Working in the Shadows
by Madeline Fox
In 2005, approximately 500 Indian men paid $10,000 each — a figure more than six times their country’s total domestic product broken down per person — to recruiters who promised them good jobs and permanent residency for themselves and their families in the United States.
Instead of the stable life with family and work they were promised, these men were forced to pay more than $1,000 per month, in addition to their initial “recruiting fee,” to live in crowded, guarded labor camps. They were underfed and overworked while they repaired oil rigs and facilities damaged by Hurricane Katrina for Alabama-based shipbuilding company Signal International. Their promised residency documents never materialized.
The Signal International case is one of the largest labor trafficking cases ever prosecuted, with more than 200 plaintiffs filing more than a dozen related lawsuits against the company and other individuals involved in the trafficking process. What sets the case apart, though, is not simply its scope, but the fact that it was prosecuted at all.
Labor trafficking is the use of force or physical threats, psychological coercion, abuse of the legal process, deception, or other coercive means to recruit, harbor, transport, provide or obtain people who are then compelled to work.
One of the reasons labor trafficking cases can be difficult to prosecute is that identifying victims is a challenge, says Catherine Longkumer, an attorney with Metropolitan Family Services in Chicago, who provides legal advocacy to survivors of trafficking.
“A lot of victims of labor trafficking are immigrants, and their traffickers are very good at making them fear any sort of law enforcement,” Longkumer says. “Even if they’ve got perfectly valid legal status, they’re so fearful of deportation proceedings being initiated against them because of what their trafficker told them.”
To read the rest of this story, head on over to The Riveter Magazine
