Human Trafficking: Combating modern-day slavery on North Carolina farms

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Agricultural production in North Carolina is 46 billion dollar industry which involves the fifth most farmworkers of any state (Legal Aid of NC). For tens of thousands of farmworkers, it’s an industry which remains seeped in extreme exploitation and, for some workers, modern-day slavery. The issue of human trafficking has become a point of action for the governments across the world, while here in North Carolina, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice is teaming up Student Action with Farmworkers Student Action with Farmworkers to build awareness about and to combat human trafficking on NC’s farms.

What is Human Trafficking?

Human trafficking, defined by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) is any recruiting, harboring, moving, obtaining, or maintaining of a person by fraud, force, or coercion, for a commercial sex act, involuntary servitude, debt bondage, peonage, or slavery.

In 2007, at a time when the US Senate was fiercely debating immigration reform, the New York Times published a story about a guest worker from Thailand, Worawut Khansamrit, which described the horrors of fraudulent recruiting and labor trafficking in North Carolina.

The story is simple, proving that human trafficking could happen to anyone. Mr. Khansamrit, a former farmer in Thailand, mortgaged his family farm in Thailand for the opportunity to work in North Carolina. Mr. Khansamrit was promised to make more than thirty times what he made in Thailand, which would have allowed him the ability to afford his daughter a quality education. When Mr. Khansamrit arrived in North Carolina, the job he was promised no longer existed, which led him to working in New Orleans cleaning up debris from Hurricane Katrina, a job for which he was never paid.

This story is repeated by many of the 120,000 guest workers per year allowed to get work visas. Guest workers fill a historical role in the work force in the US, a role based on paltry wages, no rights, and horrid working conditions. Faced with systematic exploitation, similar to the former plantations of yesteryear, the workers are faced with an assault on their basic human rights and little way out.

http://www.bluenc.com/human-trafficking-combating-modern-day-slavery-north-carolina-farms

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2. the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is addressing trafficking . . .

through a contract with the Migration and Refugees Services (MRS) Program of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) . . .

http://www.usccb.org/mrs/trafficking/index.shtml

which in turn is sub-contracting with nonprofit organizations nationwide through their Anti-Trafficking Services Program . . .

http://www.usccb.org/mrs/trafficking/docs/traffickingappkitapril08.pdf