Mércia Silva, director of Brazil’s InPacto, an organization focused on eradicating forced labor in businesses and their supply chains, often must meet with owners and managers of companies where forced labor exists. But she doesn’t approach them “with theory,” she says.
“I take a photograph of a worker working under extremely difficult conditions and I ask them, ‘Would you like someone in your family to work like this?’ ‘Of course not,’ they say, and from there we are able to make change.”
Silva shared her strategies for empowering workers last week on the panel, “Raising the Floor—Fresh Thinking to Improve Working Conditions and Workers’ Rights,” a discussion on worker-driven strategies to improve conditions for workers enduring the most abusive conditions. The panel was part of a two-day, two-city International Labor Organization (ILO) conference, Out of the Shadows: Innovative Approaches to Combating Forced Labor and Other Forms of Worker Exploitation.
“The presence of forced labor in society doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” said Solidarity Center Executive Director Shawna Bader-Blau. “Forced labor is created by policy. And change comes from the demands and voices of workers and their unions standing up for their rights, standing up for better treatment.” Bader-Blau facilitated the panel, whose primarily U.S.-based participants discussed a range of strategies—including enlisting consumers and the global labor movement—to assist workers in winning their rights on the job.
“You can’t organize anyone with a vague vision,” said Saket Soni, executive director of the National Guestworker Alliance. “These are people who have been staring into the face of evil (forced labor). The alternative has to be concrete. For us, that alternative is, ‘what if you could sit down and negotiate a contract with your employer?’ The only way you can do that is to collectively organize.”
Silva praised Brazil’s Central Union of Workers (Central Unica dos Trabalhadores, CUT) and other Brazil union federations for seeking to make worker rights a reality for agricultural laborers toiling under what she described as “horrible working conditions.
“It’s important to open the door to unions” for these workers, she said. The Solidarity Center works with CUT and other Brazil union federations to help empower vulnerable workers. The AFL-CIO and the CUT have a several decade-long partnership to promote fundamental labor rights in the United States, Brazil and across the Americas.
Women make up a large percentage of workers in forced labor, and panel participants pointed to their key role in taking the lead to improve their working conditions. Neidi Dominguez, director of the AFL-CIO Worker Centers and Community Engagement, discussed how even though Los Angeles carwash workers are predominantly male, women workers were among those who stood up and demanded to be paid a regular wage. Until they did, carwash workers were paid on through pooled customer tips.
The conference, held in in Washington, D.C., on April 22 and in Los Angeles on April 24, brought together representatives from civil society, government and business to discuss strategies to prevent and mitigate exploitative labor practices, with a focus on the United States and Brazil. These strategies aim to decrease workers’ vulnerability to forced labor and other forms of worker exploitation.
Some 30 global unions, corporations and nonprofit networks are urging the U.S. State Department to ensure its upcoming Global Trafficking in Persons report accurately reflect the serious, ongoing and government-sponsored forced labor in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
“The Uzbek government continues to operate one of the largest state-orchestrated systems of forced labor in the world,” according to letters sent today by the organizations, which include the Solidarity Center, the AFL-CIO, AFT and the Australian Council of Trade Unions. (Read the letters here and here.)
In Turkmenistan, as in Uzbekistan, the government’s “mass mobilization of citizens to harvest cotton degraded public services, especially schools, which sent their teachers to pick cotton,” according to the organizations. “Some officials also forced civil servants to clean and landscape public spaces and to clean the officials’ homes.”
In its 2014 report, the State Department ranked Uzbekistan as “Tier 3,” a designation that means it does not fully comply with the minimum standards set by the U.S. Trafficking Victims and Protection Act (TVPA) and is not making significant efforts to do so. Turkmenistan was ranked on the Tier 2 Watch List, meaning its government does not fully comply with the TVPA standards but is making significant efforts to become compliant.
The organizations are urging the State Department to maintain Uzbekistan’s Tier 3 status and downgrade Turkmenistan to Tier 3. Key to the Tier 3 designation is the extent to which a country serves as origin, transit or destination for severe forms of trafficking and the extent to which officials or government employees are complicit in severe forms of trafficking.
The Trafficking in Persons report “is an important means to shine light on modern-day slavery and to press governments to do more to eradicate it,” the organizations state. Maintaining the Tier 3 ranking not only accurately reflects the reality on the ground, they say, but will help press the governments to take meaningful steps to end forced labor. The letters were sent to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Ambassador Patricia Butenis, acting director of the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.
A report released this month found that extortion and bribery fueled the forced labor behind Uzbekistan’s cotton harvest in autumn 2014, a coerced mass mobilization that took teachers, health care workers and millions of other employees away from their duties for several weeks.
In Turkmenistan, tens of thousands of teachers, doctors and other public employees were forced, under the threat of dismissal, to spend four months in the cotton fields, according to a 2014 report by Alternative Turkmenistan News. “The working and living conditions of the forced laborers were abysmal, with people often having to sleep in the open air, drink ditch water and bathe in irrigation channels.”
The U.S. Trafficking in Persons report, issued annually for the past 14 years, covers 188 countries and was mandated by the 2000 Trafficking Victims and Protection Act. The act sets standards to eliminate trafficking and creates enforcement measures, such as the withholding or withdrawal of U.S. non-humanitarian and non-trade-related assistance for countries with low rankings.
Extortion and bribery fueled the forced labor behind Uzbekistan’s cotton harvest in autumn 2014, a coerced mass mobilization that took teachers, health care workers and millions of other employees away from their duties for several weeks, according to a report released today by the nonprofit Uzbek-German Forum for Human Rights.
While fewer children were pushed into the fields during the most recent harvest, the study found an unprecedented degree of extortion of individuals and businesses that included keeping people in fields even though there was no more cotton to pick so that workers had to continue to pay for room and board, and the setting of unattainable quotas so people had to pay to make up deficits.
“The Government’s Riches, the People’s Burden,” which builds on the Uzbek-German Forum’s preliminary findings last November, reports that the government mobilized more public employees in the 2014 harvest than in previous years, likely to make up for fewer child laborers. Uzbekistan has cut back on the use of child labor in the cotton fields, following worldwide condemnation—including by the U.S. State Department, which in October placed Uzbekistan among 12 countries with the worst forms of child labor.
“Students and the sick suffer during the harvest time,” says Nadejda Atayeva, president of the Association for Human Rights in Central Asia. “Schools and health clinics cannot function with so many staff sent to pick cotton. Students cannot receive the quality of education that they deserve, and medical care is inaccessible to people, even when they are very ill.”
At least 17 people died and numerous people were injured as a result of the cotton harvest and poor or unsafe working and living conditions, according to the report, which details how workers were forced to toil long hours picking cotton in unsafe and unhealthy working conditions that often included no access to clean drinking water. Workers were forced to live in garages, unused farm buildings or local schools in crowded and unsanitary conditions often without heat or hot water, even during cold weather at the end of the season.
The annual cotton harvest, estimated to exceed $1 billion, disappears into an extra-budgetary fund in the Finance Ministry to which only the highest-level officials have access, the report states.
“The enrichment of officials creates a powerful disincentive to enact real reforms of the cotton sector, and unlawful practices undermine the rule of law, nurturing an environment in which the government denies its use of forced labor and impunity prevails,” the report’s authors write.
The report concludes with specific recommendations for governments and nongovernmental organizations to address Uzbekistan’s abuses of human rights, including investigating and prosecuting companies that benefit from or contribute to the forced labor system of cotton production, which is in violation of international and national laws.
Experienced Uzbek-German Forum monitors, fluent in Uzbek, researched the cotton harvest and labor practices in the capital, Tashkent, and in six regions in Uzbekistan.
Understanding the link between worker rights violations and human trafficking is the key to ending modern slavery, Solidarity Center Executive Director Shawna Bader-Blau testified today on Capitol Hill.
“Most modern slavery today is, in fact, forced labor,” Bader-Blau told the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. “Trafficking for labor exploitation is far more prevalent than sex trafficking globally, accounting for 68 percent of trafficked people.” (Watch a video of the full hearing.)
Bader-Blau and other expert witnesses at the hearing, “Ending Modern Slavery: What is the Best Way Forward?” discussed actions and policies to help end human trafficking, debt bondage and other forms of modern slavery in supply chains around the world, including in the United States.
The vast majority of the almost 21 million people in forced labor globally are exploited in the private economy, Bader-Blau said in oral remarks and testimony submitted for the record. Illegal profits made from the use of forced labor worldwide is $150 billion per year, “exceeding the GDP of many countries.”
Instead of shackles and chains, workers are now enslaved through threats, debt and other forms of economic coercion, she said.
“We must move beyond the notion that modern “slavery is all about bad individuals doing bad things to good people,” Bader-Blau said. “We must address what one leading global expert on the international law of human trafficking, calls the ‘underlying structures that perpetuate and reward exploitation, including a global economy that relies heavily on exploitation of poor people’s labor to maintain growth and a global migration system that entrenches vulnerability and contributes directly to trafficking.’”
Bader-Blau said that based upon more the Solidarity Center’s more than 20 years of experience in the areas of child labor, migrant worker exploitation and supply chain accountability, the following steps are essential to ending human trafficking:
Reform unsafe migration practices, which includes regulating labor recruiters, many of whom manipulate and deceive workers for profit, and banning recruitment fees, which is a primary source of debt bondage and forced labor.
End impunity for labor traffickers. Forced labor is pervasive around the world because employers who engage in modern slavery face few consequences.
Make it impossible for governments to allow forced labor and for companies to get away with it, including down their supply chains. Many countries with significant labor trafficking problems continue to receive trade preferences from the U.S. government, said Bader-Blau.
Promote worker-driven solutions. Workers are key to eradicating forced labor and trafficking in supply chains. They see abuses or may themselves be exploited. First-hand reporting of abuses and exploitation by workers, unions and rights organizations shines a light on abusive practices long before a third party decides to take a look.
The other witnesses included Gary Haugen, president of the International Justice Mission; David Abramowitz, vice president of Policy and Government Relations at Humanity United; James Kofi Annan, founder of Challenging Heights, a child labor rescue organization in Ghana; and Shandra Woworuntu, a trafficking survivor.
A coalition of worker and human rights organizations, including the Solidarity Center, is urging the U.S. State Department to maintain Uzbekistan’s rank at the bottom of its “Trafficking in Persons” report when it is released this year. (Read the full document.)
“In 2014, the government of Uzbekistan forced more than a million citizens to work in the cotton fields under threat of penalty, for its benefit, and as a matter of state policy,” the groups write in a 15-page document detailing the Uzbekistan government’s coercion of public servants and other workers—including children—to toil in cotton fields.
The document notes that at least 17 people died due to unsafe working conditions during last fall’s harvest. Workers forced to pick cotton were not given any time off—including weekends and holidays. Organizations monitoring the harvest reported that workers were provided with no protective gear, such as gloves.
Public organizations, including schools, were required to provide between 30 percent and 60 percent of their staff for the duration of the harvest, and in some cases, up to 80 percent of their staff. Children often had no classes during these weeks because teachers were working in the fields. Clinics and hospitals had few or no medical personnel.
Many employees were threatened with loss of employment, loss of utilities and other public services, social exclusion, fines, administrative harassment, and criminal prosecution if they did not participate in the cotton harvest, the report states.
The 2014 Trafficking in Persons report gave Uzbekistan a “Tier 3” ranking, a designation that indicates a country is not complying with the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s minimum standards nor making attempts to do so. The coalition says that maintaining the Tier 3 ranking is essential to convey to the Uzbekistan government the need to end forced labor.
A Tier 3 ranking makes countries liable to sanctions, which could include the withholding or withdrawal of U.S. non-humanitarian and non-trade-related assistance.
The coalition further notes that “the government of Uzbekistan’s use of forced labor to produce cotton is supported by its denial of fundamental rights of association, freedom of press and due process to enable its use of forced labor to produce cotton.”
The 2014 Trafficking in Persons report found that Uzbekistan’s “government-compelled forced labor of men, women, and children remains endemic during the annual cotton harvest….There were reports that some children aged 15 to 17 faced expulsion from school for refusing to pick cotton.”
Uzbekistan also was at the bottom of the 2014 Findings on the “Worst Forms of Child Labor” report released in October by the U.S. Labor Department.
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