If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction. – William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (III,iv)
The moral panic over human trafficking has grown more aggressively than most; in its earlier form, the Satanic Panic, it only barely got out of the United States. But once the cultists metamorphosed into “criminal gangs”, two powerful and wealthy types of organizations recognized that the hysteria provided the perfect plot for media theatrics designed to disguise sleazy agendas which might have mobilized considerable resistance had they been openly revealed. The anti-sex cabal of neofeminists and evangelical Christians use “trafficking” as camouflage for an anti-whore crusade, while governments use it as an excuse for tighter controls on immigration; the net result is an awful lot of money being invested into dramatic displays, and an awful lot of disinformation being spread through official channels, while real victims of exploitation are ignored.
In the US, “human trafficking” is practically synonymous with “sex trafficking”; though lip-service is paid to the existence of other forms of exploitation, virtually all of the money, manpower and press coverage is devoted to “sex trafficking”, which bogus statistics declare to be the most common form (with claims ranging from 60% to “almost all”, despite the insistence of other reports that it’s more like 10%). This is due partly to the fact that most of the money either comes from or flows through prohibitionist organizations, and partly because sex sells in the media. But there’s another, more sinister and far dirtier reason why so much attention is paid to whores who are not “enslaved” in any reasonable sense of the word, and so little to people who are clearly coerced and exploited: modern Western economies depend upon dirt-cheap labor, so by harassing harlots they can make a great and entertaining show of “doing something” about exploitation while yet ensuring that the vegetables get picked and the garments get made. Americans in particular leer over lurid accounts of “child sex trafficking” which is so rare as to be almost nonexistent, while ignoring widespread and pervasive sexual abuse among women who, if they were sex workers, would be called “trafficking victims”:
The majority of women farmworkers interviewed…by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Human Rights Watch had experienced some form of sexual harassment or assault, which ranged from verbal abuse to rape. One…study…estimated that as many as 80 percent…have been sexually harassed or assaulted on the job…Women make up slightly more than 20 percent of U.S. farmworkers, and of these, the majority are immigrants from Mexico. Women become migratory workers for the same reasons men do—in many cases, to escape rural poverty…“Generally, [the perpetrator] will have some kind of legal immigration status,” says Liz Maria Chacko, a supervising attorney at Friends of Farmworkers in Philadelphia. “This gives them power over their victims”…lack of fluency in English makes the women even more vulnerable. Their immediate supervisors, who tend to be their harassers, also tend to be bilingual. If a woman complains, the perpetrator can directly present his case to the farm owner in English. The woman who’s been victimized cannot…Chacko says owners often react defensively to accusations of harassment. “The response we get is usually denial”…Women who are the victims of serious crimes, including rape, domestic violence and sexual harassment, are eligible to apply for a U-Visa. But in order to qualify, they must cooperate with law enforcement—and thus risk deportation…
And when the US government itself is the “trafficker”, it’s even worse:
Alleging unpaid wages and repeated retaliation, McDonald’s workers in central Pennsylvania launched a surprise strike [on March 6th]…The strikers are student guest workers from Latin America and Asia, brought to the United States under the controversial J-1 cultural exchange visa program…[which] is officially intended to promote educational and cultural exchange. But advocates allege that J-1, like the other guest worker programs that collectively bring hundreds of thousands of workers in and out of the United States each year, is rife with abuse…According to [National Guestworker Alliance (NGA)] the visiting students each paid $3,000 or more for the chance to come and work, and were promised full-time employment; most received only a handful of hours a week, while others worked shifts as long as twenty-five hours straight, without being paid overtime. “Their employer is also their landlord,” said [NGA Director Saket] Soni. “They’re earning sub-minimum wages, and then paying it back in rent” to share a room with up to seven co-workers. “Their weekly net pay is actually sometimes…as low as zero”…management required [them] to be on call twenty-four hours a day, ready to show up for work at thirty minutes’ notice, and…workers have been subject to threats and retaliation for speaking up or turning down work. [Striker Jorge] Rios said that…“they actually threatened one of our roommates by saying that they’re just a call away from sending him back to his home country”…
Let’s see now; we’ve got people being misled about the conditions under which they’ll work, then paid starvation wages that are docked for “fees” so they can never get clear, and threatened with deportation if they complain…sound familiar? Yet Nicholas Kristof, Polaris Project and the other “rescuers” who purport to care so much about victims are mysteriously silent on the issue, probably because they’re too busy trying to get sex workers and our clients arrested and our faces splashed across TV screens from coast to coast. This is hypocrisy on an epic scale; either governments need to start paying attention to real labor exploitation (most of which doesn’t involve sex work) and cease harassing those who neither want nor need their “help”, or else drop the whole pretense and admit their real and ugly motives for funding “anti-trafficking” theater instead of simply ensuring the rights of all people, whether native or migrant.
Fantastic. Pure Gold.
This sounds so familiar to governments pretending they are checking on drug abuse while they are busy arresting people who are not a threat to themselves or to society. They need to spend their energies elsewhere and at the same time, media must tell people the truth not just what sells but what people need and ought to know.
Prohibitions are usually a cover for what the government really wants, more power.
Capitalism feeds on cheap labor, and the abuse of workers.
Cheap labor? Yes …
Abuse of workers? Not really, when you consider the amount of corporate investment in worker’s healthcare and retirements. If these things stopped tomorrow – there would be chaos and real hardship.
Krulac… where do you think corporate investment in workers’ healthcare and retirements comes from? It’s from tight labor markets (including the markets in skilled labor). When the labor markets are loose, those things do not get offered and workers remain interchangeable and disposable.
Moreover, especially with retirements, the incentives are backwards for what you just said, aren’t they? A company is much happier to have workers stay just short of when they’d become vested.
The real source of corporations treating workers nicely is when the workers are not readily replaced – they have specialized skills, say, or there simply aren’t enough of them.
A corporation has no moral obligation to pay for an employee’s retirement and healthcare. Now – there may be laws that say as much … then again there are laws that say I owe almost 30% of my productivity to government.
I’m not arguing that corporations are knights in shining armor. What I responded to was CC’s assertion that Capitalism … “feeds on … the abuse of workers”.
That is an incorrect and hyperbolic statement. Yes, like … they sit around in the WalMart board room saying … “Well, now gents – we need to pick up the profits here and you know – there is nothing like outright abuse of employees to do it!”
That doesn’t happen.
Oh I know – all the “woe is me” crowd – the people who aren’t sharp enough to make it on their own like to hypothesize these wild corporate schemes to keep them down – but what’s actually keeping them down is their lack of initiative, their work ethic, and the fact that they don’t realize that life is not fair.
Well, It depends on what you mean by moral. Specifically in the case of retirement, if part of a worker’s negotiated salary includes retirement benefits, then the company is obligated to keep their damn word, morally and legally.
AND I will say that, unless their are legal repercussion, companies will do morally questionable things to cut profits0 they won’t phrase it negatively -decrease benefits vs destroy peoples lives and violate employment contracts- but many companies, especially companies with a lot of separation between low and high wage workers, will try if not held accountable.
Its not “intentional” in a cartoon villainy fashion, but it is part of the system.
Also, as Maggie pointed out below, its not just capitalist economies that violate human rights, its all economies- socialist, communist, ect. Those in power (either via money or politics or land or guns, w/e) will, a significant chunk of the time, abuse the working class. Because its profitable. Only people who have been trained to morally abhor such practices, or those who are legally liable for doing such things, will make an effort to not abuse workers.
Again, I disagree with you on that definition of “capitalism”; ALL tyrannical governmental forms, from centralized monarchy to feudalism to communism to fascism, feed on “cheap labor and the abuse of workers”. As such, that alone is not enough to define anything, and more than “it eats meat” is enough to define a particular life-form. The exploitation defines the tyranny, not the economic system it uses.
Agreed. Today we have something that some Libertarians call Crony Capitalism, because rent-seeking is so common that fair competition is greatly limited due, in part, to legal barriers to entry. When that happens, of course there’s going to be exploitation.
Which is another good point – the fact that the U.S. now practices gangland style capitalism.
As a worker – I’ve never felt abused. Now – as a TAXPAYER – God Damn right I feel abused and it’s getting very old I’ll tell you. Who took my money to pay off a financial system that ran itself into the ground? TARP was the biggest fraud ever pulled on a democratic nation and no once gives a crap. TARP was passed to buy up toxic assets and restore order to the financial system. Instead – no toxic assets were purchased and the fund was used as a slush fund to line the pockets of corporations and unions. Yes – I said UNIONS since some of the TARP money went to the Chrysler and GM bailouts (which had fuck to do with the economic class or the reasons TARP was passed) … and when the auto companies got bailed out we now know the labor unions were the greatest beneficiaries.
The best description I’ve heard of the government style of the modern West is probably “participatory fascism”.
Kevin,
That is succinct and descriptive. Mind if I steal it?
:^)
The term itself isn’t mine (I’ve forgotten where I first read it), but feel free.
“Capitalism feeds on cheap labor, and the abuse of workers.”
I’m not saying you are absolutely wrong, though I would put a “can” after Capitalism and take the “s” off of “feeds”, but the accidental byproduct of Capitalism has, historically, been the middle class rising out of the lower classes. The byproducts of the systems that use this kind of rhetoric to attack Capitalism tend to be mounds of skulls, and I’m not persuaded that that’s an accident.
I don’t think the rise of the middle class was an accident either. I just can’t wrap my mind around the mounds of skulls – and that is certainly NOT an accidental side effect.
“…paid $3,000 or more for the chance to come and work, and were promised full-time employment”
If they are poor and unable to earn money, where did they find the $3,000 or more?
As a rule? They borrowed it from the people who shipped them in, and they are losing ground to the vig. I won’t call it “interest”, because it is probably two or three times as high as legitimate interest charged by non-shady types.
The classic means would be that it is borrowed from their employer.
Additionally, asking family members, friends, and neighbors help defray the costs as well. These people would help in this instance in the hopes that the person they are helping will return the favor once they are in this luckier position.
Borrowed from the employer. Possibly helped by family pitching in a few bucks.
As a rule, anything that brings agreement from two or more political factions that hate each-other poisonously (like the neofeminists and the Evangelical God-botherers) should be viewed with deep suspicion. It may be legitimate; a cause so outstanding that it startles them into burying their differences in the face of some horror. It is far likelier to be unmitigated hogwash.
By the same token, if two (or more) political interests (not parties) who are normally at odds agree on something, often one or more of those interests is being taken for a ride by one of the other groups.
“Bipartisan”; any measure or cause so stupid or corrupt that it attracts political hacks from both sides of the aisle.
Brilliant definition….
“Bipartisan” is supposed to be a means to an end, as in “Congressman Bob wants this to pass so much he’s even willing to work with the Other Party.” Unfortunately some people see bipartisan as being the end, as in “Congressman Bob could get this thing passed whether the Other Party likes it or not, because the Bob Party has a clear majority. But he’s watered it down some to get Other support, so that it will be bipartisan. The Bob Party voters start to wonder what the point is of giving the Bobs a majority.”
Bipartisanship: When the evil party and the stupid party agree on something evil and stupid. (Cribbed from Kim DuToit)
[…] your occupation you can face the danger of sexual violence. Maggie McNeil writes as wonderfully as ever on the attacks on migrant workers in the US. The sort of trafficking no one seems to care about, because as any whore knows sex sells. Sex […]
When a machine picks vegetable and cleans hotel rooms better and cheaper than any human being, we’ll have an honest discussion about immigration.
Hah, amen!
[…] your occupation you can face the danger of sexual violence. Maggie McNeil writes as wonderfully asever on the attacks on migrant workers in the US. The sort of trafficking no one seems to care about, because as any whore knows sex sells. Sex […]