Almost 100 Indians who moved to the US for jobs have marched hundreds of miles to Washington DC in protest at being forced to work "like slaves". The Indian ambassador said he would do all he could to protect their rights.
BBC News - 3/27/08
The men say recruiters tricked them into paying up to $20,000 each for a new life in the US, where they then had to work in exploitative conditions.
The Mississippi firm that employed them has denied they were mistreated. It claims the recruiters misled the men.
The employer, Signal International, says the men were paid wages above the local average and given good accommodation.
It accuses recruitment firm Global Resources of deceiving the Indians and has ended its contract. It has also demanded that the recruiters return the fees the men paid them.
Global Resources has in turn denied any wrongdoing, saying it recruited the workers to the terms of its agreement with Signal International and that the men's treatment since was down to the employer.
'We want freedom'
In 2006, some 500 men from across India each paid recruiters up to $20,000 for what they were told would be a new life.
They were given temporary visas and jobs at Signal International, a marine construction company on the Mississippi Gulf Coast which needed extra workers because of a shortage of skilled labour following Hurricane Katrina.
But the men say they were then forced to live in primitive conditions with 24 men sharing a dormitory, for which they each paid $1,050 a month.
Almost 100 of them made an eight-day journey by foot and bus to Washington in an attempt to highlight what they say is the exploitation of foreign workers under the US temporary guest worker programme.
Chanting "we want freedom, we want justice", the men carried signs demanding they be treated with dignity and held up pictures of family members left behind in India.
They have described their protest as a Satyagraha, a word used by Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi to describe a non-violent battle against injustice.
'Nothing left'
Former Signal worker Sabulal Vijayan, a father-of-two from the southern Indian state of Kerala, told the BBC he had sold everything he had to come to the US to try to earn a better life for his family but had been left with nothing.
We need to change this system to one that helps the employees who are suffering
Sabulal Vijayan
The 39-year-old fitter said he was threatened with losing his job when he complained about the men's treatment last year - at which point fear and despair led him to attempt suicide.
"I slit my wrists, tried to commit suicide, because there is nothing left for me to go home to," he said, adding that he had been treated in hospital for three days afterwards.
Mr Vijayan said the men had been living in "slave-like conditions" with cramped accommodation, nowhere to keep their belongings and inadequate food.
And while the wage of about $19 an hour was good, he said, it would have been impossible to earn enough to pay back the fee they were charged initially in the 10 months allowed by their visas.
They were unable to leave and seek other work because that would have invalidated their visa and forced them to return to India worse-off than when they left.
"We need to change this system to one that helps the employees who are suffering, not the employers," he said.
Saket Soni, director of the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice, called on the Indian ambassador to the US to help "almost 100 brave, courageous Indian guest workers".
He said the men had been held for 18 months "in forced labour in a labour camp" before walking out of their jobs and reporting Signal International to the US Department of Justice (DoJ) as a "human trafficker".
The workers, backed by Mr Soni's organisation and others including the Southern Poverty Law Center, have also filed a federal anti-racketeering lawsuit against their recruiters.
Ambassador Ronen Sen urged the workers to report any allegations of mistreatment to him so that the embassy could work to help improve the guest worker system.
Claims denied
Signal International issued a statement on Thursday saying it would hire no new temporary workers under the H2B guest worker programme until it was "reformed to better protect foreign workers and US companies that were misled by recruiters".
Temporary workers had been given the same benefits as other workers, including health insurance, the statement said, and the accommodation charge included food, laundry and other services.
"We think that anyone who uses the word 'slave conditions' has little respect for the truth or the use of that phrase," chief executive Richard Marler said.
He claimed the recruiting companies and their lawyers had misled Signal and "deceived the workers in India by demanding highly excessive fees" and making false promises about visas.
Global Resources gave a statement saying Signal had been "totally and completely in charge of the relationship with the Indian workers", including their visa and living arrangements, since the contract with Global had been terminated in 2006.
A Global Resources spokesman told the BBC that "there were no misrepresentations to anyone" and that any information given to the workers had been agreed to by Signal.
The DoJ has said it will not be pursuing certain charges of discrimination filed against Signal International. Lawyers for the workers say that other civil and criminal suits are in progress.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/7316130.stm
Published: 2008/03/27 23:21:05 GMT
© BBC MMVIII
Friday, March 28, 2008
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Do as He Said
March 13, 2008
OP-ED COLUMNIST/ NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times
The last time I saw Eliot Spitzer, he encouraged me to write about his work involving prostitution. So here goes.
The governor buttonholed me because he wanted credit for passage of a tough state law against sex trafficking. Frankly, he deserves credit, for the law took the innovative step of cracking down on johns by increasing penalties.
The big worry now among those working to stop trafficking is that the Spitzer scandal will add to perceptions of prostitution as a “victimless crime.” On my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, one person named “Carmen” argued, “if a man can hire a pro to help improve his golf, why not let him hire a pro to help improve his sex?”
Another poster, who identified herself as a former prostitute in Australia, said she had “never felt exploited or trapped” and added, “It was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had.”
Yet the evidence is overwhelming that, in the United States, prostitution is only very rarely just another career choice. Studies suggest that up to two-thirds of prostitutes have been sexually abused as girls, a majority have drug dependencies or mental illnesses, one-third have been threatened with death by pimps, and almost half have attempted suicide.
Melissa Farley, a psychologist who has written extensively about the subject, says that girls typically become prostitutes at age 13 or 14. She conducted a study finding that 89 percent of prostitutes urgently wanted to escape the work, and that two-thirds have post-traumatic stress disorder — not a problem for even the most frustrated burger-flipper.
The mortality data for prostitutes is staggering. The American Journal of Epidemiology published a meticulous study finding that the “workplace homicide rate for prostitutes” is 51 times that of the next most dangerous occupation for women, working in a liquor store. The average age of death of the prostitutes in the study was 34.
“Women engaged in prostitution face the most dangerous occupational environment in the United States,” The Journal concluded.
We as a society forbid certain behavior by consenting adults because we deem it too dangerous or harmful. We do not permit indentured servitude or polygamy, or employment for less than the minimum wage. So why permit people to work in the unusually dangerous business of selling sex?
One response would be: Prostitution is inevitable, so we might as well legalize and regulate it. That’s a pragmatic argument that I used to find persuasive. If brothels were legalized and inspected, I believed, then we could uproot child prostitution and reduce AIDS and sexually transmitted infections.
I changed my mind after looking at the experiences of other countries. The Netherlands formally adopted the legalization model in 2000, and there were modest public health benefits for the licensed prostitutes. But legalization nurtured a large sex industry and criminal gangs that trafficked underage girls, and so trafficking, violence and child prostitution flourished rather than dying out.
As a result, the Netherlands is now backtracking on its legalization model by closing some brothels, and other countries, like Bulgaria, are backing away from that approach.
In contrast, Sweden experimented in 1999 with a radically different approach that many now regard as much more successful: it decriminalized the sale of sex but made it a crime to buy sex. In effect, the policy was to arrest customers, but not the prostitutes.
Some Swedish prostitutes have complained that the policy reduced demand and thus lowered prices, while forcing sex work underground. But the evidence is strong that the new approach reduced trafficking in Sweden, and opinion polls show that Swedes regard the experiment as a considerable success. And the bottom line is that if you want to rape a 13-year-old girl imported from Eastern Europe, you’ll have a much easier time in Amsterdam than in Stockholm.
A growing number of other countries are pursuing the Swedish model. South Korea had a vast trafficking industry in the 1990s, but a crackdown has led Korean gangs to traffic girls to California instead — because pimping teenagers there is seen as safer and more profitable than at home.
No approach is going to work perfectly. But the Swedish model seems to have worked better than any other. The New York law that Governor Spitzer pushed was inspired partly by the Swedish experience, and New York should enforce that law firmly, by cracking down on pimps and customers.
We’re not going to end the world’s oldest profession, any more than we’ll ever end the world’s oldest crime, murder. But mounting evidence from around the world suggests that a demand-side crackdown would drive some pimps to peddle pirated DVDs instead of pubescent flesh — and that would be a positive legacy of Governor Spitzer’s tenure that might balance its tawdry hypocrisy.
OP-ED COLUMNIST/ NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times
The last time I saw Eliot Spitzer, he encouraged me to write about his work involving prostitution. So here goes.
The governor buttonholed me because he wanted credit for passage of a tough state law against sex trafficking. Frankly, he deserves credit, for the law took the innovative step of cracking down on johns by increasing penalties.
The big worry now among those working to stop trafficking is that the Spitzer scandal will add to perceptions of prostitution as a “victimless crime.” On my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, one person named “Carmen” argued, “if a man can hire a pro to help improve his golf, why not let him hire a pro to help improve his sex?”
Another poster, who identified herself as a former prostitute in Australia, said she had “never felt exploited or trapped” and added, “It was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had.”
Yet the evidence is overwhelming that, in the United States, prostitution is only very rarely just another career choice. Studies suggest that up to two-thirds of prostitutes have been sexually abused as girls, a majority have drug dependencies or mental illnesses, one-third have been threatened with death by pimps, and almost half have attempted suicide.
Melissa Farley, a psychologist who has written extensively about the subject, says that girls typically become prostitutes at age 13 or 14. She conducted a study finding that 89 percent of prostitutes urgently wanted to escape the work, and that two-thirds have post-traumatic stress disorder — not a problem for even the most frustrated burger-flipper.
The mortality data for prostitutes is staggering. The American Journal of Epidemiology published a meticulous study finding that the “workplace homicide rate for prostitutes” is 51 times that of the next most dangerous occupation for women, working in a liquor store. The average age of death of the prostitutes in the study was 34.
“Women engaged in prostitution face the most dangerous occupational environment in the United States,” The Journal concluded.
We as a society forbid certain behavior by consenting adults because we deem it too dangerous or harmful. We do not permit indentured servitude or polygamy, or employment for less than the minimum wage. So why permit people to work in the unusually dangerous business of selling sex?
One response would be: Prostitution is inevitable, so we might as well legalize and regulate it. That’s a pragmatic argument that I used to find persuasive. If brothels were legalized and inspected, I believed, then we could uproot child prostitution and reduce AIDS and sexually transmitted infections.
I changed my mind after looking at the experiences of other countries. The Netherlands formally adopted the legalization model in 2000, and there were modest public health benefits for the licensed prostitutes. But legalization nurtured a large sex industry and criminal gangs that trafficked underage girls, and so trafficking, violence and child prostitution flourished rather than dying out.
As a result, the Netherlands is now backtracking on its legalization model by closing some brothels, and other countries, like Bulgaria, are backing away from that approach.
In contrast, Sweden experimented in 1999 with a radically different approach that many now regard as much more successful: it decriminalized the sale of sex but made it a crime to buy sex. In effect, the policy was to arrest customers, but not the prostitutes.
Some Swedish prostitutes have complained that the policy reduced demand and thus lowered prices, while forcing sex work underground. But the evidence is strong that the new approach reduced trafficking in Sweden, and opinion polls show that Swedes regard the experiment as a considerable success. And the bottom line is that if you want to rape a 13-year-old girl imported from Eastern Europe, you’ll have a much easier time in Amsterdam than in Stockholm.
A growing number of other countries are pursuing the Swedish model. South Korea had a vast trafficking industry in the 1990s, but a crackdown has led Korean gangs to traffic girls to California instead — because pimping teenagers there is seen as safer and more profitable than at home.
No approach is going to work perfectly. But the Swedish model seems to have worked better than any other. The New York law that Governor Spitzer pushed was inspired partly by the Swedish experience, and New York should enforce that law firmly, by cracking down on pimps and customers.
We’re not going to end the world’s oldest profession, any more than we’ll ever end the world’s oldest crime, murder. But mounting evidence from around the world suggests that a demand-side crackdown would drive some pimps to peddle pirated DVDs instead of pubescent flesh — and that would be a positive legacy of Governor Spitzer’s tenure that might balance its tawdry hypocrisy.
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