureau of International Labor Affairs and the
Employment and Training Administration work collaboratively to
ensure that the Department uses all available tools in the most
efficient and effective manner to protect these vulnerable
populations. I am pleased to report to the Commission our
efforts.
The Wage and Hour Division enforces some of the Nation's
most comprehensive Federal labor laws, allowing the agency to
have a daily presence in American workplaces. While Wage and
Hour does not have responsibility to investigate trafficking
directly, many of its investigations take place in industry
marked by workers who are vulnerable to trafficking. This means
that Wage and Hour Division is often the first Federal agency
to make contact with the workers who may have been trafficked
or maybe otherwise employed under abusive conditions in
violation of the law.
Because of its focus on civil enforcement, criminal
activity found in the workplace by Wage and Hour investigators
may be referred to an appropriate authority as part of the
standard Wage and Hour procedure. After a referral is made, the
agency's assistance may be requested to compute back wages to
ensure restitution on behalf of victims of trafficking, and to
assess penalties against their employers. Additionally, in its
role of investigating workplace laws, the Department of Labor
may detect evidence that a worker is a victim of certain
criminal activity, including trafficking, that may qualify the
worker for U nonimmigrant status.
In April 2011, the Department announced protocols to
complete a certification that the individual petitioning for U
nonimmigrant status is a victim of a qualifying crime and is,
has been or is likely to be helpful in the investigation or
prosecution of that crime. The Wage and Hour Division is also a
member of the Federal Enforcement Working Group, along with the
Justice Department, the FBI, and Immigration and Customs
Enforcement. As part of the working group, Wage and Hour is
participating in the development and implementation of the--a
pilot Federal anti-trafficking coordination team, the ACT team
program. The goal of the ACT team program is, one, to
proactively identify and assist human trafficking victims; two,
to develop victim-centered multidisciplinary human-trafficking
investigations; and three, produce high-impact human-
trafficking prosecutions resulting in the conviction of
traffickers.
Finally, Wage and Hour also participates in several other
outreach and partnership activities to share information and
leverage community-based resources to more effectively inform
workers about their rights and how they can file Wage and Hour
complaints. Such information can assist vulnerable workers,
including those who may have been trafficked.
Through the Department of International Labor Affairs, it
also plays a critical role in bringing to light the dark
stories of human trafficking. In December 2010, the Department
released three new reports on child labor and forced labor.
Together, these reports demonstrate that from factories to
farms, abuses of fundamental human rights, including human
trafficking, still persist in the 21st century. These reports
are, one, the list of goods produced by child or forced labor;
two, the list of products produced by forced or indentured
child labor; and three, the ninth annual findings on the worst
forms of child labor.
Since 1995, Congress has appropriated over $839 million to
ILAB for programs to combat international child labor. This
funding has supported technical assistance projects in more
than 80 countries and reached approximately 1.5 million
children at risk of, or engaged in, exploitative child labor.
While the Department's technical assistance programs include
stand-alone trafficking in persons projects, many also include
multi-faceted projects to address other worst forms of child
labor in addition to trafficking, because many of the most
vulnerable workers in the United States are temporary foreign
ag workers--agricultural workers, excuse me.
ETA's H-2A program is another significant locus in the
Department's efforts to combat trafficking. It is paramount
that both workers in the United States and temporary foreign
workers are provided with appropriate and adequate worker
protections. In March 2010, a final ruling addressing the
temporary agricultural employment of H-2A aliens in the United
States became effective. The final rule includes enhanced
mechanisms for protecting H-2A workers, who are increasingly
susceptible to the abuses of dishonest employers and their
agents, such as foreign labor recruiters. The 2010 final rule
requires employers to contractually forbid foreign labor
contractors or recruiters engaged in international recruitment
of H-2A workers from seeking or receiving payments from such
prospective employees. The 2010 H-2A final rule enhanced
enforcement provisions allow the department to investigate and
sanction employers and their agents or attorneys where there is
a violation of regulation provisions. These penalties
demonstrate the department's commitment to strengthening the
necessary enforcement of a law that protects workers who are
unlikely to complain to government agencies about violations of
their rights under the program.
In conclusion, in today's global economy, workers in any
country are vulnerable to trafficking and labor rights abuses.
The department's innovative and integrative programs help
workers earn decent incomes, and prevent them from being abused
and exploited. This approach is a vital part of the
administration's goal of ensuring that globalization provides
benefits and opportunities for workers everywhere, rather than
triggering a race to the bottom.
Again, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. I'm
happy to answer any questions the Commission may have on the
Department of Labor's efforts to combat trafficking.
Mr. Smith. Thank you very much, Ms. Lemus.
Let me just begin the questioning, if I could. Both you,
Mr. Ambassador, and I both referenced the important work that
has been done by Julia Ormond as founder of the Alliance to
Stop Slavery and End Trafficking. And Senate Bill 657, which
was signed into law, as you know, requires retail sellers and
manufacturers doing business in California to publicly disclose
their efforts to eradicate slavery--I'm reading from an op-ed
written by Ms. Ormond--and human trafficking from their direct
supply chains. She points out that by January 2012, companies
impacted by the bill will have to post on their Web sites what
policies they have in place to ensure that their supply chains
are free of slavery and human trafficking.
And my question is, this is a model bill. Obviously there's
another 49 States and the District of Columbia that could
follow suit, and obviously the Federal Government ought to be
thinking along these lines as well. And I was wondering what
your thoughts are about the new law's strengths and weaknesses,
whether or not--and I don't think we should wait until January
2012 to see how well or poorly it's working. I do think it
looks to bring business along for the ride, and so I would be
interested in your thought on this piece of legislation.
Amb. CdeBaca. Thank you, Mr. Smith. We are very excited
about the California law. We think that this is a very good way
that one of the States--a State which, of course, if it were
its own economy, certainly it would be part of the G-20, if not
maybe even the G-8. A State like California taking these
actions is going to have a ripple effect to countries and
companies all the way around the world, because anyone who is a
multinational company worthy of the name is doing business in
California. One of the things that we see from our
perspective--and I think we all look forward to hearing from
Ms. Ormond and others on the specifics of the law--but what
we've seen in talking to California, a real hero against the
fight against traffickers in the Attorney General's office
there, Kamala Harris, from her time when she was a State's
attorney in San Francisco, but also Jerry Brown, who's gone
from overseeing the training of law enforcement in California
as the Attorney General, to go after trafficking in a new way
over the last few years. His office has been very supportive of
this. So one of the things that we think is going to happen is
that all of us, as consumers, as the State Department's Office
to Monitor and Combat Trafficking, academics, et cetera, will
be able to access this information and start figuring out what
the companies are doing.
I think the brilliance of this is that in our
understanding, it doesn't necessarily say what particular
policy company has to have; they just have to have something.
And we think that that will then put it out to the marketplace
of ideas. It's an innovative way to have a regulatory structure
that actually brings the market to bear, so all of us as
consumers can look at these companies and make decisions, and
put pressure on them accordingly.
Mr. Smith. I appreciate that, thank you. Let me just ask: A
common theme in trafficking for labor exploitation is holding
the victim in debt bondage through recruitment and migration
fees. Although the practice is illegal, and some countries have
prohibited it under international conventions, how can we do a
better job in enforcing that part of this chain of degradation?
If you could----
Amb. CdeBaca. One of the things Congress did on its, I
think, first day back after the end of the Civil War was pass a
law that was called the ``peonage'' law--because of the term
for debt bondage in Spanish--that made it clear that the
protections of the thirteenth amendment didn't just apply to
the newly freed African-American slaves in the South, but
applied to people all over the country. So this notion of debt
bondage as being one of our core anti-slavery ideals in the
United States is key to our efforts.
One of the things that we've seen is that with the passage
of the 2008 reauthorization of fraud in foreign labor
contracting, we've seen our first convictions of that now in a
case out of Kansas City where people were being brought over
for janitorial services. We think that that's going to be a
powerful tool because sometimes you can show that there was a
debt, but you can't show that the debt was then specifically
used as a threat. So we think that that fraud in foreign labor
contracting provision of Title 18 that was in the TVPRA is
going to help an awful lot.
Two other areas, though, that we think that we need to look
at: We're working with countries around the world to try to--as
the Department of Labor's final rule on the guest worker
programs here in the United States does--to try to strip the
power of the labor recruiters to basically sell the chance to
work in another country in exchange for the person's freedom.
We see that as something that only when we are able to bridge
the power differential between the source countries--your
Bangladeshes, Philippines, Malaysia, et cetera, and the wealthy
countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, other countries in the
Persian Gulf--only when we are able to narrow that power
differential will we be able to end this practice of debt
bondage.
So for the first time just about a month-and-a-half ago, we
were able to attend the Colombo Process, which is the sending
and receiving countries--a multilateral forum. They asked the
United States to attend because I think they've realized that
even though we were not one of the countries involved, that we
had a particular voice. And we're going to use that as an
avenue, as well as ASEAN and some of the other fora, to put
that kind of pressure on the receiving countries.
Mr. Smith. Thank you. Ms. Lemus, back on July 11th and July
15, 1996, I held two hearings on child labor. Robert Reich
testified; he made an impassioned appeal that we have to
prioritize, we have to keep our focus. Then, we actually had
Kathy Lee Gifford testify; she was embroiled in a problem of
her line of clothing being made by sweatshops in Central
America.
But we actually heard from Wage and Hour--the Administrator
at U.S. Department of Labor, Maria Echaveste, who had just
produced and spoke about the report, ``By the Sweat & Toil of
Children,'' and she made a very strong statement that without
the participation of industry--and this was back in 1996--
because we have too few Wage and Hour investigators, too few
people at the State and Federal level, you just can't enforce;
you have to have buy-in fully by the industry--that our efforts
would flounder without that.
And I'm wondering--that was back in 1996--what is the
industry doing now to be full-fledged partners in trying to
combat labor trafficking?
Ms. Lemus. Well, at the Department of Labor, part of what
we've also tried to do is to increase the number of inspectors
and ensure that they're not only bilingual, but that they have
had training around the issue of human trafficking. As I said
earlier, they are the first to come to the table and see, maybe
witness where persons have been victims of trafficking.
On our end, we do about 26,000 inspections a year, yet
there are approximately 7 million employers. So obviously, it's
a challenge. And we do need assistance from the employers
themselves to have buy-in that they wish to participate. And we
would say probably a good majority of them are going to be good
actors.
Internationally, when we work with child labor issues in
particular, what we're noting is that those reports do have an
effect--that countries--as you said at the beginning, the
Ambassadors--as soon as their reports come out, the phone calls
at our international labor affairs office, they start streaming
in quite steadily. And it's really an effort to partner with
not only the countries but the businesses themselves to ensure
that we are changing the bar, that we're actually raising the
bar in terms of that participation with the private sector.
Mr. Smith. Thank you. Chairman Cardin.
Mr. Cardin. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And let me
thank both of our witnesses. The 2010 Trafficking in Persons
Report, TIP report, for the first time included an analysis of
the United States, which I think many of us thought was a major
improvement on the TIP report.
Is it the Secretary's intent that the United States will be
included in future reports?
Amb. CdeBaca. That's correct.
Mr. Cardin. Good. I'm going to make sure that is done
because I think it is helpful. But let me talk a little bit
about your testimony--you were talking about the H-2A
enforcement provisions--and I guess my question to you: How do
you enforce this? You already pointed out that many of the
laborers will be reluctant to come forward to talk about the
circumstances out of fear. Could you just share with us how you
intend to enforce the provisions you talked about in the H-2A
program?
Ms. Lemus. Through the Wage and Hour Division in
particular, we have engaged in a variety of local campaigns--or
national campaign, I should say--but also State and local law
enforcement and community-based types of task forces. The Wage
and Hour Division belongs to about 25 taskforces across the
country at the local level.
We also participate in the [47:46] [Federal act team ?]
program, which is looking right at this point--and my
understanding is, they're pilot programs--but they're looking
to really increase the level of cooperation across Federal law
enforcement agencies to really improve--we look at the three
P's as prevention, protection, and prosecution; we kind of
start on the prevention end of things because a lot of what we
have to do is that educational piece.
We're also engaged--and this is not a new program, but it's
something that we've reinvigorated: We've re-engaged with a
memo of understanding with the Government of Mexico, for
example, whereby we have signed a memo of understanding to
basically ensure that workers that come in from Mexico are
aware of the----
Mr. Cardin. But if I understand your H-2A restriction about
the foreign employment agencies being prohibited from being
compensated, is that what you said? Did I hear you correctly on
that?
Ms. Lemus. The foreign labor contractors are not to receive
any payment from an employee. And it's up to the employer to
pay all fees, et cetera, and contractually state that they--in
the contract with their agents--that they may not charge them
any fees.
Mr. Cardin. And again, how are you going to enforce that if
you don't have your own inspectors out, or some way of finding
out what's going on? It's wonderful to have cooperation, but I
don't think you're going to have cooperation from unscrupulous
foreign employment agencies or the workers who are afraid of
losing their jobs.
Ms. Lemus. That is correct. There's an audit process
through the employment training that actually certifies the
visas. Prior to, they look at the procedures of the paperwork
if for any reason there are any types of violations whatsoever.
And there is a new audit process that began, I want to say,
last year. So it's relatively new, but it's something that's
been added. So after the fact, they are continuously checking
the information from the workers.
The workers do come forward, not as often as we would like
and not as well as we would like, so we've also increased our
partnerships with local community-based organizations, faith-
based organizations, et cetera, but also State and local law
enforcement so that they can come forward as well. Sometimes,
the workers do not wish to speak on their own behalves, and
they have to have these third parties intervene, including, for
example, the consulates.
Mr. Cardin. Can either one of you follow up with us with
how the 2008 provisions about training consulars on the
issuance of visas, do we have any direct information on
oversight as to how that has been enforced?
Amb. CdeBaca. Certainly, Senator. One of the things that
our consular officers now receive during ConGen, which is the
basic consular officers' course--the trafficking victims
identification, the indicators, et cetera, are now taught
during the basic course. So it's not just kind of remedial
training like it had been in the past. Additionally, an online
training course is available for the consular officers out in
the field for updates and for keeping current.
But one of the things that we've seen that is probably the
best training is the repetition of the training. You're
familiar with, in the TVPRA of '08, the requirement that we
work with the nongovernmental organizations to come up with a
brochure that would be given to many of the work-based or
employment-based visa, non-immigrant categories. And that's the
``know your rights'' brochure that is now given out. It's
actually reviewed by the consular officer with the immigrant
during the interview on the visa line.
I can't say that it's always 100 percent--it kind of
depends on what's happening at that exact moment. But one of
the things that we've seen is, it's got the 24-hour hotline on
it, they have received upwards of a thousand calls since this
went into place a couple years ago. Some of those calls are
general wage-hour type of calls, people wanting to know about
housing conditions, people wanting to know about a whole host
of worker rights. But some of those calls are human trafficking
calls. And it's something that we work with the Human
Trafficking Resource Center and with these task forces the
Department of Justice and ICE and others run to make sure that
they respond when there's an allegation that's coming forth.
Mr. Cardin. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, let me just point out:
I think it's important that our staff really review the
analysis of the United States in the TIP report. Let me just
point out one nuance here that was in this report dealing with
benefits. And as you know, immigrants, non-nationals, are
entitled to very few benefits in this country. And if they are
certified as being a foreign victim, then they are entitled to
certain benefits.
And even though there was a 250-percent increase in
certifications for victims in the last year, there was no
increase in funding for those programs.
We already have a relatively--well, we already have a
hostile attitude in this country on benefits for non-nationals.
And we're dealing here with an area where we have either
potential victims or victims that it seems to me we need to
conform to international standards as to how we deal with
governmental services available to this class of individuals.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Smith. Commissioner Cohen.
Mr. Cohen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Ambassador, do we
have--and it's hard to quantify, but could you give me the
three or four worst countries that are involved in the slave
trade?
Amb. CdeBaca. Well, I think, Mr. Cohen, there's a couple of
ways to cut that particular orange. Whether it's the raw
numbers, I think that most interlocutors that look at it
certainly in the report indicates that South Asia, that South
Asian countries continue to have perhaps the largest numbers--
India, Nepal, Bangladesh, et cetera. East Asia and the Pacific
region continue to be of great concern as far as the numbers
are concerned.
But one of the things that we often are trying to balance
as far as saying, what's the worst country that there would be
to be a trafficking victim--and probably our heart goes out to
most of the folks in the AF region, the Africa region, because
you're talking about countries that have so few functioning
governmental structures, rule of law that's not really there.
Even if there is an anti-trafficking law, even if they are
active in the AU up in Addis, which does an anti-trafficking
day for the African child--against child trafficking--on June
16th each year, that doesn't necessarily mean it translates out
into the villages, out into the places where these kids are
enslaved, whether it's in the cocoa plantations, whether it's
the fishing fleet on Lake Volta or otherwise.
So without necessarily going into a particular country in
Africa, we think that Africa is deserving of a lot more of
attention. We can't take our eyes off the prize as far as the
countries that are continually of concern in East Asia and
South Asia. But we feel like the African children and the
African men and women deserve to be free from slavery and
involuntary servitude just as much as their partners.
Mr. Cohen. What I was thinking of--and I feel like it's
going to be difficult. I was imagining that maybe Ukraine and
some of the more Western countries might have had more of a
involvement. But if the State Department has any sanctions
against countries, and if that could happen----
Amb. CdeBaca. This is something that is one of the tools in
our tool chest: Each year with the trafficking report, the
ranking of the countries from Tier 1 down to Tier 3--following
that Tier 3 designation can come sanctioning. And we've seen
great movement, for instance, just in the last year from the
Government of Moldova, which was very publicly concerned that
sanctions might kick in and that sanctions, not just the
sanctions from the TVPA--but perhaps even more importantly, the
TVPA requires the United States to vote against a country
that's on Tier 3 in the IMF, World Bank, et cetera.
And in the Millennium Challenge Corporation, we've seen a
lot of movement on countries who are concerned about their MCC
money. Because then you're talking about some real money. So
we've seen just in the last year the Government of Moldova,
which doesn't necessarily have it to spare, spend almost
$900,000 on victim care.
Ukraine is still a problem, but not necessarily with its
back against the wall the way it was 10 years ago because of
the number of projects both at the OSCE, the U.S. Government
projects, AID, Justice Department, et cetera. But we've seen
that notion of sanctions, and the threat of sanctions, as
something that is moving these countries.
Mr. Cohen. As a judiciary graduate, are there laws that we
should be looking at in judiciary you can recommend to us to
strengthen what the body of law is in our country?
Amb. CdeBaca. Well, one of the things that we look at each
year in the minimum standards when we're putting together the
rankings of the TIP report is the sufficiency of the laws in
these countries. At the end of the day, what we've been very
adamant on is that they have a law that's not based on old
notions of people being moved across international borders--
that's kind of the 1880s' version of human trafficking--but
rather focusing upon the enslavement, focusing on the abuse of
the people so they can see them not as an illegal migrant but
as a victim of slavery.
So through the ABA, through the International Organization
for Migration, through U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime and
bilaterally, just directly as the United States, we've been
working with countries to try to get these modern anti-
trafficking laws passed. About 120 countries have done so since
the passage of our Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which
was one of the first ones and therefore the models.
But what we've seen in some countries is, they can have the
best law on the books, but if they don't go out and use it then
it's a failed promise. So we're having to come back in behind
those laws, make sure that they mean something in the real
world.
Mr. Cohen. How about laws here in our country, about
employers or landlords or tenants and/or employees that are
involved either directly or secondarily in labor trafficking?
Amb. CdeBaca. One of the most positive things about the
2008 Trafficking Victims Protection reauthorization was moving
from a full-on knowledge standard to a reckless-disregard
standard for those who profit from human trafficking. And so
what we're hoping is both the government--but then there's also
civil liability under the trafficking act, which means that a
good plaintiff's lawyer out there might take this and run with
it.
But that notion of going after the hotel owner who knows
that the pimps are bringing the underage girls or the women
into the hotel and profiting from that, if they're knowingly
looking the other way, if there's a farmer--you know, when I
was at the Justice Department, I prosecuted a farm-labor
contractor who was putting a work crew onto the same fields
that one of my predecessors had prosecuted somebody 20 years
before. And the farmer was the son of the man who had watched
this other farm-labor contractor allow slavery.
But at the time, we didn't have this provision. So the hope
is, now this provision with the reckless disregard, that'll be
a way to hold, whether it's farmers, hotel owners, et cetera,
accountable in a new way.
Mr. Cohen. Is there confiscation of property involved with
those laws?
Amb. CdeBaca. There is, although to date, most of the asset
forfeiture has been against the trafficker, the direct
trafficker, rather than somebody who's knowingly or recklessly
profiting from the trafficking. But I think that that's
something that we've seen the Civil Rights Division act very
aggressively on. It tends to focus one's mind when the domestic
servant--say, for instance, in a case that was prosecuted out
of Wisconsin--a domestic servant who has been held captive in a
house for 19 years ends up owning that house because the
government comes in and takes it away from the people who
enslaved her. That gets a lot of attention, and it should.
Mr. Cohen. Yes. I think it should, too. What do we have in
the way of undercover operations? Do we have any of those?
Amb. CdeBaca. One of the things that's been tough about
undercover operations is because we're dealing with human
beings, it's kind of like doing the human experiment trials in
a university setting: The level of controls that one needs to
have as far as a controlled purchase, or something like that,
becomes very challenging.
But we have in the United States done a number of
innovative and proactive law enforcement approaches that I'd
certainly be happy to brief you on offline; perhaps we could
have some of our colleagues from DOJ and ICE as well to talk
about some of those things that are being done.
Mr. Cohen. I was just thinking--now, you were in Judiciary
when Stephen Colbert came, when he did the migrant worker day--
maybe we could get Geraldo and let him do that.
Amb. CdeBaca. [Laughter.] Well, it's interesting because I
think there has been some very effective undercover work. I
think I saw in the audience today Ben Skinner, who in his book,
``A Crime So Monstrous,'' talks about how he basically set his
stopwatch when he left his apartment one morning in New York,
and within 6 hours he had bought a Haitian child for slavery.
And I think that that says a lot not only of what world we live
in as far as involuntary servitude, but the kind of
investigative reporting and the kind of undercover work that
needs to be done if we're ever going to break this.
Mr. Cohen. Thank you, and thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Smith. Commissioner Cohen. Let me ask just two very
brief questions to Ambassador CdeBaca: The J-1 visa program, as
you know, brings in about 100,000 college students from around
the world to work in the United States. Some work on the Jersey
Shore, and they often do work in the summer resort industry.
And there have been increasing numbers of reports of abuse by
third-party brokers and unsupervised businesses. Associated
Press did an expose on this, as you know.
And my question is--and the national human trafficking
hotline--let me just add this--has received, as I think you
know, Mr. Ambassador, 369 calls from J-1 visa holders on the
work and travel program from young people who are experiencing
trafficking and other forms of exploitation from last summer
alone.
Strip clubs and adult entertainment companies openly
solicit J-1 workers even though government regulations ban
students from taking those jobs that might bring the Department
of State into disrepute. And I'm wondering what could be done
to stop the abuse of J-1 visas by labor recruiters and
businesses, ensuring that students who come here have a safe
and humane experience, and not one of exploitation.
And second, on China--and I do hope when the designations
of Tier 3 are listed that the Department and your office is
very seriously considering the designation of Tier 3 for China
both on the labor and sex trafficking area.
But I'm wondering what kind of data calls you've gotten
from--and information from our Embassy and other sources about
the exploitations of a Chinese work force. We know there's no
OSHA protections whatsoever; they have in excess of 125,000
deaths directly attributable to occupational hazards. There's
no labor unions. And those who argue for labor unions are
summarily sent to the laogai and tortured.
There is an MOU, as you know so well, that dates back to
the George Bush--the first administration on prison labor, and
it's not worth the paper it's printed on because it requires
U.S. investigators to submit any complaint to the Chinese
authorities, and then they investigate and report back to us.
There's no onsite inspections, no independent verification. And
Chinese workers, as we know, get 10 to 50 cents per hour for
work, and many are in sweatshop conditions dotted throughout
all of China.
So if ever there was unfair trading practice, I think it
is--and the exploitation of labor fits that bill. Doesn't that
constitute labor trafficking?
Amb. CdeBaca. Thank you, Mr. Smith. One of the things that
of course, with the Summer Work and Travel Program--and this is
something that when I have been in Eastern Europe, especially
Ukraine and Russia, that we've been hearing about some of these
concerns.
At the end of the day, this is a program which I think, you
know, millions of children, millions of students have been able
to come in the United States over the last 50 years. We think
that it's been not just a success story of U.S. public
diplomacy, but had a lot to do with getting people behind the
Iron Curtain to be able to understand who America was, who
Americans were. And we want to continue that with the countries
especially in Eastern Europe.
One of the things that the department has done, because we
recognize that the young age and limited sophistication of some
participants have contributed to a potential vulnerability for
trafficking initiatives that are targeted at the participants--
and so to minimize the risk, early this year we issued an
interim final rule--it's April 25th of 2011--in the Federal
Register which makes some changes to the program, sharpens the
program as far as a pilot program for the six countries:
Belarus, Bulgaria, Moldova, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine. And
these are the six countries, frankly, that our law enforcement
agencies and our Embassies and other had identified as those
that should be of concern.
The program and the pilot is requiring a 100-percent pre-
placement in jobs--no bringing folks over through the program,
and then getting them jobs here; a full vetting of all the job
offers; and enhanced monitoring.
But one of the things that the interim final rule
explicitly did, because we thought that it needs to be in there
in no small part--so then if someone brings someone over and
does this, they might not just be violating the terms of the
program, but depending on what promises or contracts were
given, could be reached through visa fraud, fraud in foreign
labor contracting, or even the trafficking statutes--is that no
Summer Work and Travel participant can be put in any position
in the ``adult industry,'' and they can't be put into domestic-
servant positions in private homes. Both of those are things
that we certainly know make participants vulnerable to
trafficking, and are basically a violation of the promise that
the United States and the program is making to these parents
overseas that their children, their students are coming to the
United States to learn the best of us.
So we're committed to policing this program and to not
tolerating any of these types of abuses within it.
As far as China is concerned, one of the things that we've
seen in the last months in China is in the wake of their
joining the Palermo Protocol is a little bit more of analysis
from the Chinese academics, as well as some parts of the
Chinese Government, the IMOAT--I-M-O-A-T, which is the inter-
ministerial anti-trafficking coordinating body--looking at what
they need to do to come into compliance with the Palermo
Protocol. They have a way to go.
And we've talked to them about this; I've raised it when in
Beijing. Especially, there's been a problem of labor
trafficking because up until recently--up till just this year--
men were not included in the definition of trafficking, and
unofficial workgroups were not. If you were part of a work
unit, then you could be considered a trafficking victim if you
were a woman. But a man who is working in the underground
economy would not have been covered by the trafficking laws.
So those cases that we've known about for the last 5 or 6
years--the horrible cases of the brick workers, the men in the
blacksmith shops, the miners, et cetera, case after case after
case coming to light--and having a lot of--even with the issues
of being able to get the word out in China, cases that have
gotten a lot of attention in China, those cases legally were
not part of their definition of trafficking. So we've raised
this with them, but we stand ready to continue to work with our
Chinese counterparts on the law enforcement side especially as
to what they need to do to address this.
One thing that we are seeing as far as some modicum of
worker protection is for internal migration. The Chinese
Government has been working with the International Labor
Organization and others, so we're seeing a little bit more as
far as materials, know-your-rights type of things, kind of like
what we've talked about for workers going to other countries.
But it's the West-to-East pattern of internal migration in
China, even to the point of having it--you know, deck of cards
with all of the horrible things that could happen to you when
you're in Southeast China before anybody gets on a train.
But we certainly share many of your concerns, and we've
raised many of these when I've had a chance to deal with our
Chinese counterparts.
Mr. Smith. Yes, just a followup: How difficult will it be
for a corporation to live up to the spirit and letter of S.
bill 657, the Senate bill in California, when some of or many
of its feeder parts are made or manufactured in China, where--
as Harry Wu has documented over and over again, the great
laogai survivor who is now a great champion of human rights
here in the United States--since there's no access?
And very often, a colonel by day is also the CEO of that
particular corporation, and has the full protection of the
government and the People's Liberation Army so that it's very
hard to penetrate that corporate veil. How----
Amb. CdeBaca. We think that the California bill will have a
big impact. We've seen companies in China respond when there
have been other issues often, whether it's lead in the paint or
other adulterated materials. But this is something that--Mr.
Cohen's point earlier about the wood in the guitar--
unfortunately, sometimes it's easier to test that wood and see
that it's an endangered tree; it's easier to test the animal
product and see that it's from an endangered species than it is
sometimes to look at a factory and see whether or not somebody
was enslaved there.
So the level of inquiry that we hope that the California
transparency act will enable us to proceed with--certainly, the
hope is that we can put the freedom of a person at the same
level as the pelt of some kind of exotic animal.
Mr. Smith. Do you anticipate that the administration might
suggest its own language that would parallel the California
bill?
Amb. CdeBaca. I think that at this point, we definitely
want to see how the California bill comes online. We want to be
supportive of the effort. I think that we'd certainly want to
work with you and others, if that was something that was under
active consideration, whether for the re-authorization or
otherwise. But at this point, we're very much looking to see
what we hope is going to be the success of the California bill
before we get into the middle of it, as it were.
Mr. Smith. I will thank our two very distinguished
witnesses for your testimony and for your leadership. And thank
you so much.
I'd now like to invite our second panel to the witness
table, beginning with Nancy A. Donaldson, Director of the
International Labor Organization at the Washington office.
Before joining ILO, Ms. Donaldson was Vice President for Dutko
Global Advisors, where she was an Advisor to the ILO Washington
office from 1997 to 2005. She was Vice President for Energy,
Education, Technology, Trade, and International Issues at the
Downey McGrath Group. Prior to that, she was in the Washington
office, Director for Women's Action for a New Direction, and a
lawyer in private practice.
We'll then hear from Neha Misra, who is a Senior Specialist
on Human Trafficking and Migrant Worker Programs for the
Solidarity Center, an international worker-rights NGO based in
Washington, DC, and part of the AFL-CIO. She has worked for
many years in international policy, advising on migration and
human trafficking issues. She serves as a member of the Board
of Directors for the Global Workers Justice Alliance, and as
chair of the public interest committee for the North American
South Asian Bar Association.
In addition to her position as Senior Specialist at the
Solidarity Center, Ms. Misra also serves as Senior Program
Officer in the Africa regional office. Her expertise on global
trafficking issues was initially developed in Indonesia, where
she was the Deputy Country Director and Program Manager for the
Solidarity Center's Counter Trafficking Project. She worked in
Indonesia for over 5 years, starting with the Solidarity Center
as the Director of its Democracy Project.
Before assignment in Indonesia, she worked in Bosnia on
post-war elections and democracy, and in the United States as
Senior Attorney Advisor with the U.S. Department of Justice.
While at DOJ, she also served as the President of the American
Federation of Government Employees.
And finally, we'll hear from Julia Ormond, who is an
internationally admired and successful actress, and has played
roles in numerous motion pictures and TV shows, including
``Legends of the Fall,'' ``Sabrina,'' ``The Curious Case of
Benjamin Button,'' ``First Knight,'' and so many others. And
she was awarded an Emmy in 2010.
Julia Ormond has an inspirational record of advocacy on
human rights issues, and has been strongly involved in the
issue of human trafficking since becoming aware of it firsthand
experience on the plight of trafficked women in Eastern Europe.
She also served in a number of roles in international NGOs,
most recently as President of the Alliance to Stop Slavery and
End Trafficking, or ASSET, an organization she founded in 2007.
ASSET is an advocacy NGO dedicated to the systematic
eradication of slavery chiefly through giving the victims of
slavery a voice on their own. The group was the leading sponsor
of the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act of 2010,
which we discussed with the earlier panel, which tackles
slavery and human trafficking by requiring companies to report
on the sources of their supply chains.
Previously in 1999, Ms. Ormond also co-founded FilmAid
International, which aims to inform and empower refugee
communities through film. In 2005, she was named as the United
Nations Goodwill Ambassador Against Slavery and Trafficking.
She is no stranger to Capitol Hill, having previously testified
in the House as well as before the California State legislature
again on issues related to human trafficking.
So please, if you would begin first with Ms. Donaldson, Ms.
Misra, and then--batting cleanup will be Julia Ormond.
NANCY A. DONALDSON, DIRECTOR, WASHINGTON OFFICE OF THE
INTERNATIONAL LABOR ORGANIZATION [ILO]
Ms. Donaldson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Commissioner
Cohen, and the Members of the Commission, for inviting me to
testify today. I am representing the International Labor
Organization, which is a specialized agency of the United
Nations.
Each year, millions of people leave their homes and cross
national borders in search of better prospects and greater
security for themselves and their families. Ninety percent of
all migrants are workers and their families. Migrants bring
skills and initiative to advanced economies, to host countries.
They also benefit origin countries, sending money home and
transfer of technology and critical skills.
Today, we are here to discuss urgent problems often faced
by vulnerable migrant populations and individuals--criminal
trafficking and forced labor--and the actions that the ILO and
others are taking to eradicate these abuses.
Migrants are vulnerable to exploitation and discrimination.
In the extreme, irregular migration includes trafficking,
smuggling, sexual exploitation and violence. As ILO's recent
report highlights, forced labor today is the antithesis of
decent work, and a global problem affecting almost every
country in the world.
Traditional slavery is still found in some parts of Africa,
while forced labor or coercive recruitment is present in many
countries of Latin America, parts of the Caribbean, and
elsewhere. In Europe and North America, an increasing number of
women and children are victims of traffickers who sell them
into forced prostitution or sweatshops.
The ILO estimates that there are at least 12.3 million
persons in forced labor today. Eighty percent, or 9.8 million
people, were exploited by private agents. Most victims are
poverty-stricken people in Asia and Latin America of those
figures. Yet, over 360,000 women and men are in forced labor in
industrialized countries--OSCE countries--trafficked for either
labor or sexual exploitation. Some 56 percent of all persons in
forced labor are women and girls, and children under 18 years
of age make up about half, nearly half of forced laborers.
The ILO has taken up the issue of protecting domestic
workers vigorously. Last year, the ILO International Labor
Conference began consideration of a domestic workers'
convention. It will be expected to take it up for the second
final round in June of this year. We very much appreciate the
strong support of the United States in working on the domestic
worker protections, and also the OSCE.
One principal responsibility of the ILO is drawing up and
overseeing international labor standards. Strong enforcement of
labor standards worldwide, levels the playing field for all
workers, including American workers and industries. In today's
globalized economy, international labor standards are also an
essential component for ensuring that the growth of the global
economy provides benefits to all.
The ILO has pioneered the development of international
standards prohibiting forced labor and for the governance of
labor migration and the protection of migrant workers since the
1930s. Two of the eight core conventions among core labor
standards set out prohibitions on all forms of forced labor.
There are also two conventions, 97 and 193, that govern
migration for employment. Also, in 1990, the U.N. International
Convention on the Protection of Rights of All Migrant Workers
and Members of Their Families was established.
The ILO has two specialized programs: the International
Migration Program and the Special Action Program to Combat
Forced Labor, which provides technical assistance to ILO
countries and partners with the challenges of labor migration
and forced labor. The ILO is promoting a global alliance with
partner agencies, pooling their efforts to eliminate forced
labor worldwide by 2015. The OSCE is a major partner in this
endeavor, and we do a lot of things together.
ILO's International Migration Program supports ILO member
states in combating discrimination against migrants and helping
their social and economic integration. Currently, the program
is engaged in 14 technical cooperation projects either funded
by or implemented in OSCE countries, working to develop
effective migration systems and policies and to strengthen
government institutions and educate migrants on their rights
and the services available. ILO has been at the forefront of
generating and sharing data and knowledge on these subjects to
raise public awareness and increase pressure for action. ILO's
initial body of research was seminal, as it provided the basic
facts and figures on modern forced labor, raising the global
pressure for policy change.
I would like to emphasize that improving data collection on
these issues is of paramount importance. Significant gaps in
understanding the quantitative dimension of forced labor and
human trafficking remain. I will say that the U.S. law has
brought forward more data collection, which we think is
extremely important.
The ILO has developed and disseminated courses, guidances,
training materials on key aspects of forced labor and
trafficking. And cooperation between the OSCE and the ILO on
research and training has helped our economic partners to
access important knowledge and expertise.
The ILO assists governments. We work hand in hand with our
183 member governments in designing and implementing projects
on the ground. Through our Decent Work Country Programmes
strategies, the ILO works with employers, workers and
governments to set out agreed national priorities in the world
of work. Experience shows with--that with careful awareness
raising, consensus can be built to include sensitive subjects
such as forced labor among the core national priorities.
In Brazil, the ILO has been working with our social
partners on the issue of forced labor and global supply chains.
The abolition of slave labor and the worst forms of child labor
are a key priority for Brazil and their national agenda for
decent work. With grant support from the State Department, ILO
worked with companies and continues to work with the
government, companies and civil society to promote new
understanding and strategies for engagement. The key objective
is to strengthen the global alliance against forced labor by
reducing the risks of trafficking and forced labor facing
Brazilian suppliers and international buyers. And we work with
seven tiers of suppliers just in Brazil sometimes.
I want to leave the Commission with three key points. One,
good migration policies and the abolition of forced labor are
challenges for every county, whether industrialized, emerging
economies or less developed. We believe that true gains in the
governance of migration and against forced labor must happen in
a multilateral context.
Two, the ILO takes a rights-based approach to these issues.
In that, we are very harmonious with this Commission. We are
devoted to promoting social justice and decent work in
recognizing human and labor rights.
Three, the governance of migration and forced labor
deserves a multi-stakeholder approach. The ILO works with
governments and its strong social partners to reduce irregular
migration and end forced labor and ensure protection of
workers' rights. We have enjoyed fruitful partnerships with G/
TIP, DRL, and ILAB represented here today, and we respect and
seek more ways to work with the Solidarity Center. We are
dedicated to continue working together with our social partners
and advocates to improve migrants' conditions and to end forced
labor and human trafficking around the world. Thank you very
much.
Mr. Smith. Thank you very much, and thank you for the good
work of ILO over these many decades.
I'd like to now ask Ms. Misra if she would proceed.
NEHA MISRA, SENIOR SPECIALIST, MIGRATION AND HUMAN TRAFFICKING,
SOLIDARITY CENTER
Ms. Misra. Thank you, Chairman Smith and Commissioner
Cohen, for this opportunity to testify today. I'd like to ask
that my full written testimony be submitted to the record so
that I can be very brief with you----
Mr. Smith. Sure.
Ms. Misra [continuing]. And we can get to some questions.
Mr. Smith. Without objection, so ordered.
Ms. Misra. OK. The Solidarity Center is an International
Labor-Rights Organization working in over 60 countries around
the world, and really appreciates the U.S. Helsinki Commission
focus in this hearing on trafficking for labor exploitation and
the focus on abusive, unethical and illegal business practices
that contribute to human trafficking and forced labor. We've
seen firsthand how violations of worker rights and the lack of
labor standards and protections for workers increase their
vulnerability to human trafficking. But we still see in the
media and when you talk to the public about human trafficking,
many times you'll hear people talk about it as the crime of
organized syndicates, criminal gangs and underground criminals,
which, of course, is the case in many instances. But we are
also seeing increasingly around the world trafficking for labor
exploitation happening in the context of legal structures of
employment and business, with the traffickers being employers
and labor recruiters, and not gang members or members of
organized crime.
And so, that's what I want to focus on today in my
testimony. While trafficking for labor exploitation has many
facets, several major trends in our globalized world endanger
workers, particularly those at most risk in the need and those
in the most need of protection. In developed economies like the
United States and Europe, we're seeing an increase in the cases
of trafficked immigrant teachers, nurses, construction and
service-sector workers, all in destination countries with valid
visas, shining 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 structural failures.
Of particular concern to us--and Chairman Smith, you talked
about this in the Senate, and in the earlier testimony we heard
some about this--are temporary labor-migration schemes. Around
the world we hear these referred to as guest-worker sponsorship
or circular-migration programs. But these are increasingly
being promoted by governments around the world to fill the
demand for cheap labor. In practice, these schemes create a
legalized system and structure for employers to exploit workers
and increase workers' vulnerability to human trafficking and
other forms of severe labor exploitation.
Such programs have been plagued by a long history of
abuses, ranging from labor violations to visa fraud, debt
bondage, involuntary servitude and trafficking for labor
exploitation. This includes, among many others, the U.S. H-2
visa guest-worker program. And we heard testimony from our
colleague from the Department of Labor about the H-2A, but I
would like to emphasize the H-2B visa program; seasonal
agricultural programs in Canada, such as the Canadian-Guatemala
Program; seasonal agricultural programs in Europe such as
Moldovan migrant workers going to Italy; and the kafala, or
sponsorship system, in the Gulf Cooperation Council states.
In my written testimony, I go into detail about some of
these abuses, but we already talked about that, so I'll skip
over that, but just want to emphasize two common themes that we
see come out of these temporary-visa programs.
One of them, we talked about a little bit earlier is the
role of foreign-labor recruiters or employment agencies
sometimes also called foreign-labor contractors, and taking
advantage of the lack of labor rights and inherent structural
failures in these programs to exploit immigrant workers. The
other theme that we see is the need to provide greater
protections to workers and the opportunities for them to report
abuses and advocate for their own rights.
We've already talked a lot about the issues of debt bondage
as some of the problems of foreign labor recruiters. I want to
get to some of the solutions. The Solidarity Center is a proud
member of the Alliance to End Slavery and Trafficking, or
ATEST, which is a coalition of 12 organizations including
Julia's organizations and many groups that are currently in
this room. And we have some suggestions for the reauthorization
of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2011 that would
help increase regulation of foreign-labor recruiters that we
think is key to ending trafficking.
In 2008, as you know, Chairman Smith, there were actually
some of these provisions included in the House version of the
bill. And then unfortunately it didn't pass the Senate, so it
didn't end up in the final version. But we would really like to
see it back in the 2011 version. And what we've seen is a
number of service providers in the United States have said that
greater regulation of foreign-labor recruiters and eliminating
debt bondage would go a long way to preventing human
trafficking in the United States.
So we're recommending, among many recommendations, first of
all, strict elimination of fees, that no foreign-labor
contractor agent or employee of a foreign-labor contractor
should be allowed to assess any fee whatsoever, including visa
fees, processing fees, transportation fees, legal expenses,
placement fees and other costs to any worker. And employers, if
they paid this to the foreign-labor contractor, should not be
allowed to pass this on to workers.
The other key element that we would like to see in the
TVPRA of 2011 is greater disclosure, that workers are in a
written contract both in English and the primary language of
the worker, the written contract disclose fully the terms and
conditions of work; and the details of that are in my written
testimony.
Senator Cardin asked Ambassador CdeBaca earlier about some
of the role of the consular officers. And I have to say that
that pamphlet that was mandated in 2008, TVPRA, has made a
great difference. We have a number of service providers who
specifically say that workers in the H-2A program and others
who have been given T visas to the United States say they found
out about services through that pamphlet. And so we think
greater disclosure in workers' contracts itself would really go
a long way in helping to prevent trafficking.
We also think that registration of foreign-labor recruiters
is key. And our recommendation includes administrative
procedures for the Department of Labor to register foreign-
labor recruiters and that employers should be required to use a
certified, registered labor recruiter or face penalties.
The last two pieces that we'd like to recommend are
enforcement--I mentioned that we recommend an administrative
procedure within the Department of Labor, but that also workers
need to be given access to civil remedies and rights to access
U.S. courts to be able to enforce their rights.
And then finally, accountability; that workers must be
protected from retaliation and employers must be held
accountable for the actions of foreign-labor contractors that
they hire. One of the big things that we are seeing as
organizations that work on human trafficking for labor
exploitation in the United States is that the threat of
deportation is unfortunately being used against workers to stop
them from reporting violations and from getting benefits of the
T visa program. And we've actually seen a number of cases
recently in the United States where it's taken years for
workers to be identified as trafficking victims and get T
visas, and that threat of deportation being used against them
in keeping them suppressed.
And so we would also like to recommend a change in the 2011
TVPRA that provides temporary immigration relief to
whistleblowers, to workers who raise the alarm about cases but
that it might take them some time to be able to be found as
victims of trafficking, so that during that time, they don't
have to fear deportation, they don't have to fear threats; and
instead, there can be an investigation done about the abuses
that they're raising.
Just the last thing that I'll mention is--I know Julia's
going to talk a lot more about supply chains, so I'm not going
to focus a lot on that--but that when I was looking at the--
when I was asked to testify today and looking at the topic for
this hearing, I thought it was important to mention another
major trend in the global economy is the use of trafficking for
slave labor and slavery victims all along supply chains; and
that when employers, whether they're buyers, multinational
corporations or others, demand cheap labor or unrealistic
pricing structures, they should not be surprised to find severe
labor abuses, including slavery in their supply chains.
Similarly, when employers contract out or hire unregulated
subcontracted suppliers, they should not be surprised to find
that there are trafficking victims in the production lines. And
when employers refuse to enforce or claim that it is too
difficult to monitor adherence to core labor standards in their
supply chains, they will find forced labor, debt bondage and
other severe forms of labor exploitation. And Julia, I know,
will talk about the California law. ATEST is also advocating
that it be included nationally in the TVPRA. But the one thing
that at Solidarity Center we'd like to point out is that we
think that it needs to be looked at about how the United States
does investigations abroad of products that are made with
forced labor or slavery.
And just as an example, the Solidarity Center had a report
in 2007 called ``The True Cost of Shrimp,'' which looked at the
seafood-processing industry both in Thailand, in Bangladesh.
And we found severe cases of forced labor, human trafficking,
debt bondage, especially Burmese migrant workers in Thailand.
As a result of our report, the U.S. Senate asked ICE to do an
investigation about what was in our report. And so ICE did what
they call a ``jump investigation,'' and they went to both
Thailand and Bangladesh to investigate.
The problem is that they have to notify, of course, the
Thai Government that they were coming. And our partners on the
ground reported that basically the supply chains are completely
cleansed. They had 2 weeks' notice to know that they were
coming. The books were changed. A lot of the Burmese migrant
workers were sent off. And we have a lot of anecdotes I could
tell you about that, but that basically ICE said to us that
they had to say that they did not find anything that was in our
report there. And it was basically because they had to let the
government know.
And so we'd like to advocate to try to find a better way to
do these investigations so that we ensure that products made
with forced labor, human trafficking and slavery to not enter
the U.S. market.
Thank you so much for this opportunity to testify. I look
forward to your questions.
Mr. Smith. Ms. Misra, thank you very much for your
testimony and your work. And now, Julia Ormond, you're
recognized.
JULIA ORMOND, FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT, THE ALLIANCE TO STOP
SLAVERY AND END TRAFFICKING
Ms. Ormond. I learn something every time at these things.
I've learned so much from the previous testimonies. Thank you,
Mr. Chairman, and distinguished Members of the Commission and
staff. I initially engaged about the issue of slavery and human
trafficking shocked and spurred into action by reports of sex
trafficking. Nothing then seemed to me more heinous than the
repeated rape and violence that its victims endured.
The wide variety of the faces of slavery that I met--the
first were California-based. Other travels around the world
took me to Russia, Ghana, Thailand, Cambodia, India, and
Europe, and provided me with a creepy and shocking perspective
of how slavery pervades my own life, how I am unwittingly
connected to it and ultimately connected to its systemic
violence. People often ask--it was a question that came up--
where in the world is this worst? My answer is always in my
home.
It's simply not possible to sit easily in Los Angeles and
forget the enslaved children I have met, children that I have
walked away and left to an uncertain fate. And what keeps me up
at night, what haunts me, are all of the victims' stories. I'll
never forget the girl who crawled out of an eight-floor window
for fear of her life in sex slavery. But I can equally never
forget the child enslaved in the fishing industry, who jumped
ship into the Thai Sea to float on a barrel for 2 days and a
night before being rescued because that was his safest option;
or the child who was chained, whipped, and scarred for life
while maybe working on our carpets; or the child soldier forced
to burn his village, kill his mother, and rape his sister for
someone else's war; or the enslaved garment worker making my
clothing or the footage of a Mayan agricultural slave in
Florida picking my tomatoes. These people are no less deserving
of all of our compassion than those forced into sex slavery.
All victims of trafficking and slavery deserve our attention
and our commitment.
In 2007, I founded the Alliance to Stop Slavery and End
Trafficking, otherwise known as ASSET. ASSET's an advocacy
organization dedicated to eradicating slavery and trafficking
through amplifying the victim's voice and supporting systemic
solutions. I have come to define enslavement as when one person
completely controls another person, uses violence or violent
threat to maintain that control, exploits them economically and
pays them effectively nothing. Trafficking is a process of
enslaving someone.
Under the tenure of Ambassador CdeBaca, the 2010 Annual
Report to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons stated that
more people are trafficked into forced labor than commercial
sex. Yet ask any member of the public what proportion of this
issue is sex trafficking, and the usual response is about 80
percent. The International Labor Organization has recently
stated that for every one person forced into the sex trade,
nine people around the world are forced to work.
The forced labor of these victims taints many of the
products that we purchase and rely on every day. To quote the
TIP report: It is not possible ``to get dressed, drive to work,
talk on your phone, or eat a meal without touching products
tainted by'' slavery.
The United Nations has repeatedly stated that trafficking
has shifted from trafficking weapons to trafficking in drugs to
trafficking in people, and now into children. The United
Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has cited that the profits
from trafficking in people into Europe has now overtaken the
profits in the trafficking of drugs into Europe. Yet, in the
United States we spend more in 1 day still fighting the war on
drugs than we spend in an entire year fighting the trafficking
of people.
So we all have a role to play in supporting the solutions,
and solutions, there are many. Every single place I travelled
to, I specifically sought out solutions that just await the
resources to scale to meet a drastic need.
In order to resource the solutions, however, it's vital to
get the story straight. And media can play a crucial role. Sex
will always sell, whether the story is good or bad. But we need
the media to cover the issue fairly, proportionately. We need
media outlets to set aside deliberate resistance of losing
advertising revenue, and articulate how businesses can use
their influence over supply chains to recreate the map to
illuminate the worst areas of poverty in the world where
slavery and trafficking can take hold.
As advocates, we need to do a better job articulating to
the public the enormous challenges that today's complex supply
chains present to business. We need to articulate that the CEO
is most often not the criminal, that this is criminal activity
tainting their supply chain most often around raw materials,
but as we have heard today, on many other points of intersect
along the supply chain, just as shoplifting is criminal
activity occurring at the other end of the supply chain, at the
point of purchase.
Only by rediscovering the supply chain and influencing each
step of it by encouraging best practices can we implement real
solutions, can the NGO work with the CEO. A supply chain
without a policy of best practices is like a computer without
virus protection: You will most likely become infected with a
virus or tainted by labor violations.
We need companies to come to the table and collaborate in
finding better solutions to work with governments and the NGO
community who can offer victims safety and rehabilitation, and
can assist vulnerable communities. We cannot accurately and
efficiently access victims without the assistance of companies
that influence infected supply chains.
I think one of the most crucial pieces that I've learned is
that this is a verification of a process: Whether you are
growing, picking, selling tomatoes out of Florida, or
purchasing couture clothing, you will find slaves. The point is
that the better your practices along the supply chain, the less
you will find them, and the better your practices, the better
your response will be at that moment.
ASSET's solution was to be primary sponsor of the
California Transparency in Supply Chains Act of 2010, authored
brilliantly by Senator Darrell Steinberg, who I have to thank
deeply. This law came into effect January 2011, and requires
major retailers and manufacturers operating in California with
over $100 million in worldwide gross receipts to publicly
disclose their efforts to eradicate slavery and human
trafficking from their supply chains.
This law will apply to just over 3,000 companies, around 4
percent of California companies who represent an umbrella of
approximately 87 percent of economic activity in the State.
This new law is one small step in a long journey forged by
others that ASSET joined.
I hope if it's applied well that it will represent a
watershed in the sharing of knowledge, and will enable active
consumer, investor and other stakeholder engagement, will
encourage a pooling of resources, and will get us closer to
concrete, measurable results.
The California Transparency in Supply Chains Act will for
the first time enable consumers to choose to support businesses
that are creating best practices, using their purchasing power
to encourage them to bring their expertise and knowledge of
supply chains into the equation. Investors can implement
corporate governance and social responsibility practices,
providing incentives to companies to elevate human rights and
place them right at the heart of their strategy.
In one sweep, it'll educate companies unaware of a possible
problem, not just of their own potential vulnerability but also
the devastating impact of using company influence to drive
profit up by forcing the prices of raw materials down to a
level where labor violations and criminal activity and suicide
are the outcome for the raw-material work force.
It will create an environment where those companies already
doing the right thing can more robustly and publicly turn it
into part of their brand identity. And for the next step in the
process to occur, Congress should enact Federal legislation
disclosing the presence of slavery, trafficking and all forms
of forced labor in the corporate supply chain.
Post-globalization, where I have heard that the public
trusts brands, identifies with brands more closely than
government--the supply chain is the modern vehicle through
which today we can spread liberal democracy throughout the
world.
Thank you for listening.
Mr. Smith. Ms. Ormond, thank you very much for your
testimony, for being here again, and above all, for your
advocacy that has led to enactment of this very important
landmark legislation.
Let me just ask, if I could, Ms. Donaldson, you know, the
assumption of goodwill or the potential of goodwill obviously
undergirds the multilateral framework. Obviously most, if not,
all United Nations, ILO, any convention always has a problem on
the enforcement side. That's no fault of your own; it's just
the way it works. But I think you said consensus can be built.
And I'm wondering if the Transparency in Supply Chain Act of
2010 might not fit best into a practice that the ILO could
include in its framework of best laws that needs to be shared.
One of the important aspects of when we did the Trafficking
Victims Protection Act was to share and invite best practices
so we could improve our own law but also to give it out
liberally. And I remember giving a copy that John Finerty on
our Commission staff translated into Russian to a member of the
Russian Duma, who then got some of it enacted in the Russian
Duma. We want plagiarism, in this case [laughter.] So I'm
wondering if the ILO is looking at this as a best-practice law
that needs to be shared with the world, including the 14
agreements that you--or the work you have going within the OSCE
and elsewhere.
Ms. Donaldson. We are very interested to see how this law
is implemented. And you know, we tend to see California as
another country, just another economy. And it's very hard to be
a big company anywhere in the world and not have California as
one of your markets. So in a way, it may not need to be passed
in every State.
But yes, we want to share good practices. And I might say,
I see this as part of a trend. And it's also because the USDA
guidelines that have been issued by the Agriculture Department
on best practices in agricultural settings--I see in my
conversations with companies that across the board, there are
different things coming up. And maybe the most intensely
discussed right now is actually around the conflict minerals.
But I hear companies, big ones, saying, well, the due
diligence, that framework that the OSCE has raised, maybe we
should use this in the context of forced labor or child labor.
So it's creating a lot of cross-fertilization. But I do have to
say the California law, I think, kicked it to another level in
terms of more recent legislation.
So thank you.
Mr. Smith. Would you want to respond on that?
Ms. Ormond. This was a little law that just, I feel, kind
of got us out of an impasse. It was a moment that we could
capitalize on, as an NGO, thanks to the work that had been done
by the ILO. I think we actually did take some of your practices
[laughter] we took an amalgamation of best practices, but the
law is designed in such a way that allows the corporation to
come in with what businesses see idiosyncratically within their
own supply chain. Each industry has different, idiosyncratic
problems so the NGO community can't really sit from the outside
and dictate to them. Plus, they'll bring a totally different
mindset and innovation to finding solutions.
So the law is designed in such a way that we make
suggestions as to best practices, we make suggestions in terms
of talking to the ILO, but we also open it up to say, just--
well, tell us what you are doing so that we can rate it.
Mr. Smith. Commissioner Cohen does have to leave, so I'd
like to yield to him for any questions.
Mr. Cohen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have a hearing at 4--
another Ranking Member--but I want to ask Ms. Ormond, who were
the main opponents to your law in California?
Ms. Ormond. Thank you for landing me in it. Well, let's put
it this way: There was not a single business in California that
supported it. And I think we were very lucky to have a Governor
who didn't veto it, and who stood up and asked if this is a
job-killer, and I don't think it is. I think it's a lifesaver.
I think there are challenges. I don't want to presume that
people go into it with malicious intention; I think very often,
there are stumbling blocks that because we're not discussing it
because there's lack of transparency, we can't get to the
solution. So within different industries, individual brands and
companies aren't actually sharing with each other what they're
learning.
So I think as this--the first step is to sort of move
industries--like, you have conflict minerals; you have the tech
industries coming together to work on that. And in a parallel,
you have people sharing best practices around cotton.
If we don't move it forward in terms of raising it up, then
I think it really has a devastating effect. I think the
California Grocers Association----
Mr. Cohen. They opposed the law and fought it?
Ms. Ormond. Yes. And it took me by surprise because I
thought, well, isn't this good for California? Can't they
verify more easily than somebody who's reaching out to the
developing world? And I think we just haven't really gotten to
the bottom of how they deal with undocumented workers. I think
it made it difficult for them legislatively to answer to that,
because we didn't really deal with it.
Mr. Cohen. Did the chamber or any other organized groups of
business, manufacturers, et cetera--did any of them come out
and work against it?
Ms. Ormond. Yes.
Mr. Cohen. They did? [Laughter.]
Yes? [Laughter.]
Ms. Ormond. Yes. They did. I mean, we went back and forth.
We had support from consumers and consumer rights--we had a
terrific support from socially responsible investment firms
that represented $42 billion. And I think what we saw emerging
was, the consumer is one stakeholder; the next consumer to
engage through apps and writing letters and Internet and viral
is the employee. Employees work better in an environment that
they're happier with; they're more productive. You can go to
the investor; you can go to shareholders with the proxy votes.
And what we want the consumer to understand is that they
are not--they are disempowered as an individual to a certain
extent. But you rally them as a force together, they will drive
what happens down the supply chain because they will demand
that supply chains be cleaned up, or they will leave that brand
and go to someone who is doing a better job.
Mr. Cohen. Was the vote close on your bill?
Ms. Ormond. Sometimes. I mean, different--there were----
Mr. Cohen. Stages.
Ms. Ormond. Different stages that we had to go through.
What I have always loved about this issue is that it's a
bipartisan issue. It's something that I will say in terms of
the coalition, a task that we work on--it's bipartisan. And it
has to be, for longevity.
What I do want to say about the bill is, I think it
provides an engagement point for the consumer to actually
physically take action. There's a lot of awareness from an
employee standpoint people can have; one little Web site that
we participated in setting up has now sent off 97,000 emails to
CEOs asking them, what are your practices? And they've got
until January in 2012 to say ``no response.''
And I also--if I may, just a bit before you leave, I want
to talk about how when a supply chain is tainted, it may be
tainted by very few individuals. But there's one example--
there's a terrific documentary called ``End of the Line'' which
looks to the decimation of the fish population. Fishing is an
industry that has a lot of issues. One boat coming in with two
loads of cargo--I wrote it down somewhere; I want to get it
right--one of those boats can come up with--I think it was the
entirety of Taiwan's quota for one fishing season.
So one or two criminals can decimate and destroy a supply
chain. And I think that's what we're seeing in fishing; we're
talking about having 20 to 50 years left of fish. It isn't
those that have been given a quota and are meeting that quota
that are causing that decimation; it's illegal fishing. It is
illegal deforestation that is causing huge environmental
damage. And if we don't look to it, I believe that that is
where this issue feeds all the way through to being an
international security issue.
Mr. Cohen. I thank you for appearing before us, and your
work, and the other panelists as well. And I wish I had more
time to stay here, but I've got an obligation. I've learned a
lot. As you say you've learned, I learned from this Commission.
And there's no greater human rights champion than the Chairman,
and I will work with him on legislation to improve our work
product.
You asked me earlier, do we have an audience? Well, you
have a great audience here with Chairman Smith.
Ms. Ormond. Thank you.
Mr. Smith. Mr. Cohen, thank you very much, and thank you
for your leadership. Let me just ask a couple of other
questions, if I could. And I think Commissioner Cohen's
comments, or one of your comments was very well-taken about a
corporation--what corporations don't do business in California.
I mean, it's just about the world.
But I do think there could come in 2012 some real issues of
faithfulness on the part of the corporations. And so the
question would be, how do we ensure compliance with the
mandates of the California law? Would the Federal law fill some
gaps that perhaps dropped off as the legislation was making its
way through, and would the additional firepower, if you will,
of a Federal statute further prioritize and ensure that these
corporations are, indeed, being very faithful?
We found even when we passed the Trafficking Victims
Protection Act, I had to hold an oversight hearing right here,
9 months later, to ensure that major provisions where it said
you shall set up a TIP office, you shall establish a T visa--
nothing in it said ``may''; it all said ``shall.''
And even here, with the traditional separation of powers
and the checks and balances that are obviously a very good
thing, we had to have an oversight hearing--and I chaired it--
to ensure that the major revisions were carried out. Because
delay is denial, and I would be very worried that some
corporations will game the system, be inadequate.
So what are the advantages of a Federal law? And do other
states have to pass a law, or would that be--I mean, what
corporations, again, like I said before, are not doing business
in California?
Ms. Ormond. Well, one of the things that we do have to do
is get the list of who the 3,200 companies are from the
Attorney General's office. And I think that's something, for
instance, that you would want to put into Federal law, that
automatically the list of who is covered gets made public so
the NGOs aren't scrambling to do that math.
There's a number of things. I mean, for me what the bill
does is move us forward a step so that for instance we pave the
way for a commission to come in. Prior to the bill, the
commission couldn't verify it, or certify anything. So it
wasn't possible to do it.
But I also think that we have to kind of slightly change
the mindset. I want to talk about fair trade a little bit, and
how fair trade--I should rewind a bit--the greatest and most
effective part of prevention is the alleviation of poverty, and
providing people with alternative solutions. And I feel that's
what fair trade goes in and elevates the process for people;
they create communities who work together and keep each other
on track. And they then give a premium to the farmers once they
have helped them get them to the level of being an export.
And mangos out of Haiti would be a great example--the
mangos from Haiti that are sold in Whole Foods may well be
something that elevates Haiti out of a really tragic
circumstance. And I think we need to move toward that.
What I also like about the California bill--people talk a
lot about enforcement--the consumer's going to enforce it. Out
of 3,200 companies, say, there are 50 who comply, and the rest
don't. You've got 50 brands for people to switch to. You don't
have to wait for the Attorney General to do anything. You've
already clarified who's doing great work and who doesn't.
And I think that the Federal bill will work. We've--all the
way through we had a collaborative approach to business, and
that's the only way that you could get to the solutions. It
can't be done any other way. And it will be fair and it will be
reasonable and it will be doable for business.
Mr. Smith. Yes, thank you.
Ms. Misra. I'm not an expert on this as Julia is, but I've
heard a couple of things that I think are interesting. One,
we've heard that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is not opposing a
Federal bill on this, because they do want to see kind of the
playing field leveled in the sense that it would apply
everywhere in the United States and not just in California,
which is an interesting and surprising result from this. And
I've also just been receiving a lot of emails from people about
trainings that are already popping up. The University of
Delaware is doing a training for sourcing managers on the bill,
and so there are already companies getting ready in figuring
out ways.
And then just from our perspective, we're an allied
organization of the AFL-CIO, and we've already had
conversations with unions in the United States about kind of
taking the role that Julia's saying on consumers and holding
people accountable. We know who a lot of the big players are in
the sectors that we know that there's slavery, and sort of kind
of start targeting them and making sure that that's happening.
And, hopefully, it will trickle down.
Mr. Smith. Yes.
Ms. Donaldson. Just two observations. I think we are going
to see a real mix. I've seen legal opinions online where the
lawyers--corporate lawyers say, well, the way you could
interpret this is, you just have to say what you were doing on
monitoring forced labor, and you can just you're not doing
anything in particular and that's how to suffice the law. And
so you may see some of that.
I think that's going to be difficult because of the
reports, like the reports required by the TVPA, which say,
well, these are countries where we think there may be risk of
problems. It's a little harder if you're sourcing from those
countries to say, well, there's no problem in our supply chains
that we've ever seen, and that takes care of it.
So there's no question that interaction between State and
Federal law is important. And I guess what I would say, we
don't take a position on particular laws, but we are collecting
best practices. We look forward to seeing what happens in this
one. And I do think that the mix of laws and strategies going
on is having a really dynamic effect.
And I will say one thing. Once companies leave denial and
go into ``How could we do it?'' and then they move to, ``We
have to do something''--when enterprise and its ingenuity comes
into play, amazing things happen. And I have to say, I'm
getting excited about watching the companies that are at the
front end of this, because they're solving problems that no one
else has quite seen, and that's what we want more of. And I do
think it's possible that that virtuous circle, spurred on by
these different laws together, and maybe some Federal laws as
well, is going to create the process, is creating a process
that we can partner with each other. Because no one company can
solve these problems, and no one country, and that's why we say
we have to really work together. And the activists have an
irreplaceable role.
Thank you.
Mr. Smith. Let me just ask you with regard to your deadline
or your goal by 2015 of eliminating forced labor worldwide, who
on the board would make the decision whether or not to
incorporate the new California law into a best law practice
that needs to be looked at by other countries? It seems to me
that if the U.K. and other countries were to--the House of
Commons passed a similar law, the House here, obviously, and
the Congress--it would add an enormous pressure not just for
reporting, but for accurate reporting, because the Web site
would be scrutinized by not just California and the NGOs that
are so concerned, like Julia Ormond's group and yours, but it
would be a--it seems to be more hands pulling on the oar, the
greater that ship will move and forced labor will be
eradicated.
Who makes that decision?
Ms. Donaldson. Well, ultimately our body of countries and
the international labor companies pass standards.
Mr. Smith. Right.
Ms. Donaldson. But we can do things much faster than that
because it takes time and consideration, to pull together best
practices. And we are asked to advise countries all the time on
how they might solve those issues. And so I'd be happy to come
back and let you know exactly what we are doing on that,
because I would--I'll inquire.
Mr. Smith. Is it something that if we were to put together
a letter from Members of the House and Senate asking that the
ILO look to--both on a fast track and as--you know, 2015 is not
far away--to look at bringing on line this very valuable--and I
would say there's nothing little about this, Ms. Ormond, as you
said. This is huge. And one State the size of California could
make all the difference in the entire world. But if you could,
you know, we would--we could put together a letter that would
try to get you to adopt it as a best practice, if you thought
that would be helpful.
Ms. Donaldson. Thank you.
Mr. Smith. Let me just ask Ms. Misra with regard to
regulating foreign labor recruiters. I chaired a hearing some
years back when we discovered in the 2003 act, we put
provisions in, in 2005, when we learned that U.S. corporations
were often complicit, either indifferent or there was woeful
ignorance, which is two different ways of being complicit, not
wanting to know.
And in Iraq, I asked, a number of questions at two hearings
that we held jointly with the department, with the Armed
Services Committee, about labor recruiters, particularly in
Jordan, bringing in all these people who were slaves working
with U.S. taxpayer money. And we keep getting assurances that
it's been fixed. I'm not convinced. I'm wondering what you
think, whether or not that has been fixed, if you could.
Ms. Misra. Thank you. We're still hearing stories that it
has not been fixed, and not just in Iraq, but also Afghanistan,
that Jordan's being used. We've heard particularly of Nepali
and Bangladeshi workers. And then it's also been very
interesting with the Arab----
Mr. Smith. They were the same ones who were exploited
previously and that we brought attention to.
Ms. Misra. Exactly.
But it's also very interesting now with the Arab Spring and
the numbers of people who have been talking about the refugees
that are crossing the border from Libya and other places, but
there's huge numbers, as you know, of migrant workers who are
in Bahrain, who are in Syria, who are in Libya and other
places, and so their fate right now is very interesting. And a
lot of them are being told by the labor recruiters that brought
them over there, well, there's nothing that we can do now, and
they're stranded. And so it's quite interesting.
And just the global economic crisis: In the United Arab
Emirates for example, there's large numbers of Indian migrant
construction workers who are stuck in the UAE; the jobs dried
up because of the economic crisis and labor recruiters are
refusing to send them back, and so a lot of them are just
living in camps.
Mr. Smith. With regard to the Transparent Supply Chain Act,
I know how Julia Ormond feels. Do you feel that there needs to
be a Federal law?
Ms. Misra. Absolutely, yes.
Mr. Smith. I know you had some recommendations, but the
biggest problem I think we might face would be a Senate 60
votes that might be hard to procure.
Do you have any recommendations on where it should be?
Should it be in the TVPA reauthorization? You may have
mentioned that earlier.
Ms. Misra. Yes. The coalition that we're a part of, ATEST,
is recommending that it goes into the TVPRA. We think in some
ways that might be a little bit easier to have it as part of
the package. But also, a stand-alone bill, we would support
both. And so, you know, we've been having a number of
conversations with different Senators and different Congress
people about----
Mr. Smith. Have you found--and I did ask Ambassador Luis
CdeBaca earlier whether or not the administration would present
a model piece of legislation along the same lines as
California.
Do you think that might be forthcoming?
Ms. Misra. I haven't heard it coming from the
administration itself. I have heard of several Representatives
in the House that are putting that forward, and then our
coalition, as I said, is supporting it. But Julie would know
that more specifically.
Mr. Smith. Well, we hope the two meet.
Ms. Ormond. I would say--I guess what I would just add is
that I--in all honesty, I think the jury's still out as to the
best place for the bill, whether or not it be something that's
folded into TVPA afterwards. But currently language that is
being kicked around in terms of a Federal bill is placing it
under the auspices of SEC.
And I think in terms of is it worth doing nationally, is it
worth doing as a Federal--I think the Federal bill gives it
more teeth and raises awareness of it throughout the United
States, and then the United States takes a leadership role.
But we currently don't have the list from the Attorney
General. So we need to run the figures again. Because if you've
got 3,200 companies in California and nationally you would have
3,201, it would be nice to know, is it just once more? Can we
just go straight to the EU?
And I just want to say that it isn't a perfect silver
bullet. It's a starting point. And I think it does remain to be
seen how the community that works on this responds to it and
gets imaginative around it. But there definitely are stumbling
blocks. There are stumbling blocks around conflict minerals and
rare Earth minerals that only come out of the Congo. There are
stumbling blocks in terms of human rights in China and places
we can't get in. But I think it kicks the needle forward and
challenges business to help us come up with a solution, and
don't leave the table until we've made it.
Mr. Smith. Thank you.
Yes.
Ms. Misra. May I just say one more thing also? Just jumping
over to the foreign labor recruiter provisions, since you're
talking about national versus stand-alone bills and folding
into TVPRA, I know there's been some discussions about having a
separate bill on regulating foreign labor recruiters, and I
really want to urge you and the House of Representatives to
consider folding it into the TVPRA, because when it is a
separate bill, it gets caught up a lot in comprehensive
immigration reform and questions of that. And we think, while
those are important questions to address, if we address foreign
labor recruiters from the perspective of it being a trafficking
problem and being able to address it in the TVPRA, we may be
able to get a lot further than if we had it be a stand-alone
bill that kind of got caught up in the comprehensive
immigration reform. So--but thank you for letting me jump that
little piece----
Mr. Smith. No, if you could answer, because you worked
extensively in Indonesia and elsewhere----
Ms. Misra. Yes.
Mr. Smith. How do you recommend we pierce a place like
China, where a person even doing investigations into this kind
of heinous activity could land themselves into prison for 10 or
15 years and be subjected to torture? Even the corporations
often do a ``see no evil, hear no evil'' mind-set about the
sources of their materials, because they don't want to be
kicked out, they don't want their industry nationalized and
they don't want to face potential jail time.
Ms. Misra. Absolutely.
Mr. Smith. I'm wondering if on the Web sites might there be
a big gap when it comes to China especially?
Ms. Misra. Yes, and I wonder about that too. I will say,
the Solidarity Center has a China office that we call where we
specifically work on worker rights issues in China, and so I'm
not the expert on that.
But I will say one of the things that we are seeing is that
we're increasingly seeing worker actions. You wouldn't
necessarily call them the same that--as you see in the United
States as strikes and other things, but we are seeing workers
who are having many 1-day strikes, taking to the streets,
demanding more rights in the factories where they're working.
And we really think that the United States really needs to be
supporting those efforts that we are seeing of workers trying
to speak out for themselves and enforce their own rights and do
more in that regard. And I know our office would love to come
talk to you more about that.
Mr. Smith. Thank you.
Would anyone else like to add anything before the hearing
concludes, Ms. Ormond or--yes.
Ms. Donaldson. This is on an earlier subject, but I thought
I could just mention one of the things that ILO's been doing
recently--I think it was maybe in December--we had a conference
in the Gulf States, and it was primarily focused on Embassy
staff and economic officers from various Embassies. And we
were--I think we were looking in particular in the labor
trafficking issues from Nepal. But it was a very interesting
way to have countries--and I wouldn't be surprised if the
United States was involved as well, but other countries there
as well--to develop a network of representative officers to
work with each other to spot illegal-labor processes. It was
very productive, so we're looking at how to do that in other
places, too. And so the requirements that have happened as they
were discussed, and Ambassador CdeBaca was talking about, just
to let you know, that's something that can be built on, because
if that's their responsibility and they're talking to
counterparts, then it creates a different level of looking at
it.
Mr. Smith. Is there anything else?
Ms. Ormond. Just to say thank you.
Mr. Smith. Thank you.
I want to thank our very distinguished witness. I do
believe that S. 657 is an historic bill that will have
overwhelmingly positive consequences. So, I thank you, Julia
Ormond, for your extraordinary leadership in crafting and using
your persuasive powers, which are very real and compelling, to
get that legislation. And I think you gave great, I think,
accolades to the Senate, sponsored the President Pro Tem. And I
think that was a very--you know, it does take a lawmaker, but
it does take people just like you and our two other
distinguished witnesses to make all of this happen. So I thank
you sincerely for your extraordinary leadership.
Ms. Ormond. Thank you.
Mr. Smith. The hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon at 4 p.m. the hearing was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
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Prepared Statements
----------
Prepared Statement of Hon. Christopher H. Smith, Chairman, Commission
on Security and Cooperation in Europe
Welcome to today's hearing, part of the Helsinki Commission's
ongoing efforts to combat human trafficking in all of its aspects. I
had the privilege of chairing the first Commission hearing on
trafficking in June 1999. Today our attention turns to labor
trafficking, a modern-day form of slavery exacerbated by the global
economic downturn. As with all forms of trafficking, we must never lose
sight of the victim--the truly human face of men, women and children
caught up unwittingly in this multi-billion dollar criminal enterprise.
Having just returned from an international conference: ``Building
Bridges of Freedom: Public-Private Partnerships to End Modern-Day
Slavery,'' I am acutely aware that, to be successful in combating the
scourge of human trafficking, we must strengthen the cooperation
between governments and the private sector, particularly with regards
to labor trafficking.
When I first introduced the Trafficking Victims Protection Act in
1998--a landmark bill that was signed into law two years later in
2000--the legislation was met with a wall of skepticism and opposition.
People both inside of government and out thought the bold new strategy
that included sheltering, asylum, and other protections for the
victims, long jail sentences and asset confiscation for the
traffickers, and tough sanctions for governments that failed to meet
minimum standards, was merely a solution in search of a problem. I
vividly recall raising the trafficking issue at a gathering of
parliamentarians meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1999 and being
met with a similar reaction.
Each year tens of thousands of victims are trafficked into the
United States from throughout the world. The United States has been at
the forefront of efforts to combat human trafficking in all its forms,
including labor trafficking, following adoption of the Trafficking
Victims Protection Act of 2000. Our government has undertaken the vast
challenge of tracking slavery around the world. We have developed
strategic reporting tools such as the Trafficking in Persons Report;
the List of Goods Produced with Child and Forced Labor and the Findings
on the Worst Forms of Child Labor, and the world has taken notice.
While considerable progress has been made, I am deeply concerned of the
56 OSCE participating States, twenty were ranked as Tier 2, with
another eight placed on the Tier 2 Watch List.
Our efforts would not have been possible without the invaluable
contribution of civil society in the U.S. helped us write the law and
all subsequent iterations. As we reauthorize certain sections of the
Act, which expire at the end of September, civil society
representatives have flooded my office--and I'm sure Ambassador
CdeBaca's, who was with me at the Rome conference, has some thoughts
about ways to improve U.S. policy and implementation.
Catholic Relief Services and many other effective NGOs continue to
push for expansion of shelters--places of refuge and protection, places
where victims, mostly women, can begin the arduous process of healing.
On the prevention and protection side, civil society advocated--and
continues to push for--adequate shelters as well as political asylum
for victims and their families--the latter as a means of mitigating
retaliation. I have visited trafficking victim's shelters in countries
throughout the world, including Russia, Nigeria, Peru, Romania, DR
Congo, Ethiopia, Brazil, Bosnia, Italy and elsewhere.
Working with Shared Hope International and the Center for Missing
and Exploited Children, last year a group of us tried to establish
federally funded shelters for trafficked minors in the U.S. Although
the legislation passed both chambers, the versions were different and
the clock ran out before they could be reconciled.
As we all know, traffickers prey upon those in poverty and those
lacking even the prospect of a job.
In Moldova, Catholic Relief Service's documented that high-school
age girls were disappearing into human trafficking in large part due to
the extreme lack of job opportunities. CRS created the Moldova
Employment and Training Alliance, which encouraged private sector
companies to expand in rural villages.
``Employers developed vocational training and then guaranteed job
opportunities after successful training. The Project, which directly
benefited 3,300 young women [and close to 4,000 indirect
beneficiaries], also offered support services to address social factors
such as domestic violence, substance abuse in families, and lack of
financial services. These factors are all cited as high-risk factors.
The project created opportunities for young women to obtain dignified
employment within Moldova, and the option to remain in and contribute
to their communities. It therefore reduced the need to seek employment
outside of the country.''
As a destination country, we must recognize that here in our very
own backyard, thousands of people are trafficked from all over the
world to work on our farms, our hotels, our restaurants and even to
serve as our domestic workers. What's even more shocking is that many
of these labor migrants enter the country legally through our own
immigration system, deceived by their traffickers who sold them a
dream.
In my work as the Special Representative for Human Trafficking in
the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe [OSCE PA], and as Chairman of the Foreign Affairs
Committee's subcommittee on Human Rights, I often find that my role is
to facilitate the innovations of civil society. For example, Airline
Ambassadors and Innocence at Risk took the fact that the airlines were
being used by human traffickers to move victims and created a strategy
to combat it. Flight attendants noticed suspicious circumstances, but
had no idea what to do and would just move on to the next row. Airline
Ambassadors subsequently launched the Child Trafficking Initiative,
which provides flight crews with the essential information they need to
discern a trafficking situation and to notify law enforcement on the
ground for appropriate action once the plane has landed.
U.S. funding for anti-trafficking efforts abroad have brought
together labor inspectors, police, prosecutors, NGOs, and faith-based
organizations.
Indeed, this afternoon we will focus on various aspects of labor
trafficking, including abusive and illegal business practices as well
as ways to better educate potential migrants of their rights. Among
other issues to be considered will be increased education and
accountability, foreign labor recruiting practices and enhancing supply
chain transparency. Labor trafficking remains the most prevalent form
of human trafficking in the U.S.
Civil society can, and often successfully does, influence the
private sector. Take Craigslist, the forum for placing free online
classified advertisements, for example. Young women were sold on
Craigslist, several NGOs swung into action to publicize and demand that
such evil be ended. In a matter of months, Craigslist's immoral
facilitation of sex trafficking was removed from the website. Public-
private partnership is essential.
Obviously, numerous major challenges remain. It falls to us--and
like-minded people of goodwill everywhere--to meet those challenges
head on and wage an unceasing campaign to eradicate human trafficking
from the face of the earth.
Today's hearing draws from an outstanding field of witnesses
possessing expertise in various facets of labor trafficking. Their
combined effort in the fight against forced labor and human trafficking
has produced great results in the areas of education, awareness
building and even prosecution. The witnesses bios have been distributed
so let me introduce our first panel of speakers.
First up is Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, Director of the State
Department Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. He is
joined by Dr. Gabriela Lemus who represents the Department of Labor at
the Senior Policy Operating Group on Trafficking in Persons and who
will report on DOL's policies designed to combat trafficking for labor
exploitation and eliminating slavery from our supply chains.
In our second panel we are joined by the Director of the Washington
Office of the International Labor Organization, Ms. Nancy Donaldson and
Ms. Neha Misra, Senior Specialist on Migration and Human Trafficking
for the Solidarity Center. Last but certainly not least, the founder of
the Alliance to Stop Slavery and End Trafficking, a talented actress
and tireless humanitarian activist, Ms. Julia Ormond.
I am grateful to each of these experts for bringing their unique
perspectives to the table this afternoon. We look forward to your
testimonies.
Prepared Statement of Hon. Benjamin L. Cardin,
Co-Chairman, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe
I appreciate participating in this hearing today as the issue of
human trafficking has been a major priority of the Helsinki Commission
from its very inception. Trafficking in human beings is simply today's
phrase for the scourge of slavery. Something humanity has been
afflicted with for thousands of years.
This Commission has worked for a special representative within the
State Department and for the OSCE. Our government has passed some of
the most stringent reporting requirements in the world to help both of
these representatives do their jobs effectively.
Over the years, the Helsinki Commission has primarily focused its
efforts on human trafficking for sexual exploitation and for good
reason because of the extent of the problem.
It is overdue, however, that we also look at trafficking for the
purposes of labor exploitation in these exceptionally troubling
economic times.
It is true that labor migration is an important economic engine
that promotes growth throughout the OSCE region. However, the labor
migration process in many countries is fraught with potential for
exploitation, robbing those seeking decent work of their human rights
and dignity. This exploitation ripples throughout our product supply
chain and services that Americans use every day. The 56 participating
States of the OSCE region include many origin countries for labor
migrants to Europe, North America, and areas beyond the OSCE's borders.
Even in our own system, legally documented labor migrants can find
themselves in debt bondage for migration costs or circumstances of
involuntary servitude. Many of these instances remain underreported in
our own data collection mechanisms.
I am pleased to hear that interagency coordination is under way to
harmonize efforts to combat human trafficking and forced labor between
the Department of State and the Department of Labor. This cooperation
will indeed lead to a greater understanding of the scope of labor
trafficking in our own country and establish best practices for our
international partners.
This hearing is also especially timely given the upcoming
reauthorization of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization
Act of 2008 [TVPRA]. The Helsinki Commission has long played an active
role in policy formulation to combat human trafficking and facilitate
international cooperation to this end. As Chairman and now Co-Chairman
of the Helsinki Commission, I have sought to retain that legacy.
During Senate consideration of the TVPRA in 2008, I worked closely
with my colleagues to ensure that consular services were playing a more
active role on the front line of visa admissions to prevent
trafficking. We included provisions to mandate distribution of resource
materials and contact information for support to visa applicants so
that they could recognize if their migration circumstances could
potentially become labor trafficking due to the acts of unscrupulous
recruiters. Addressing recruiter accountability remains a key priority
for future legislative efforts.
OSCE Special Representative Maria Grazia Giammarinaro stated, ``To
eradicate human trafficking and forced labor, States should take more
effective measures, including with respect to training for public
officials likely to come into contact with cases of labor
exploitation.'' I feel that this should be a key point of emphasis for
our work as we seek to reauthorize the TVPRA and move forward to better
refine victim identification efforts. Only through a greater awareness
among our border professionals, law enforcement, consular officers, and
service providers will trafficking be recognized as a crucial element
of forced labor cases.
Among the forms of modern-day slavery, labor trafficking is an
insidious form often disguised as legitimate employment opportunities
that contribute products and services to our economy. In this sense,
all Americans have a stake in the problem and a capacity to contribute
to the solution through more responsible choices. I look forward to
working with my colleagues to promote greater awareness of labor
trafficking and ensure the protection of those who seek to make
meaningful contributions to economies throughout the OSCE region.
Prepared Statement of Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, Director, Office To
Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, U.S. Department of State
Good morning and thank you for the opportunity to testify before
the Commission today. I'd like to thank Chairman Smith for his
leadership on the issue of trafficking, and I applaud his decision to
use the stature of the Helsinki Commission to shed a light on the
problem of trafficking for labor exploitation in the United States.
Estimates on the total number of trafficking victims in the world
start at 12.5 million on the low end and reach to 27 million on the
high end. The victims are fishermen trapped on boats, their passports
confiscated, forced to work twenty-hour days. They are women drawn away
from their homes with the promise of good work, only to find themselves
trapped as domestic servants with no pay and no way to escape. They are
men brought overseas by unscrupulous recruiters who put them to work in
fields and factories and force them to pay back the recruiters' fees.
This problem is not isolated in faraway places in the world or
limited to countries stricken by poverty or lack of opportunity. It's
happening right here in the United States. As a federal prosecutor, I
saw it firsthand. The reality of this crime becomes very clear through
the stories of survivors, many of whom found themselves deceived and
trapped while in the hopeful pursuit of a life of greater opportunity
and freedom.
It's difficult to know exactly how many victims of labor
trafficking there are in the United States. Trafficking in persons is a
hidden crime, and gathering accurate statistics on the number of
victims is an ongoing challenge. Victims of trafficking are often
afraid or unable to come forward, and definitional difficulties,
circular reporting, and the frequent intermingling of human trafficking
and smuggling make accurate reporting nearly impossible. So rather than
attempting to precisely outline the scope of the problem, I hope this
testimony will help to highlight particular challenges in combating
labor trafficking, including those singled out by the Commission;
summarize the positive steps we have taken; share the promising
practices we have seen from government, law enforcement, and civil
society; and lay out where we need to go from here to expand and
improve our efforts to combat labor trafficking in the United States.
The strategy that we use across the US government to address modern
trafficking is based on the 3P Paradigm--prosecution, protection, and
prevention--set forth in the UN Palermo Protocol, the decade-old
document that established the framework for the modern anti-trafficking
movement. In all three areas, we are seeing progress, and interagency
coordination continues to improve so that across government we are
united in this struggle.
In particular, I'd like to praise my colleagues at the Department
of Labor [DOL] for implementing a rule that strengthens protections for
Temporary Agricultural Employment H-2A Aliens in the United States.
Guest workers are a group particularly at risk for trafficking, and
this DOL regulation reduces the risk of worker exploitation by
reinstating a requirement that employers provide documentation, as part
of the application for guest worker visas, that they have complied with
the prerequisites for bringing H-2A workers into the country and by
returning to a methodology for calculating adverse effect wage rates,
which results in higher wages for workers. Additionally, DOL has
prohibited requiring H-2A workers to pay certain fees, including
recruitment fees, and improved its own ability to ban employers who
have committed violations of the agricultural program from filing
future H-2A labor certification applications.
Building on that initiative, DOL last year entered into a revised
agreement with the Mexican Embassy and the Mexican Ministry of Foreign
Affairs to ensure that Mexican workers in the United States are
informed of their labor rights through their consular offices. This
information can assist vulnerable workers, including persons who may
have been trafficked.
And of course, DOL's lists published by their Office of Child
Labor, Forced Labor, and Human Trafficking, such as the List of Goods
Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor, prove invaluable in
demonstrating just how closely connected we are to this abuse around
the world.
Despite these and other successes, we need to continue building our
capacity and ensuring that the needed resources are in place to make
anti-trafficking efforts across government more coordinated and
effective. Today, with respect to labor trafficking in the United
States, I'd like to look at the way new ideas about prevention are
going to shape the future of this fight.
Prevention has long been the afterthought of the 3Ps in comparison
to its seemingly more tangible counterparts of prosecution and
protection. Prevention has either been relegated to the realm of poster
campaigns in airports and train stations, or regarded as an abstract
goal tied to massive structural problems such as gender inequality and
poverty. But as our understanding of human trafficking grows, so too
grows the possibility of making real inroads when it comes to
prevention.
A good place to start is by considering the way those of us in the
United States interact with labor trafficking on a day-to-day basis,
which we all do. Forced labor is prevalent in the production of a wide
range of raw materials, from cotton and chocolate and coffee to steel
and rubber and tin. All of us come in contact with products tainted by
labor trafficking, and even reputable and responsible corporate
citizens can profit from abuse. It is this knowledge that has enabled
us in recent years to focus on the importance of supply chain
monitoring and to call for increased leadership from the private
sector.
Consumer spending and corporate investment in business are
significant motivators that can turn around a system that has allowed
traffickers and economies to operate with impunity. There is an
increasing push for consumer transparency, certification, and more
rigorous regulation. Research suggests companies investing in fair
labor practices and labeling their products accordingly improve
conditions on the ground and drive up the demand for their products.
A new push for corporate accountability is emerging, which demands
companies focus their attentions beyond the places where their products
are manufactured or processed, and look additionally at the sources of
their human capital and the methods of recruitment tied to their supply
chains, as well as the places where the raw materials are collected,
harvested, or mined. Effective supply chain monitoring must go all the
way down to raw materials. Such research will lead to an understanding
of supply and demand factors that affect the workers whose labor
contributes to downstream profits.
In last year's Trafficking in Person's Report [TIP Report], the
State Department published recommendations for verifiable corporate
policies that prohibit the use of forced labor through the supply
chain. Four major principles can help guide corporate action:
Statements of corporate policy must incorporate truly
independent verification;
While remediation is important, when labor abuses rise to the
level of a human trafficking offense, authorities should be notified;
Governments must redefine norms and set standards to create a
space for companies to take the lead on combating modern slavery;
Lending institutions should consider establishing whether a
company has a forced labor supply chain policy as a factor for
determining that company's credit rating.
The aim of supply chain monitoring is to find trafficking wherever
it occurs, whether in manufacturing, harvesting of raw materials, or
the commercial sexual activity aimed at business travelers. This
knowledge will allow companies to staff and source their supply chains
in a manner that diminishes the demand traffickers satisfy through
violence and exploitation. We have developed a model set of policies
that we believe will put companies on that path:
Taking accountability for all the labor in the supply chain all
the way down to raw materials, with a pledge to monitor compliance,
remediate noncompliance, and verify those actions by an independent
third party;
Honoring the role and voice of the worker as the best check on
abuse;
Publicly disclosing mechanisms for providing independent,
unannounced, and thorough audits;
Providing effective whistleblower and complaint procedures;
Providing clear guidelines for security procedures throughout
the supply chains to ensure that security forces are not used to
intimidate, hold, or abuse workers;
Regularly updating shareholders and stakeholders on creation,
maintenance, and implementation of their related policies;
Guaranteeing all workers mobility by strictly forbidding any
confiscation of official documents;
Committing to providing restitution for victims and other forms
of remediation;
Complying with trafficking-related local laws and international
standards for confronting human trafficking and protecting victims;
Monitoring labor recruitment practices to ensure those working
on guest worker or sponsorship systems are not exploited by recruiters;
and
Holding employees accountable for any violation or exploitative
conduct contributing to trafficking in persons.
While these recommendations from the TIP Report are a good starting
point, we have already seen private-sector actors take the next steps
by embracing the notion of supply-chain monitoring. A conference last
winter produced the Luxor Implementation Guidelines to the Athens
Ethical Principles. The Athens Ethical Principles are the product of a
2006 meeting of NGOs, governments, businesses, international
organizations, and individuals, and they express a set of values
opposed to trafficking in persons. But it was the Luxor conference that
put in place standards for implementing those principles. According to
the guidelines, they seek ``to help move beyond aspirational statements
to the development of standard operating procedures--a way to move
beyond principles to practice and implementation.'' To date nearly 600
companies have adopted the guidelines.
The Luxor Guidelines represent the future of the way we look at
demand for forced labor. If there were no demand for the cheap goods
tied to forced labor, then suddenly the profit motive for traffickers
would no longer be worth the risk of engaging in a criminal enterprise.
And though the success of this approach requires motivated and
willing private-sector actors, government's role will remain central.
California recently enacted a law that serves as a good example of
legislation encouraging the private sector to look at their supply
chains and consider their impacts on labor trafficking. California now
requires its largest retailers and manufacturers to make public
whatever efforts, or lack thereof, they have made to eliminate human
trafficking from their supply chains. This is not a burdensome piece of
legislation; it does not require corporations to adopt sweeping new
policies for monitoring their supply chains. It just requires
transparency. Of course, like the enactment of many trafficking laws,
it was a partnership between government and the activist community that
helped usher this process along, and it would not have been possible
without the commitment and leadership of Julia Ormond, who will testify
before this Commission later today and can likely provide greater
insight on this outstanding legislation.
Beyond legislating, governments can use their leverage as consumers
to curb the demand for forced labor. We have already taken steps in the
US government's procurement and contracting policies to protect against
both sex and labor trafficking. The Department of Homeland Security and
the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission co-chaired a temporary
working group on implementation of the Federal Acquisition Regulation
to combat modern slavery and its contributing factors like the demand
for commercial sex. The group is developing a training program for the
federal acquisition workforce to be considered for adoption by all
agencies and deployment at the Federal Acquisition Institute.
Additionally, if government at all levels made commitments to
reduce their slavery footprint--to support private-sector partners that
had adopted anti-trafficking practices--the ripple effect could be
tremendous. Forging partnerships to raise awareness about slavery
footprint issues holds great potential. The State Department
Trafficking in Persons Office is currently working with civil society
and private sector partners to develop a tool that will allow
individuals to determine not only their slavery footprint in their
purchasing habits, but the steps they can take to reduce it.
Lastly, there can be no substitute for continued strong government
action on all fronts of the anti-trafficking movement. The United
States must continue to prosecute and punish traffickers. We need to
enhance our efforts to identify victims, offer them protection, and
provide survivors with the support and resources they need. We need to
work with civil society and the international community as a global
leader in the fight against modern slavery.
A decade into the modern anti-slavery movement, we find ourselves
at a moment to ask the question ``What are the next steps?'' In the
United States, and in many places around the world, the legal
structures are in place, the political will has grown, and we are
beginning to see progress. The fact that we're having a hearing on
labor trafficking and supply chain monitoring shows how far this
movement has come. The fact that this commission recognizes the
importance of partnering with the private sector and civil society
speaks to the tremendous potential of what lies ahead. I believe that
with the engagement of dedicated lawmakers and the commitment of the US
government, the next ten years of this struggle will be a decade of
delivering on what we've promised. I look forward to working with you
as we continue this important struggle, and I again thank you for the
opportunity to testify today.
Prepared Statement of Gabriela D. Lemus, Labor Representative to the
Senior Policy Operating Group on Trafficking in Persons, U.S.
Department of Labor
Introduction
Chairman Smith, Co-Chairman Cardin, and distinguished members of
the Commission, on behalf of the Department of Labor and Secretary
Hilda L. Solis, thank you for the opportunity to discuss the
Department's efforts to combat human trafficking, both domestically and
abroad.
President Obama and Secretary Solis are deeply committed to
addressing the problem of human trafficking and the Administration and
the Department of Labor are working to enhance efforts to combat
trafficking and assist victims. It has been more than a decade since
enactment of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act [TVPA] and the
fight against trafficking in persons continues.
The Department of Labor's commitment to fighting human trafficking
is rooted in its long history of working to protect and assist our
nation's most vulnerable workers, some of whom may wind up in forced
labor. Labor trafficking subjects women, children, and men to the most
extreme forms of workplace exploitation. Workers who are trafficked are
denied not only their wages, but their human rights.
As one of Secretary Solis' priorities, the Department is engaged
both domestically and internationally to better serve and protect
vulnerable workers. Our efforts to ensure that workers are afforded all
of their rights under the law include initiatives to combat human
trafficking in all of its forms. The Secretary leads a coordinated
effort across the Department to achieve our goal of making progress in
this important fight against human trafficking. Under her leadership,
the Wage and Hour Division [WHD], the Bureau of International Labor
Affairs [ILAB], and the Employment and Training Administration [ETA]
work collaboratively to ensure that the Department uses all available
tools in the most efficient and effective manner to protect these
vulnerable populations. I am pleased to report to the Commission on
these efforts.
The Wage and Hour Division [WHD]
The Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor enforces some
of the nation's most comprehensive federal labor laws, including the
minimum wage, overtime pay, child labor, the employment of persons with
disabilities, family and medical leave, the employment of temporary or
seasonal migrant workers, and prevailing wages for government service
and construction contracts. These enforcement responsibilities allow
WHD to have a daily presence in American workplaces and, while the
Agency does not have responsibility to investigate trafficking
directly, many of WHD's investigations take place in industries marked
by workers who are vulnerable to trafficking. This means the Wage and
Hour Division is often the first federal agency to make contact with
the workers who may have been trafficked or may be otherwise employed
under abusive conditions in violation of the law.
In industries with vulnerable workers like restaurants, garment
manufacturing, and agriculture, investigators interview workers and
assess situations where workers may have been intimidated, threatened,
or held against their will. Investigators also review payroll records
and inspect migrant farm worker housing. Criminal activity found in the
workplace by WHD investigators may be referred to an appropriate
authority as part of standard WHD procedure. After a referral is made,
WHD's assistance may be requested to compute back wages to ensure
restitution on behalf of victims of trafficking, and to assess
penalties against the employer.
WHD representatives currently participate in approximately 25 human
trafficking task forces around the country, including in Los Angeles,
Houston, Phoenix, and Long Island. WHD's primary responsibility on
these task forces is to report trafficking crimes to the task force
when detected during the course of an investigation, and provide
assistance in calculating back wages/restitution owed to victims of
trafficking.
Additionally, WHD is a member of the Federal Enforcement Working
Group [FEWG], along with the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau
of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security--U.S. Immigration
and Customs Enforcement, and the DOL-OIG. As part of the FEWG, WHD is
participating in the development and implementation of a Pilot Federal
Anti-Trafficking Coordination Team [ACTeam] Program. The goal of the
ACTeam Program is to proactively identify and assist human trafficking
victims; develop victim-centered, multi-disciplinary human trafficking
investigations; and produce high-impact human trafficking prosecutions
resulting in the conviction of traffickers, the dismantling of
trafficking organizations, and the forfeiture of proceeds and
instrumentalities of trafficking offenses. WHD's role in the program
focuses on helping to detect trafficking indicators during
investigations, and computing back wages owed to trafficking victims.
DOL's Office of the Inspector General strengthens this collaboration
through its expertise in investigating labor racketeering and visa
fraud violations that occur in connection with labor trafficking
offenses.
Department of Homeland Security [DHS] regulations [8 C.F.R.
214.14 [a] [2]] expressly list certain federal law enforcement agencies
that may certify U nonimmigrant status [U visa] applications, including
the Department of Labor. Under that regulation the Department of Labor
is identified as an agency with jurisdiction to conduct investigations
of violations of laws. In its role of investigating workplace laws, the
Department of Labor may detect evidence that a worker is a victim of
certain criminal activity, including trafficking, that may qualify the
worker for U nonimmigrant status. On April 28, 2011, the Department of
Labor announced protocols to complete, as appropriate, a certification
that the individual petitioning for U nonimmigrant status is a victim
of a qualifying crime and is, has been, or is likely to be helpful in
the investigation or prosecution of that crime. This certification must
be included by an individual in his or her U nonimmigrant status
petition to DHS U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The U
nonimmigrant status certification process has been delegated to the
Wage and Hour Division's regional administrators located in five cities
around the country.
In May 2010, to support and enhance WHD's enforcement efforts, the
Department entered into a revised Joint Declaration and revised Letters
of Agreement with the Mexican Embassy and Mexican Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, updating 2004 agreements between the two countries. In March
2011, the Department signed a similar agreement with the El Salvadorian
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These agreements aim to ensure that
workers from these countries who are employed in the United States are
informed about their labor rights through information sharing,
outreach, education, training, and exchange of best practices. Such
information can assist vulnerable workers, including those who may have
been trafficked. DOL is also expanding the program to include
partnerships with embassies from Central America and the Caribbean. In
December 2010, ambassadors from nine Central American and Caribbean
countries met with Secretary Solis to learn about the program and
potential areas for partnership. In addition to these formal
declarations, WHD also participates in several other outreach and
partnership activities to share information and leverage community-
based resources to more effectively inform workers about their rights
and how to file wage and hour complaints.
Bureau of International Labor Affairs
The Department's Bureau of International Labor Affairs builds
relationships and funds programs in developing countries to improve
working conditions and labor standards across the global economy.
ILAB plays a critical role in bringing to light the dark stories of
human trafficking. By bringing these stories to the public's attention,
the Department is hopeful that countries and companies will change
their behavior and reform their worst practices. On December 15, 2010,
the Department released three new reports on child labor and forced
labor. All three reports include information on persons in severe labor
exploitation, such as forced labor, servitude, or debt bondage.
Together these reports demonstrate that from factories to the farms,
abuses of fundamental human rights, including human trafficking, still
persist in the 21st century. These reports are:
The List of Goods Produced by Child or Forced Labor, pursuant
to the 2005 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act,
identifies 128 goods from 70 countries that DOL has reason to believe
are produced by forced labor, child labor or both, in violation of
international standards;
The List of Products Produced by Forced or Indentured Child
Labor, pursuant to Executive Order 13126 of 1999, includes 29 products
from 21 countries; and
The 9th annual Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor. DOL
has published this report since 2002, but last year the report was
reformatted, and for the first time identifies gaps in government
efforts and includes country-specific suggestions for government
action. By providing more analysis and specific suggestions for action,
the redesigned report provides Congress and Executive Branch agencies
with useful information to consider when making labor and trade policy.
Since 1995, the U.S. Congress has appropriated over $839 million to
ILAB for programs to combat international child labor. This funding has
supported technical assistance projects in more than 80 countries, and
reached approximately 1.5 million children at risk of or engaged in
exploitive child labor. ILO Convention 182 identifies child trafficking
as one of the worst forms of child labor, and it is through this
framework that DOL addresses trafficking in its technical assistance
projects. While the Department's technical assistance projects include
stand-alone trafficking in persons projects, many also include multi-
faceted projects to address other worst forms of child labor in
addition to trafficking. For example, the Department undertakes such
projects to:
Provide victims with rehabilitation services and educational
opportunities.
Facilitate increased access to economic and vocational
opportunities for trafficked victims and their families.
Support awareness raising campaigns about the risks of
trafficking.
Build capacity to strengthen enforcement efforts and promote
legislative and policy reform to incorporate anti-trafficking
initiatives.
Collect reliable data about trafficking to better understand
the problem.
Employment and Training Administration
Because many of the most vulnerable workers in the United States
are temporary foreign agricultural workers, the Department's H-2A
program is another significant locus of the Department's efforts to
combat trafficking. The Immigration and Nationality Act assigns
specific responsibilities for the H-2A program to the Secretary of
Labor. Among the responsibilities delegated to the Department's Office
of Foreign Labor Certification are ensuring that U.S. workers are
provided first access to temporary agricultural jobs and that the
employment of the foreign workers does not adversely affect similarly
employed U.S. workers. Accordingly, it is of great importance to the
Department that both workers in the U.S. and temporary foreign workers
are provided with appropriate worker protections. The Department
ensures that these statutory responsibilities are met through
regulatory standards for the acceptance and processing of employer-
filed H-2A applications.
On March 15, 2010, a final rule addressing the temporary
agricultural employment of H-2A aliens in the United States became
effective. The H-2A final rule includes enhanced mechanisms for
protecting workers, including H-2A temporary foreign workers who are
increasingly susceptible to the abuses of dishonest employers and their
agents such as foreign labor recruiters. The Secretary has tasked the
Employment and Training Administration with taking an active role in
ensuring compliance with H-2A protections because temporary foreign
workers remain unlikely to file complaints about violations of their
rights under the program.
The Department believes that requiring employers to bear the full
cost of their decision to employ nonimmigrant workers is a necessary
step toward preventing the exploitation of such workers. Therefore, the
2010 Final Rule prohibits employers or their agents from seeking or
receiving payment of any kind from an H-2A worker for any activity
related to obtaining the necessary labor certification, including the
employer's attorneys fees, application fees, or recruitment costs,
unless the employers are being reimbursed for costs that are the
responsibility of the worker, such as government-required passport
fees. The regulation also prohibits ``kick backs'' from the H-2A worker
to the employer or any other deductions that reduce the actual wage
paid to the worker below the required H-2A wage; and requires employers
to pay transportation costs between the place of employment and the
place from which the H-2A worker has come, as well as subsistence
costs, and visa fees.
Moreover, amidst reports of H-2A temporary foreign workers being
required to give recruiters thousands of dollars to secure a job, the
Department recognized that such practices adversely affect the wages
and working conditions of U.S. workers by creating conditions akin to
indentured servitude, driving down wages and working conditions for
foreign and domestic workers. Therefore, the 2010 Final Rule requires
employers to contractually forbid foreign labor contractors or
recruiters engaged in international recruitment of H-2A workers from
seeking or receiving payments from such prospective employees.
Lastly, in an effort to ensure worker protections and program
integrity, the 2010 Final Rule requires employers to provide the H-2A
worker a written copy of the work contract no later than at the time
the foreign worker applies for a visa, and to post and maintain in a
conspicuous location at the place of employment a poster provided free
of charge by the Secretary of Labor which sets out the rights and
protections for foreign workers.
The 2010 H-2A Final Rule's enhanced enforcement provisions allow
the Department to investigate and sanction employers and their agents
or attorneys where there is a violation of regulation provisions. The
possible sanctions include debarment from the program for up to three
years, revocation of an already approved labor certification, and/or
special procedures for future applications where a less than
substantial violation has occurred. If an employer is found to have
failed to meet its legal obligations under the 2010 Final Rule, for
example by violating the prohibition on making workers pay for
recruiter fees, the Department may seek recovery of those recruitment
fees and obtain temporary or permanent injunctive relief, as well as
assess civil money penalties against the employer. These monetary
penalties demonstrate the Department's commitment to strengthening the
necessary enforcement of a law that protects workers who are unlikely
to complain to government agencies about violations of their rights
under the program.
Conclusion
In today's global economy, workers in any country are vulnerable to
trafficking and labor rights abuses. The Department's innovative and
integrated programs help workers earn decent incomes and prevent them
from being abused and exploited. This approach is a vital part of the
Administration's goal of ensuring that globalization provides benefits
and opportunities for workers everywhere, rather than triggering a
``race to the bottom.''
Again, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. I am happy
to answer any questions the Commission may have on the Department of
Labor's work to combat human trafficking.
Prepared Statement of Nancy A. Donaldson, Director, Washington Office
of the International Labor Organization [ILO]
Chairman Smith, Co-Chairman Cardin and Members of the Commission,
thank you for inviting me to brief the Commission on the ILO's
perspective and its work on migration, forced labor and human
trafficking.
International Trends
The migration of human beings today is, as it has always been, a
function of the search for greater opportunity. Each year millions of
people leave their homes and cross national borders in search of better
prospects and greater security for themselves and their families,
undertaking jobs ranging from manual labor to science and technology.
Migration takes place between developed and developing countries and
among developing countries as well. International migration is on the
rise and will continue to grow in the coming decades due to growing
income inequality and wealth concentration across countries, lack of
jobs and economic opportunities where people live, environmental and
natural disasters, political persecution, armed conflict, and lower
population growth in most destination countries.
Ninety percent of all migrants are workers and their families.
According to UN and ILO estimates, international migrants reached 214
million in 2010, of which 105 million [49 per cent] are economically
active migrants. Women make up almost 50 per cent of all international
migrants. Thus, international migration is primarily about the search
for decent work and livelihoods.
Migrants make significant contributions to social progress and
welfare in both their country of origin and the ``destination''
countries where they work. They bring skills, labor knowledge and
initiative to advance economies in host countries. They also benefit
origin countries--sending money home, and through transfer of
technology and critical skills and investments through return migration
and Diasporas.
Today we are here to discuss urgent problems often faced by
vulnerable migrant populations and individuals, criminal trafficking
and forced labor and the actions that the ILO and others are taking to
eradicate these abuses across national borders and within countries.
With growing labor demand in some sectors and regions, malpractices by
private recruitment agencies involving high fees and misleading
information is a substantial issue in the globalized economy. Migrants
are vulnerable to exploitation, experience deskilling and
discrimination, and poor workforce integration in host countries. In
the extreme, irregular migration includes trafficking, smuggling,
sexual exploitation and violence.
As ILO's recent report highlights,\1\ forced labor today is the
antithesis of decent work and a global problem affecting almost every
country in the world. Until very recently, the bulk of forced labor and
slavery-like practices were bound up with traditional forms of serfdom,
with individuals tied to agrarian landlords and others. Today forced
labor is mostly found in the informal economy in developing and
industrialized countries alike. It is affecting vulnerable women much
more than before. Moreover, a key feature of modern forced labor is the
exploitation of the poor and vulnerable by intermediaries, and is
basically a form of modern debt bondage. There are new forms or
patterns of coercion creeping into production systems and labor markets
around the world, mainly in the informal economy, but also sometimes in
the supply chains of modern industrial enterprises and supermarkets.
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\1\ ILO. 2009. The Cost of Coercion. Geneva.
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Traditional slavery is still found in some parts of Africa, while
forced labor in the form of coercive recruitment is present in many
countries of Latin America, parts of the Caribbean and elsewhere.
Around the world, domestic workers are trapped in situations of forced
labor, with some restrained from leaving their employer's home by means
of threat or actual violence. Bonded labor persists in South Asia where
millions of men, women, and children are tied to their work through a
vicious cycle of debt. In Europe and North America, an increasing
number of women and children are victims of traffickers who sell them
into forced prostitution or sweatshops. Finally, forced labor is
sometimes still imposed as a punishment for expressing one's political
views.
The ILO estimates that there are at least 12.3 million persons in
forced labor today. Globally, only 20 percent of all forced labor is
exacted by the State or armed forces. Eighty percent of forced laborers
or 9.8 million people were exploited by private agents. Of this
majority, 11 percent is exacted for forced commercial sexual
exploitation, while 64 percent is exacted for the purpose of economic
exploitation. Reliable statistical information about the economic
sectors where forced labor is found remains difficult to establish.
Most victims are poverty-stricken people in Asia and Latin America,
whose vulnerability is exploited by others for a profit. Yet, over
360,000 women and men [3 percent of the total] are in forced labor in
industrialized countries, trafficked for either labor or sexual
exploitation. Some 56 percent of all persons in forced labor are women
and girls. Children under 18 years of age make up between 40-50 percent
of forced laborers.
The ILO is actively focused on people within contract labor and
recruitment systems and domestic workers. The ILO has taken up the
issue of protecting domestic workers vigorously. Last year, the ILO
International Labor Conference [ILC] began consideration of a Domestic
Worker's Convention. It is expected to receive the second round and
final consideration and a formal vote during the meeting of the 100th
ILO ILC this June. The U.S. has been an important leader on protecting
domestic workers. We appreciate U.S. support for the convention and we
welcomed the April 2011 statement made by the U.S. mission in response
to the OSCE Report on Human Trafficking.
ILO Labor Standards
One principal responsibility of the ILO is drawing up and
overseeing international labor standards. Since 1919, the member
countries, employers and workers that make up the tripartite structure
of the ILO have developed and maintained a system of international
labor standards aimed at promoting opportunities for women and men to
obtain decent and productive work, in conditions of freedom, equity,
security and dignity. Strong enforcement of labor standards worldwide
levels the playing field for all workers, including American workers
and industries. In today's globalized economy, international labor
standards are also an essential component for ensuring that the growth
of the global economy provides benefits to all.
The ILO has pioneered the development of international standards
prohibiting forced labor and for the governance of labor migration and
protection of migrant workers since the 1930s. Universal human rights
are applicable to all human beings irrespective of nationality.
Moreover, the core labor rights--in the eight Conventions of the ILO
Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work [1998]--are
applicable to all workers including all migrant workers. Two of the
eight core conventions [C. 29 [1930] & C. 105 [1957]] prohibit all
forms of forced or compulsory labor and prohibit forced or compulsory
labor as a means of political coercion or education or as a punishment
for holding or expressing political views or views ideologically
opposed to the established political, social or economic system; as a
method of mobilizing and using labor for purposes of economic
development; as a means of labor discipline; as a punishment for having
participated in strikes; and as a means of racial, social, national or
religious discrimination. Additionally, forced or compulsory labor is
considered to be one of the worst forms of child labor in the Worst
Forms of Child Labor Convention No. 182 [1999].
The ILO Conventions on migrant workers--Migration for Employment
No. 97, [1949] and the Migrant Workers [Supplementary Provisions]
Convention No. 143, [1975] define the rights of migrant workers, and
advocate the principles of equal treatment, equality of opportunity and
non-discrimination. The 1990 UN Internatinoal Convention on the
Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their
Families has elaborated and expanded on these rights. These three
Conventions together define a comprehensive charter of migrant rights
and provide a legal basis for national policy and practice on migrant
workers.
Member States of the OSCE have made significant commitments to
International Labor Standards relevant to forced labor and migration.
The vast majority of OSCE states have ratified the Conventions
prohibiting all forms of forced labor. Additionally, 93 percent have
ratified Convention 182 on the worst forms of child labor. Regarding
migration, the record of ratifications is lower: only 20 OSCE countries
ratified Convention 97 and 14 have ratified Convention 143.
ILO Programs
The ILO has two specialized programs--The International Migration
Program [ILO MIGRANT] and the Special Action Program to combat Forced
Labor [SAP-FL] to assist ILO countries and partners with the challenges
of labor migration and forced labor.
The ILO Governing Body created the Special Action Program to combat
Forced Labor in November 2001 as part of broader efforts to promote the
1998 Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work and its
Follow-up. The ILO is promoting a Global Alliance with partner agencies
pooling their efforts to eliminate forced labor worldwide by 2015.
ILO's International Migration Program supports effective practices
by the ILO member States in combating discrimination against migrants
and in helping their social and economic integration. The program is
currently implementing the Plan of Action of 2004 which consists of
seven components, including a Multilateral Framework, promoting the
application of international labor standards, strengthening social
dialogue, technical assistance for capacity building, and supporting
the ILO global employment agenda at national levels. The Multilateral
Framework provides non-binding principles and guidelines to assist
countries in developing more effective labor migration policies and
includes a set of best practices. Currently the program is engaged in
14 technical cooperation projects either funded by or to be implemented
in OSCE countries, to develop effective migration systems, policies,
and strategies; strengthening pertinent government institutions, and
educating migrants on their rights and available services
The ILO has been at the forefront of generating and sharing data
and knowledge on these topics, to raise public awareness and increase
pressure for action. ILO's initial body of research was seminal as it
has provided the basic facts and figures on modern forced labor,
raising the global pressure for policy change. The ILO has continued to
expand the global knowledge base on forced labor, for example
commissioning focused studies in methodologically challenging and
politically sensitive areas.
I would like to emphasize that improving data collection on these
issues is of paramount importance. Significant gaps in understanding
the quantitative dimension of forced labor and human trafficking
remain. The few available national estimates are generally calculated
on the basis of secondary data. The ILO is working with governments to
improve indicators and data collection on forced labor and human
trafficking to promote better enforcement and monitor the impact of
national and international policies.
The ILO has developed and disseminated courses, guidance and
training materials on key aspects of forced labor and trafficking. For
example, a regular course on labor migration was launched in 2007 at
ILO's training center in Turin, Italy. In July 2011 the Labor Migration
Academy will provide advanced knowledge and enhance the capacity of key
migration actors to better understand labor migration challenges and
opportunities. A set of handbooks and training manuals for recruiters,
labor inspectors, businesses have been developed to provide guidance
and strategies about forced labor.\2\
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\2\ See, for example, Trafficking For Forced Labor--How To Monitor
The Recruitment of Migrant Workers [2006]; Forced Labor and Human
Trafficking: Handbook for Labor Inspectors [2008]; Handbook for
Employers & Businesses [2008].
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Cooperation between the OSCE and the ILO on research and training
has helped our economic partners to access important knowledge and
expertise on these topics. For example, a number of migration handbooks
have been jointly developed to assist countries in their efforts to
develop new policy approaches, solutions and practical measures for
better management of labor migration in countries of origin and of
destination. Training projects were organized in 2010 focusing on
gender aspects in labor migration policies. Last week, ILO participated
in a two-day OSCE conference in Tbilisi, Georgia focusing on building
partnerships to combat human trafficking and forced labor as part of a
European Union-funded regional anti-trafficking project in the South
Caucasus. In June 2011, ILO will participate in the Alliance Against
Trafficking in Persons meeting in Vienna, Austria--an international
forum which aims at combining the efforts of the stakeholders to
prevent and combat human trafficking.
The ILO assists governments in designing and implementing projects
on the ground. Through our Decent Work country program strategies, the
ILO works with employers, workers and governments to set out agreed
national priorities in the world of work. Experience shows that, with
careful awareness-raising, consensus can be built to include sensitive
subjects, such as forced labor, among the core national priorities.
Bolivia and Nicaragua are examples of countries which have included the
abolition of forced labor as a specific Decent Work Agenda priority. In
Asia, Pakistan has included a direct commitment on reducing bonded
labor. The U.S. Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons [G/
TIP] is providing leadership and grants to eliminate human trafficking
globally, support the victims of trafficking and to prosecute
traffickers. In Turkey, through the ILO's International Program on the
Elimination of Child Labor [IPEC], the U.S. Department of Labor
sponsored a project that withdrew or protected over 13,000 children
from the worst forms of child labor between 2003 and 2006.
In Brazil, the ILO has been working with our social partners on the
issue of forced labor in global supply chains. In many sectors,
enterprises outsource a range of production and service-related
activities which results in complex international supply chains. The
growth of supply chains and outsourcing has raised issues surrounding
the application of international labor standards on suppliers. The
abolition of ``slave labor'' and the worst forms of child labor are a
key priority in Brazil's ``National Agenda for Decent Work''. With
grant support from the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor
[DRL] of the State Department, the project ``Eradicating Forced Labor
from Global Supply Chains through Social Dialogue'' [2005-2011] has
promoted new understanding and strategies for engagement. The key
objective is to strengthen the Global Alliance Against Forced Labor by
reducing risks of trafficking and forced labor facing Brazilian
suppliers and international buyers. The public and private sector
efforts in Brazil have helped to raise awareness about forced labor,
mobilize companies, rescue thousands of forced laborers, and map
complex supply chains in a range of industries.
Conclusions
I want to leave the Commission with three key points:
One--Good migration polices and the abolition of forced labor are
challenges for every country--whether industrialized, emerging
economies or less developed. The ILO is playing a critical role in
assisting countries to bring decent working conditions to citizens and
migrants alike, and ending forced labor and trafficking. However, we
believe that true gains in the governance of migration, and against
forced labor and human trafficking must happen in a multilateral
context. By definition, international migration and human trafficking
require common approaches and means for cooperation among States.
Two, the ILO takes a rights-based approach to these issues. The ILO
is devoted to promoting social justice and internationally recognized
human and labor rights, pursuing its founding mission that labor peace
is essential to prosperity. Basic human rights, including core labor
rights of all workers, both men and women, and children, migrants and
other vulnerable workers should be respected.
Three, governance of migration and forced labor deserves a multi-
stakeholder approach. The ILO works with governments and strong social
partners in devising innovative and sustainable solutions to these
issues. Cooperation between the economic partners--government,
employers and workers is critical to reducing irregular migration and
ending forced labor and ensuring protection of workers' rights.
We at the ILO have enjoyed fruitful partnerships with G/TIP and DRL
at the U.S. Department of State, and with the Bureau of International
Labor Affairs within the U.S. Department of Labor while working on
these important issues. We respect and seek more ways to work with the
outstanding initiatives of the Solidarity Center. We are dedicated to
continue working together to improve migrants' conditions and to end
forced labor and human trafficking around the world.
Thank you once again for inviting me to participate in this
hearing, Chairman Smith, Co-Chairman Cardin and distinguished Members
of the Commission. I am happy to answer any questions you may have.
Prepared Statement of Neha Misra, Senior Specialist, Migration and
Human Trafficking, Solidarity Center
``Slavery without Shackles'': Labor Exploitation and the Trafficking of
Vulnerable Workers around the World
Thank you to the U.S. Helsinki commission for the opportunity to
present the Solidarity Center's view about ``labor trafficking in
troubled economic times'', and especially to highlight the
vulnerability of immigrant workers \1\ to trafficking and forced labor
within legal structures in the U.S. and around the world.
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\1\ The term ``migrant worker'' is the internationally accepted
term for a person who migrates for employment, whether temporary,
seasonal, or permanent. In the United States, in everyday language,
``migrant worker'' refers to a seasonal or temporary worker, and
``immigrant worker'' refers to someone who migrates for work on a more
permanent basis, or who has residency rights. I will use the common
U.S. term of ``immigrant worker'' in my testimony modifying it slightly
to refer to any person who leaves his or her country of origin to find
a job abroad--whether temporary, seasonal or permanent.
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My name is Neha Misra. I am the Senior Specialist for Migration and
Human Trafficking at the Solidarity Center. We are an international NGO
that promotes and protects worker rights globally, working in over 60
countries. The Solidarity Center is an allied organization of the
American Federation of Labor--Congress of Industrial Organizations
[AFL-CIO], and a member of the Alliance to End Slavery and Trafficking
[ATEST]. Building upon more than 20 years of experience in the areas of
child labor and immigrant worker exploitation, the Solidarity Center
raises awareness about the prevalence and underlying causes of
trafficking for labor exploitation, and strives to unite disparate
forces to combat the problem. Since 2001, the Solidarity Center has
implemented more than 20 programs combating human trafficking in
countries such as Thailand, Indonesia, Nepal, India, Sri Lanka,
Pakistan, the Philippines, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Kenya, and the
Dominican Republic. These programs include initiatives that address
each of the four ``Ps'' that have become part of the anti-trafficking
paradigm: prevention, protection of victims, prosecution [or as we
prefer to describe it, ``rule of law''], and partnerships.
Trafficking for Labor Exploitation in Today's Global Economy
The Solidarity Center especially appreciates the Helsinki
Commission's focus in this hearing on trafficking for labor
exploitation and the focus on ``abusive, unethical, and illegal
business practices that . . . contribute to human trafficking and
forced labor.'' As a worker rights organization, the Solidarity Center
has seen firsthand how violations of worker rights and the lack of
labor standards and protections for workers increase their
vulnerability to human trafficking.
Too often the media and the public see human trafficking only as a
crime of organized syndicates, of criminal gangs, or underground
criminals who exploit undocumented immigrant workers. While this is of
course true in some contexts, we are increasingly seeing trafficking
for labor exploitation happening in the context of legal structures of
employment and business--with traffickers who are employers and labor
recruiters, not gang members.
Examples abound around the world of human trafficking thriving in
the context of worker exploitation:
When immigrant workers are forced to pay high fees, often at
exorbitant interest rates, to labor recruiters to work in another
country, they are vulnerable to debt bondage--one of the most pervasive
forms of modern day slavery. This is the case for 400 Thai workers who,
according to a U.S. Department of Justice indictment, were allegedly
trafficked to the United States by Global Horizons Manpower under the
H-2A visa program through false promises of decent work. The Thai
workers ``took on crushing debt to pay exorbitant recruiting fees,
about $9,500-$21,000. After they arrived in America, 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.'' \2\ Millions of other workers--including for
example, Moldovan migrant agriculture workers in Italy and Vietnamese
workers toiling in factories in Malaysia--can tell a similar story.
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\2\ Editorial, ``Forced Labor,'' September 7, 2010, http://
www.nytimes.com/2010/09/08/opinion/08wed2.html?_r=2
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When buyers pressure suppliers all along supply chains to
achieve cutthroat prices for their products, workers are the ones that
bear the burden as labor costs are often the first ones to be cut,
increasing workers vulnerability to severe forms of labor exploitation,
including human trafficking. This is the case for thousands of Burmese
migrant workers who have been subject to forced labor and physical,
emotional, and sexual intimidation in seafood-processing factories in
Thailand, which export to the United States. The factories rely on
trafficked workers to stay within the cost structure.
When labor laws and regulations are not implemented, monitored,
or enforced--when labor inspection is weak or nonexistent--workers are
vulnerable to trafficking for forced labor and other forms of severe
labor exploitation. When workers face retaliation for trying to
exercise their rights or when workers lack access to avenues to address
abuse, workers are vulnerable to human trafficking. This is the case
for millions of domestic workers,\3\ agricultural workers, and
immigrant workers in the United States and around the world who face
extreme conditions of exploitation, including physical and sexual
violence, confiscation of passports, illegal confinement, dangerous
working conditions, and non-payment of wages. These workers are often
explicitly excluded from the protection of labor laws, even when they
are citizens or nationals of a country, and their work is often
relegated to the informal economy where there is little labor
inspection.
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\3\ The term ``domestic worker'' refers to a person who provides
services--such as childcare, cooking, and cleaning--to or within a
household.
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In 2011, a slave may not be in chains or shackles, but they are no
freer. Slavery is not simply ownership of one person over another.
Modern day slavery is much more subtle. Trafficking victims toil in
factories that produce products that are exported to the United States,
Europe, and other destinations. Trafficking victims harvest vegetables
and process food that ends up on our dining room tables. They pick
crops or mine minerals that are raw materials in the products we buy.
They make the clothes and shoes we wear. They clean people's homes and
take care of the young, elderly and sick. They are enslaved not only
through physical restraint, but also through coercion, fear, and
intimidation. In today's global economy, workers can be enslaved by
threats of deportation, lack of viable alternatives, and especially
debt.
While trafficking for labor exploitation has many facets, several
major trends in our globalized world endanger workers, particularly
those most at risk and most in need of protection. In developed
economies like in the United States and Europe, we are seeing an
increase in cases of trafficked immigrant teachers, nurses,
construction, and service sector workers--all in these destination
countries with valid visas, shining 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.
Trafficking as an Inherent Vulnerability in Temporary Labor Migration
Schemes
Of particular concern are temporary labor migration schemes--
sometimes referred to as guestworker, sponsorship or circular migration
programs--that are increasingly being promoted by governments around
the world to fill demand for cheap labor. In practice, these schemes
create a legalized system and structure for employers to exploit
workers, and increase workers' vulnerability to human trafficking and
other forms of severe labor exploitation. Such programs have been
plagued by a long history of abuses ranging from labor violations to
visa fraud, debt bondage, involuntary servitude and trafficking for
labor exploitation. This includes, among many others, the U.S. H-2 visa
guestworker program, seasonal agricultural programs in Canada and
Europe, and the ``kafala'' or sponsorship system in the Gulf
Cooperation Council [GCC] countries.
The Alliance to End Slavery and Trafficking or ATEST, of which the
Solidarity Center is a member, recently described the problem in a
submission to the U.S. Department of Labor as follows:\4\
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\4\ ATEST Comments on RIN 1205-AB58, Temporary Non-Agricultural
Employment of H-2B Aliens in the United States [Employment and Training
Administration, 20 CFR Part 655 and Wage and Hour Division, 29 CFR Part
503], May 17, 2011.
It is by now beyond dispute that temporary ``guestworker''
programs have long worked to the detriment both o f the U.S.
workers who are bypassed in favor of foreign workers, and for
the foreign workers who fall prey to unscrupulous employers and
their labor contractors.\5\ Of particular concern to our
members, key aspects of the program lead to human rights
violations such as debt peonage [or debt bondage], trafficking
for labor exploitation and involuntary servitude, all forms of
modern-day slavery. Guestworkers' vulnerability is greatly
increased by the use of labor recruiters or foreign labor
contractors who lure impoverished and desperate foreign workers
to jobs within the United States described as plentiful and
lucrative. The opportunity to work in the U.S. comes with an
intolerably high price tag that includes inflated
transportation, visa, border crossing and other costs, and
``recruitment fees.'' Often, workers literally mortgage family
properties or take out loans from loan sharks at exorbitant
rates in order to meet these obligations. Companies within the
United States claim no knowledge of their recruiters' actions
and escape legal liability on these grounds. The recruiters
themselves often remain beyond the reach of the U.S. legal
system.
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\5\ Southern Poverty Law Center, 2007. ``Close to Slavery:
Guestworker Programs in the United States,'' http://www.splcenter.org/
pdf/static/SPLCguestworker.pdf; Closed and Criminal Cases Illustrate
Instances of H-2B Workers Being Targets of Fraud and Abuse, GAO 10-
1053; testimony submitted by members of the Guestworker Alliance for
Dignity to the House Committee on Oversight and Governmental Reform
Domestic Policy Subcommittee, ``The H-2B Program and Improving the
Department of Labor's Enforcement of the Rights of Guestworkers,''
April 9, 2009; The Costs of Coercion: Global Report under the Follow Up
to the ILO Declaration of the Fundamental Principles and Rights at
Work, International Labor Organization, International Labor Conference,
98th Sess. 2009 Report I [B], http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/-
--ed_norm/---relconf/documents/meetingdocument/wcms_106230.pdf.
Once guestworkers arrive in the United States, the well-paid
jobs that have been offered [often] do not materialize. Workers
are left without work at all, or without work for the length of
time promised them. Favorable terms and conditions of work
offered in the home country are replaced by harsh conditions.
Job contractors transfer workers, for a price, to other
contractors. Workers who are dissatisfied with the jobs face
overwhelming subtle and not-so-subtle pressures to acquiesce.
Passports and other immigration and identity documents are
confiscated [by employers] to ensure that workers do not run
away. Families back home are threatened [by recruiters] with
physical violence, as well as family bankruptcy due to loss of
their investment in the worker. Workers who dare speak up for
their rights face job loss, followed by deportation to their
home countries and blacklisting. These factors lead workers to
fall into myriad situations that rise to the level of a severe
form of human trafficking, most notably coercion through abuse
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
or threatened abuse of the law or legal process.
As noted in a recent ILO report, these conditions create a
program that is ripe for human rights violations. Human
trafficking abuses involving H-2B visas have been documented
with frequency in recent media.
While the description above refers to the U.S. temporary
guestworker program, the same scenario repeats itself around the
world--for example, in Canada, Europe, the GCC, and around Asia. The
common element is that these workers are trafficked within legal visa
systems, fully documented, and that structural flaws within these
programs allow workers to be trafficked.
Two other major common themes emerge:
1. The role of foreign labor recruiters in taking advantage of the
lack of labor rights and inherent structural failures in these programs
to exploit immigrant workers; and,
2. The need to provide greater protections to workers and
opportunities for them to report abuses and advocate for their own
rights.
The Role of Labor Recruiters in Promoting Human Trafficking
Foreign labor contractors or recruiters are increasingly relied
upon by employers, businesses, and multi-national corporations to
facilitate the movement of labor from one country to another. While
many labor recruiters behave ethically and are engaged in lawful
conduct, other recruiters are often complicit with or directly involved
in trafficking of workers. Recruiters often charge exorbitant fees for
their services, forcing workers into debt bondage, falsifying
documents, and deceiving workers about their terms and conditions of
work increasing vulnerability to human trafficking.
The incidence of known human trafficking cases involving foreign
labor recruiters is increasing dramatically in the United States. The
aforementioned Global Horizons case and the Signal workers case are
just two recent examples. Many U.S.-based service providers state that
regulating labor recruiters is one of the most important initiatives
needed to combat human trafficking in the United States--both labor
recruiters based in the U.S. and abroad. Employers rely on labor
recruiters who have operations both in the U.S. and in foreign
countries--as they use a system of subcontracting to find workers. The
operations of such recruiters need to be regulated on both ends of the
spectrum.
Stricter regulation of labor recruiters is needed to protect
workers entering the United States from human trafficking and other
abuses such as wage theft. Stronger legal frameworks will help to
prevent unregulated actors from conspiring to fraudulently deceive
workers about the terms and conditions of work.
To that end, ATEST has made a series of recommendations to include
regulation of labor recruiters/foreign labor contractors in the 2011
Reauthorization of the Trafficking Victim Protection Act [TVPRA 2011].
Similar provisions were passed in the 2008 House of Representatives
version of the TVPRA. We have learned even more since 2008 about the
need for greater regulation of foreign labor recruiters. As such, ATEST
recommends, with the support of a number of worker and immigrant rights
groups in the United States, the following for inclusion in the 2011
TVPRA:
1. Elimination of Fees: No foreign labor contractor, or agent or
employee of a foreign labor contractor, should be allowed to assess any
fee [including visa fees, processing fees, transportation fees, legal
expenses, placement fees, and other costs] to a worker for any foreign
labor contracting activity. Such costs or fees may be borne by the
employer, but these fees cannot be passed along to the worker. This is
one of the most crucial elements to eliminate debt bondage for
immigrant workers.
2. Disclosure: Foreign labor contractors and employers must be
required to fully disclose to the worker in writing in English and in
the language of the worker being recruited, all of the terms and
conditions of their work. This includes:
The identity of the employer and the identity of the person
conducting the recruiting on behalf of the employer, including any
subcontractor or agent involved in such recruiting.
A signed copy of the work contract, including all assurances
and terms and conditions of employment, from the prospective employer
for whom the worker is being recruited, including the level of
compensation to be paid, the place and period of employment, a
description of the type and nature of employment activities, any
withholdings or deductions from compensation and any penalties for
terminating employment.
The type of visa under which the foreign worker is to be
employed, the length of time the visa is valid and the terms and
conditions under which this visa will be renewed with a clear statement
of whether the employer will secure renewal of this visa or if renewal
must be obtained by the worker and any expenses associated with
securing or renewing the visa.
An itemized list of any costs or expenses to be charged to the
worker. Including but not limited to: the costs of housing or
accommodation, transportation to and from the worksite, meals, medical
examinations, healthcare or safety equipment costs, and any other
costs, expenses or deductions to be charged the worker.
A statement describing the protections afforded the worker by
U.S laws and regulations, including protections in the Trafficking
Victims Protection Act of 2000 [Division A of the Public Law 106-486],
as well as relevant information about the procedure for filing a
complaint and the telephone numbers for the Department of Labor hotline
and the National Human Trafficking Resource Center hotline number.
3. Registration: A Department of Labor administered process for
foreign labor contractors to obtain a certificate of registration.
Employers must be required to use only foreign labor contractors who
are properly registered under this system.
4. Enforcement: A Department of Labor established administrative
process for receiving, investigating, and adjudicating complaints
against the compliance of either employers or foreign labor
contractors. Criminal and civil rights of action for workers themselves
are also key to preventing trafficking.
5. Accountability: Workers must be protected from retaliation and
employers must be held accountable for the actions of foreign labor
contractors that they hire.
Worker Rights as a Means to Prevent Trafficking for Labor Exploitation
As described earlier, immigrant workers must be included fully in
the protection of labor laws and have access to mechanisms to exercise
their rights and report abuses to reduce their vulnerability to
trafficking. Threats of retaliation, deportation, and visas being tied
to a particular employer all increase the incidence of trafficking for
labor exploitation. For this reason, ATEST also recommends a provision
for the 2011 TVPRA that provide temporary immigration relief to workers
who are whistleblowers of severe labor exploitation. There have been a
number of human trafficking cases recently in the United States where
workers who raised the alarm about severe abuse by employers have
initially been threatened with deportation as a way to keep them quiet.
These workers have had to remain in the United States in an
undocumented status in order to stay in the country to pursue their
cases against the abusive employers. After many years, these same
workers have been certified as trafficking victims and receive ``T''
visas, but had to struggle for many years without status. Examples of
this include the Global Horizons case and a group of Indian workers
known in the media as the Signal Workers. ATEST recommends that a
provision be included in the TVPRA 2011 to give trafficked workers like
these access to temporary immigration relief in the United States while
they pursue claims here, even if they are not initially identified as
trafficking victims.
Trafficking in Supply Chains
Another major trend in the global economy is the use of
trafficking, forced labor, and slavery victims all along supply chains.
It is difficult to quantify the exact number of trafficking victims who
work in global supply chains but, as those supply chains reach down to
smaller and smaller suppliers, the chances increase that the labor
force includes trafficked people.
When employers [buyers and multinational corporations [MNCs]]
demand cheap or unrealistic pricing structures, they should not be
surprised to find severe labor abuses, including slavery, in their
supply chains.
Similarly, when employers contract out or hire unregulated
subcontracted suppliers, they should not be surprised to find that they
have trafficking victims in their production lines
When employers refuse to enforce or claim that it is too
difficult to monitor adherence to core labor standards in their supply
chains, they will find forced labor, debt bondage, and other severe
forms of labor exploitation there.
The Solidarity Center believes that the most effective way to
eliminate forced labor, debt bondage and other forms of slavery in
supply chains is by empowering workers to have a voice in their
workplace, and supporting their right to organize and join unions. We
believe that governments, MNCs, employers, labor recruiters and others
must adhere to core labor standards and respect workers' human and
labor rights in order to affect change in practices all along supply
chains.
The existence of MNC codes of conduct have failed to curtail
trafficking practices in any number of sectors including garment/
textile, agriculture, and seafood processing. There is no easy solution
to this problem, but we know that a key deterrent is the ability of
unions and labor rights organizations to shine a light on these
practices through on-the-ground investigations. We believe it is
important that the Congress and Administration support such monitoring
efforts, and the efforts of workers to monitor their own workplaces.
Ultimately, workers and trade unions must be empowered to monitor
supply chains because history shows that abuses in the workplace only
end when workers have the power to ensure that their rights in both
International Labor Organization [ILO] conventions and national laws
are respected.
Governments must also play a major role in eliminating slavery in
supply chains. Examples abound of governments around the world
reluctance to hold employers accountable for trafficking in their
workplaces. Even when trafficking for labor exploitation is addressed,
the labor recruiter is blamed and not the employer who perpetrates the
exploitation.
This lack of political will translates into ridiculously few cases
of human trafficking for forced labor or other forms of severe labor
exploitation from being prosecuted around the world. When cases are
prosecuted, they often result in small fines and no jail time for the
perpetrators--barely a deterrent for exploitative employers. The U.S.
Department of Justice is playing an important leadership role globally,
by prosecuting high-profile cases, such as the Global Horizons case,
that may educate other governments of trafficking of temporary workers
and within supply chains. The Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking
in Persons [G/TIP] at the State Department also plays an important role
through its annual Trafficking in Persons Report in highlighting the
lack of [but need for] prosecutions for forced labor and other forms of
trafficking for labor exploitation in countries around the world.
The U.S. government, however, must do more to ensure that U.S.
corporations are held accountable for their practices abroad. We must
increase government scrutiny of imports and exports to ensure goods
made by slave labor are not allowed in the U.S. marketplace. To this
end, the State Department needs to put more emphasis on site visits
overseas to suspect industries. To do this, it must expand the number
of labor officers and attachees in the field, something that the
Congress has called for generally but which the Department has yet to
act upon in any meaningful way.
In addition, the Department of Homeland Security must review and
rework the role of Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] in
overseas inspections. Currently, ICE must notify foreign governments of
their intent to inspect workplaces that export products to the United
States. Such notification results in the ``cleansing'' of these
workplaces to remove any signs of trafficking or forced labor. U.S. law
does not allow evidence collected by unions or non-governmental sources
to be the basis for restricting the importation of products made by
slave labor. This must be reformed.
Conclusion
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, in the opening of the 2010
TIP Report, ``Ending this global scourge is an important policy
priority for the United States . . . and no one should claim immunity
from its reach or from the responsibility to confront it.''
We agree. It is not an oversimplification to say that if we end
worker exploitation, we can end human trafficking. As the International
Labor Organization [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.''
Thank you, again, for the opportunity to testify and for your help
in combating global trafficking and supporting the rights of workers
everywhere. I welcome your questions.
Prepared Statement of Julia Ormond, Founder and President, The Alliance
To Stop Slavery and End Trafficking
Mr. Chairman, distinguished Members of the Committee and staff,
good morning.
Initially, I engaged around the issue of slavery and human
trafficking shocked and spurred into action by reports of sex-
trafficking. To me, nothing then seemed more heinous than the repeated
rape and violence endured by its victims.
At first, I met in California with survivors representing a wide
variety of the faces of slavery. Other travels around the world took me
to Russia, Ghana, Thailand, Cambodia, India, and Europe. These trips
provided me with a creepy and shocking perspective of how slavery
invades not merely the lives of its victims, but my own life as well--
how I am unwittingly connected to it; ultimately connected to its
systematic violence. People often ask me ``where in the world is it
worst?'' My answer is: ``in my own home''
It is simply not possible to sit easily in Los Angeles and forget
the enslaved children I have met. Children from whom I have walked
away, and left to an uncertain fate.
What keeps me up at night--what haunts me--are the victim's
stories. I will never forget the story of the girl who crawled out of
an eight floor window for fear of her life in sex slavery. But I can
equally never forget the child enslaved in the fishing industry who
jumped ship into the Thai sea to float on a barrel for two days and a
night before being rescued because that was his safest option, or the
child who was chained, whipped and scarred for life while maybe working
on our carpets. Or the child soldier forced to burn his village, kill
his mother and rape his sister for someone else's war. Or the stories
of the artisanal miners of gold who begin a two-year life expectancies,
just to provide me with a trinket. Or the enslaved garment worker who
make my clothing. Or footage of Mayan agricultural slaves in Florida
picking my tomatoes.
Just as those forced into sex slavery, they all deserve our
compassion. They all deserve our attention. And they all deserve our
commitment to end all forms of slavery and human trafficking.
In 2007 I founded the Alliance to Stop Slavery and End Trafficking,
otherwise known as ASSET. ASSET is an advocacy organization, dedicated
to combating slavery and trafficking by amplifying the voice of the
victim, and supporting systemic solutions.
I have come to define ``enslavement'' as:
``When one person completely controls another person, uses
violence or violent threat to maintain that control, exploits
them economically and pays them effectively nothing.
Trafficking is a process of enslaving someone.''
Under the tenure of Ambassador CdeBaca, the 2010 Annual Report of
the U.S. State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in
Persons notes that more people are trafficked into forced labor than
commercial sex. Yet ask any member of the public what proportion of
this issue is sex-trafficking, and the usual response is about 80%. To
the contrary, the International Labor Organization has recently stated
that for every one person forced into the sex trade, nine people around
the world are forced to work.
And among labor trafficking victims, the practice is most prevalent
in the agriculture and mining industries. The forced labor of these
victims taints many of the products that we purchase and rely on every
day, such as coffee, chocolate, clothing, micro-chips, electronics,
even the brake pads in our cars. To quote the TIP Report, ``it is
impossible to get dressed, drive to work, talk on the phone, or eat a
meal without touching products tainted by forced labor.''
The United Nations has documented the shift from trafficking in
weapons and drugs, to trafficking in people. And now specifically, the
trafficking of children. The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime has cited
that in Europe, the profits from human trafficking has overtaken the
profits in the trafficking of drugs. Yet the United States government
spends more in ONE DAY fighting the war on drugs, than it spends in an
entire year fighting the trafficking of people.
We all have a role to play in supporting solutions--and there are
many solutions. Every single place I travelled, solutions await the
resources to scale and meet a drastic need.
In order to resource these solutions, however, it is vital to get
the story straight, and media can play a crucial role. Sex will always
sell, whether the story is good or bad. But we need the media to cover
the issue fairly, proportionately. Media outlets must set aside
deliberate resistance of losing advertising revenue, and instead
articulate how businesses can use their influence over supply chains to
recreate the map, to illuminate the worst areas of poverty in the
world, where slavery and trafficking take hold.
As advocates, we need to do a better job articulating to the public
the enormous challenges that today's complex supply chains present to
business. We need to articulate that the CEO is most often not the
criminal. This is criminal activity tainting their supply chains, most
often around raw materials, just as shoplifting is criminal activity
occurring at the other end of the supply chain, at the point of
purchase.
Only by rediscovering the supply chain, and influencing each step
of it by encouraging best practices, can we implement real solutions;
can the NGO work with the CEO. A supply chain without a policy of best
practices is like a computer without virus protection--you will most
likely become infected with a virus or tainted by labor violations.
We need companies to come to the table and collaborate in finding
better solutions, to work with governments and the NGO community, who
can offer victims safety and rehabilitation, and can assist vulnerable
communities. We cannot accurately and efficiently access victims
without the assistance of the companies that influence infected supply
chains.
I think one of the most crucial pieces that I have learnt is that
this is a verification of process--whether you are growing, picking,
selling tomatoes out of Florida, or implementing Fair Trade's exemplary
standards in the developing worlds small farms--you will find slavery.
The point is that the better your practices, the less you will find.
And the better your practices, the better your response.
ASSET's solution was to be primary sponsor of the California
Transparency in Supply Chains Act of 2010, authored by Senator Darrell
Steinberg and signed into law by Governor Schwarzenegger in September
2010.
This law came into effect in January 2011, and it requires
retailers and manufacturers operating in California with over $100
million in worldwide gross receipts to publicly disclose their efforts
to eradicate slavery and human trafficking from their supply chains.
The law will apply to just over 3,000 companies--around 4% of
California's companies, who represent approximately 87% of economic
activity in the state.
This new law is one small step in a long journey forged by others
that ASSET has joined. I hope if it is applied well, that it will
represent a watershed in the sharing of knowledge, and will enable
active consumer, investor and other stake-holder engagement, will
encourage a pooling of resources and will get us closer to concrete,
measurable results.
The California Transparency in Supply Chains Act will for the first
time enable consumers to chose to support businesses that are creating
best practices, using their purchasing power to encourage them to bring
their expertise and knowledge of supply chains into the equation.
Investors can influence corporate governance and social responsibility
practices, providing incentives to companies to elevate human rights
and place them at the heart of their strategy.
In one sweep it will educate companies unaware of a possible
problem not just of their own potential vulnerability, but also the
devastating impact of using company influence to drive profit up by
forcing the prices of raw materials down, to a level where labor
violations and criminal activity and suicide are the outcome for the
raw material work-force. For today's enslaved.
It will create an environment where those companies already doing
the right thing, can more robustly and publically turn it into part of
their brand identity. And for the next step in the process to occur;
Congress should enact federal legislation that will empower consumers
with information disclosing the presence of slavery and trafficking in
the corporate supply chain.
Thank you for listening, and I look forward to your questions.
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