This essay first appeared in Cliterati on March 30th; I have modified it slightly to fit the format of this blog.
There’s something missing from this story in Smithsonian magazine:
…since 2012, about 900 workers have died while working on infrastructure in Qatar, in a building boom anticipating the World Cup…the Guardian reported that over 400 Nepalese migrant workers had already died at building sites. Between 2010 and 2012 more than 700 workers from India lost their lives working on construction sites in Qatar, too. A report by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) says that if conditions don’t get any better, by the time the World Cup kicks off, at least 4,000 migrant workers will have died on the job…Workers described forced labour in 50C (122F) heat, employers who retain salaries for several months and passports making it impossible for them to leave and being denied free drinking water. The investigation found sickness is endemic among workers living in overcrowded and insanitary conditions and hunger has been reported…According to the ITUC, there are already 1.2 million migrant workers in Qatar, and about a million more will probably pour into the country to help with construction. These are essentially slaves…
So we’ve got migrant workers being imported to do jobs locals don’t want, for employers who hold their passports, pay them too little and force them to live in poor conditions…hmm, what’s the missing bit? Perhaps if we look at another recent story which gave me a similar feeling, we’ll be able to figure it out:
African artists hired by a Korean museum have been laboring under conditions “similar to indentured servitude”…They…were promised salaries of…minimum wage…and comfortable accommodations; instead, they were…forced to live in cold, mice-ridden rooms…[and] their salaries barely covered the cost of three meals a day…Their contracts stipulated three performances per day, but they were often forced to do four to six…
No, I still can’t quite put my finger on it. How about this one?
…in India’s handmade carpet sector…workers toil 10 to 12 hours a day for six to seven days a week [in buildings that are] “cramped, filthy, unbearably hot and humid, imperiled with stray electrical wires and rusty nails…and contaminated with grime and mold”…Workers were subjected to frequent beatings and abuse and…suffered from…long-term health issues because of the grueling nature of the work…The average adult worker was paid between 21 and 24 cents an hour, while children were paid less…
And it doesn’t just happen in Asia:
A company within Sweden’s home care services…mistreated migrant workers by making false promises about work conditions…Hassan…said that his official job offer stated that he would be employed full-time by…TPS Vårdteam…with a monthly wage of 26,500 kronor ($4,000)…”In the beginning I didn’t get any work at all…Then I had to work seven days a week….[for] only…8,000 kronor per month”…
…more than 150 Jamaican guest workers who clean luxury Florida hotels and condos walked off the job…They…borrowed to pay recruitment fees of $2,000 to $2,500, counting on promises of full-time work and good housing. But…the cleaning company packed as many as 15 people into unfurnished two-bedroom apartments, for…as much as $5,000 a month. Charges for rent and required extras like $70 for a T-shirt “uniform” reduced the workers’ net pay to subminimum levels, sometimes even zero, and…paychecks repeatedly bounced…Guest workers…are tied by law to the employer who sponsored their visas, which means that if they are found too “difficult” for any reason…the employer can…deport them and blacklist them from receiving future work visas…
Maybe we can identify the absentee in this one involving McDonald’s:
…the visiting students each paid $3,000 or more…and were promised full-time employment; most received only a handful of hours a week…“Their employer is also their landlord,” said [an advocate]…“They’re earning sub-minimum wages, and then paying it back in rent” to share a room with up to seven co-workers…management required [them] to be on call twenty-four hours a day, ready to show up for work at thirty minutes’ notice…
I’m sure that by now, you’ve noticed what’s missing from all these stories: it’s the word “trafficking”. In theory, “trafficking” supposedly means any worker recruited by fraud or coercion and held under exploitative conditions, but in reality the term is nearly always used to mean sex work or some other sex-related arrangement like surrogate motherhood or mail-order marriage. When the employer is politically connected and the workers employed in providing entertainment, cheap goods or creature comforts for the bourgeois, you can be sure the word “trafficking” will not appear no matter how slavery-like the conditions nor how egregious the coercion. But when sex is involved you can bet that workers’ agency will be denied, lurid details will be exaggerated, and employers will be demonized when they exist and fabricated when they don’t. As I wrote in “Chauvinism”,
Nobody is concerned about immigrants doing awful work that middle-class people don’t want, so this is rarely labeled “trafficking” even when it clearly fits the standard definition; but because sex work offends both conservative Christian and radical feminist notions about “proper” female behavior, it is labeled “trafficking” even when it clearly involves neither travel nor coercion.
The saddest thing of all is that once the moral panic collapses and the public finds something else to obsess about rather than other people’s sex lives, the new fixation definitely won’t be the kind of evil described in the items above. If people don’t even care about the exploitation of migrant workers in the midst of hysteria supposedly about that very subject, it hardly seems likely they’ll care once the topic becomes an obsolete fad.
>When the employer is politically connected and the workers employed in providing entertainment, cheap goods or creature comforts for the bourgeois, you can be sure the word “trafficking” will not appear no matter how slavery-like the conditions nor how egregious the coercion.
Spot on. When it puts money in the pockets of the capitalists, it’s never demonized by the media.
And let’s not forget, these people are trafficked in to take away the power of local workers, and to keep the jobs low paid and conditions bad.
I’ve brought up this point before, about how there’s lots of real trafficking in the world. but the authorities do nothing about it.
None of the U.S. stories that were linked involved any kind of “big capitalist” conspiracies. The Jamaican servants were hired by a small local cleaning company and the McDonald’s incident involved one franchise.
You can hardly indict capitalist based on a very small group of – not to influential individuals – who are idiots.
Reblogged this on thoughtsofapunter and commented:
I have never, to my knowledge seen a trafficked woman, (had I been aware of trafficking I would have informed the authorities, anonomously via the UK charity Crime Stoppers). A good article from Maggie Mcneill.
Well … the Qatari example …
Qatar is run by the Al Thani family and it owns Al Jazeera – and most comments I’ve read on this blog seem to favor Al Jazeera as some kind of great independent news source. LOL
But in fact … Qatar is out of control and everything that royal family touches is … shit. Again, I’ve been there.
Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain have already withdrawn their envoy’s from Qatar. Qatar is in the process of being isolated from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) due to its support of the Muslim Brotherhood and other extremist Islamic groups in the middle east. ITS NOT the U.S. attempting to isolate them either – it’s the rest of the GCC, which has grown so frustrated with the U.S. not doing anything to control the Muslim Brotherhood (and in some cases, outright supporting them ourselves) – that they’ve taken to overtly intervening themselves. Actually, I’m happy to see this because I’m sick and tired of Saudi and the rest of the GCC supporting us under the table – but then SAYING otherwise and denouncing us in public.
Little known fact – WE GOT GREAT SUPPORT and cooperation from IRAN when Saddam still controlled Iraq. They denounced us as the “Great Satan” publicly but they gave us shitloads of information under the table on the guy. This is the way these idiots work over there and the one good thing about Obama’s foreign policy incompetence is that it has forced the rats out of the sewers to do their own dirty work.
Now – the quest workers in the middle east. My experiences – in direct contact with them in many cases – is in places like Bahrain, UAE, Oman, and Iraq. There’s millions of them. I’ve talked to them – a lot of them are Bengalis and a lot are Filipinos. They work hard and it’s almost a military life they live … lots of work … not a lot of play.
But they do enjoy vacations about once a year and usually go back to their home countries (packing all the cash they’ve made). It’s a hard life – but I’ve never found a single one that would leave it and go home to look for some other option. Normally – they’re pretty happy. I even played soccer with an injured hand last time I was in Bahrain with a bunch of Bengali construction workers. These guys were all smiles … they kept calling me “macho man” because they said they thought I looked like Randy Savage.
I mean – they just didn’t act like “slaves” to me.
Now – I will say this … Muslims in all these countries tend to arrange human beings on a scale of importance. Native, Muslim men are at the top of the pyramid, with native women under them and everyone else at the rock bottom. I sometimes tend to think the Muslims look upon these people as less than human – but I have no evidence that they treat them like animals – but they DO expect one hell of a lot of work out of them.
But in Qatar – knowing that royal family … I’m not really surprised that it’s degraded to something like outright slavery. Only experience I’ve had with Qatari workers is hotel staff and taxi drivers … and most of them want to “graduate” out of Qatar and get to Bahrain or Saudi. Never seen any abused in Qatar but they are not nearly as happy as the ones in the other Gulf States.
Again – ROYAL FAMILY – the one in Qatar is SHIT. The emir of Qatar donated $400 million to Hamas and openly supports the Muslim Brotherhood. He appointed his cousin as the chairman of Al Jazeera. Remember that the next time you praise Al Jazeera – AJ doesn’t print or broadcast a damn thing that doesn’t go through the censors of the royal family.
here’s one:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/american-anthropological-association/broadening-the-lens-on-hu_b_1728820.html
Murikkans don’t care about “labor violations.”
They still want to believe in the “trickle down effect” along with Santa Clause and the Tooth Faery…
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865601683/In-Disney-Worlds-shadow-homeless-families-struggle-tourists-dont-have-a-clue.html?pg=all
The puritans don’t care if someone is starving, working a low pay job but they are obsessed with someone having a good time….
One of the reasons I could never call myself a libertarian in good faith is many who espouse that tag seem obsessed with protecting the uber wealthy but don’t give a shit about those who work an honest day for honest pay. Look at the obsession with getting rid of the minimum wage when, adjusted for inflation, it should easily be at $12 an hour. In fact Australia has a $15 minimum wage and the world didn’t stop turning…
Then why do you give a shit about them? Who appointed you as a judge of these people? Libertarianism is about you do your thing – I do mine. Uber wealthy – that includes Bill Gates, George Soros, Steve Jobs …
You wish to condemn them?
No? If not – you’re problem isn’t with the wealthy.
Your problem is with people who are wealthy and THINK differently from you.
Libertarians don’t suffer from that affliction.
You don’t know any real libertarians, then.
yes, I very well may not know any real libertarians…
I think I’ve met a few librarians though…
The above is a good example of why people who don’t understand the science of motivations (economics) should not be making economic policy.
Libertarians want to protect the right of the wealthy to keep their wealth because without it, there will be no investment, no jobs, and no hope.
And higher minimum wages do not produce higher pay, they just mean that all workers who aren’t worth that much get fired, or their jobs move underground.
Apologies to Maggie both for going along with the threadjacking, and feeding the troll. But I don’t like seeing boneheads win debates by default.
Krulac,
well apparently not all libertarians disagree with me here:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/01/california_minimum_wage_meet_the_libertarian_multimillionaire_who_is_pushing.html
I don’t have a problem with an inventor becoming a millionaire, nor do I have a problem with an artist or athlete doing the same…
I do have a problem with the dog-eat-dog culture of the US of A…
Wage stagnation/wealth inequality-not just things I pulled out of my as…
If you want to see a nutcase, look up the blogger Chuck Ross. He goes on and on about psuedoscience like HBD. With all his alternative right beliefs, looks like he missed the class on personal responsibility and all. He’s 40k+ in debt with student loans. “lil ole me didn’t make that mistake…
Honestly, the problem with libertarians isn’t the core of the ideologies they spout , it’s the lack of acknowledgement that the problems that ‘big government’ try to solve still need to be addressed, it just needs to be done it a way that protects individual liberties.
This is not easily done, and it cannot be reduced to simple campaign promises. Thus, the libertarian party fails.
Stormdaughter, I think I see your point…
I actually took a “political quiz” that identified my beliefs as mostly libertarian…
http://stonerwithaboner.wordpress.com/2013/10/22/hahaha-i-guess-this-makes-me-a-libertard/
(yeah, I get that a quiz like this is probably looked like astrology in some circles.)
I’m still hesitant with the Libertarian label for the same reason I’m histant of the MRA label. A bunch of nutcases have spouted of and made everyone who adopts that label look bad…
I would be tempted to ask which problems those are, but, honestly it doesn’t really matter.
I won’t speak for all libertarians, but as a minarchist libertarian, my feeling is that there are very few problems which need to be solved or even addressed by the federal government. The more problems they try to solve, the more problems they create, through incompetence, once-size-fits-all thinking, or the influence of special interests.
Problems should be solved at a level that makes sense. Some will be at the community level… city… county… state. But the solutions need to be something that works for the encompassed part of the populace. I know some dislike the idea of 10s or 100s of “laboratories” testing a multitude of solutions and learning from each other, but that’s actually what I would prefer to see.
Big government leads to big power and authoritarianism
polymorph…
I don’t disagree with you as far as big government
My concern is more what you see in dystopian sci-fi where corporate entities are above the law. It appears that is becoming reality.
Big corporations = governments. A large collective entity is a large collective entity.
Absolutely agree with you. It was intended to be vague- and personally, I would be ecstatic if the scientific method was applied to government and policy. That sounds so wonderful as to be nearly utopian.
Libertarian Party ≠ libertarians. If you think about it for a moment you’ll realize it never could.
yes, if one considers the individual of the highest value then it would be a contradiction for a group to band together…
😛
I guess then there are two kinds of libertarians then- the actual libertarians and the people who are members of the so called ‘Libertarian Party’
Definetly one of your better articals- super well done!
When I read that first story, my first thought was that the missing word was “men”. That also is one of the reasons people aren’t outraged. Oh, some of the other workers in the other stories are probably women, but they aren’t getting killed by their jobs. And where there *is* some little degree of consciousness of the problem (eg: textile sweatshops), its usually because it is women who are being abused. Even when it comes to sex trafficking hysteria, the possibility of trafficked gay male sex workers isn’t even on the radar. “Trafficking” is as much about gender as it is about sex.
On a different tack: this scam (your employer is your landlord, your work barely covers your rent and board) has been around for a long, long time. Always, really. One of its more recent appearances was the “company store” in the US during reconstruction.
Arguably: on a larger scale the whole of society is running this scam. Fewer and fewer people can actually get ahead of the game these days. Its current incarnation is student loan debt. It isn’t just migrant workers who are effectively enslaved, made to work for no net gain until they can’t work anymore. It’s just about everyone.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the Temporary Foreign Worker program in Canada that has recently blown up in the media, Maggie; with a possible contrast to Canadian politician’s crusade for the Swedish model. 🙂
We haven’t heard much about it down here; could you link a good article on it?
I have a few. This is the matter that woke up the media: http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/04/23/saskatchewan-restaurant-owners-deny-they-fired-canadian-waitresses-and-replaced-them-with-foreign-workers/. This article from January last year exposes many abuses of the program; apparently, human trafficking for labour is legal in Canada and nobody cared until long-running Canadian jobs were threatened: http://ourtimes.ca/Between_Times/article_246.php. This one explains how the program drives up unemployment and drives down wages so corporations don’t have to pay people what they’re worth: http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/05/01/for_conservatives_cheap_foreign_labour_trumps_canadian_youth_tim_harper.html. And this one, published by our national news network two days ago, shows how one company did not pay their workers for months worth of work, fined them hundreds of dollars for using the phone, and claimed to have *hired a hitman* to kill a man when he went to the police about death threats and working conditions: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/foreign-worker-reports-death-threats-coercion-1.2630278. You’ll be pleased to note that at last this one used the phrase “human trafficking.” So much for our reputation as a kind and friendly and liberal country. I am ashamed of my government.