Workers produce charcoal in Andrequice, a town in the state of Minas Gerais in southeastern Brazil. The activity employs large numbers of workers who are subjected to modern slavery, in addition to damaging the environment by deforesting large areas. It was a frequent target of inspections carried out by the Mobile Inspection Team for Combating Slave Labour, especially during the first decade of this century. Credit: Courtesy of João Zinclar/CPT

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 5 2020 (IPS)

“Slave labour is not declining; it has taken on new forms and is growing; it expanded to new sectors where it did not previously exist,” said Ivanete da Silva Sousa, an activist in the fight against modern-day slavery in northern Brazil.

This scourge expanded from livestock farming, charcoal and sugar production and other rural activities to urban areas: the construction and textile industries, among other sectors, she told IPS.

As one of the founders of the Centre for the Defence of Life and Human Rights (CDVDH), created in 1996, Sousa has monitored the evolution of contemporary slavery, characterised by forced labour, excessive working hours, degrading conditions, and restrictions on freedom of movement, as typified by the Brazilian Penal Code.

The Centre was born in Açailandia, in the west of the state of Maranhão, because this municipality of 112,000 inhabitants was a hub of slave labour to produce the charcoal consumed by the local iron and steel industry, which exports pig iron, a product of smelting iron ore that is used in the production of steel."The discovery of slave labour in new parts of Brazil and new branches of activity revealed situations that probably existed already, but which until then no one had reported or which had not been sufficiently or properly investigated.” -- Xavier Plassat

It was also a hotbed of trafficking of virtually captive workers, as it was located on the border of Maranhão, the largest supplier of labour for degrading and illegal work, together with Pará, the Amazon jungle state where slavery conditions are rife.

For these reasons Carmen Bascarán, a Catholic lay missionary from Spain, chose Açailandia as the headquarters of the CDVDH, to put into practice her ideas to help the poor. She was the soul and leader of the Centre, which added her name to its own when she returned to her home country in 2011.

Street vendors of hammocks made in Ceará, another neighbouring state to the east, are recent examples of workers in slavery-like conditions identified in Maranhão, Sousa said from Açailandia in her dialogue with IPS.

Stores are also taking advantage of the new facilities provided by the use of the “hour bank”, adopted in the 2017 reform of the labour laws, to force their employees to work many extra hours and give up their weekly day off, without the obligatory compensation.

“Hours worked accumulate,” but the compensation in hours off in later days, as stipulated by the law, “never arrives,” said the activist, the administrative secretary of the CDVDH for the past six years.

The 2017 reform, defended as an adaptation to the current conditions in the economy and labour relations, offered new opportunities for the “modernisation” of slave labour: “It became more difficult for people to detect slave labour,” Sousa said.

A poster from the latest gathering of workers rescued from neo-slavery conditions. Since 2014, the Centre for the Defence of Life and Human Rights has been organising these annual meetings, which are held in different locations in the state of Maranhão every year on May 13, the day the abolition of slavery in Brazil (in 1888) is commemorated. In the gatherings, workers discuss their experiences and how to overcome poverty and inequality in order to eradicate slave labour. Credit: Courtesy of CDVDH

The statistics collected by different government agencies engaged in the fight against slave labour also point to a complex picture which has evolved over time.

The Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) processed the data gathered from 1995 – when Brazil acknowledged the problem and began to combat it systematically – to 2019.

In the past 25 years, a total of 54,778 workers were rescued from slavery or degrading conditions by the authorities, especially the Mobile Inspection Team, which brings together people from the ministry of labour, the labour prosecutors office, and the police.

The crackdown on modern-day slavery intensified in the 2003-2010 period, when more than 3,000 workers were freed each year, with a record 6,001 rescued in 2007. Since then the number has dropped steadily, to 1,050 last year.

In this process, the rescue operations that were concentrated in the agricultural frontiers of the Amazon jungle states of Pará, Mato Grosso and Maranhão spread throughout the country, to the wealthier and more industrialised southern and southeastern regions as well.

Since 2006, the phenomenon has been expanding in urban areas, especially the construction and textile industries.

“The discovery of slave labour in new parts of Brazil and new branches of activity revealed situations that probably existed already, but which until then no one had reported or which had not been sufficiently or properly investigated,” Xavier Plassat, who coordinates the CPT’s campaign against contemporary slavery, told IPS.

“These statistics have to be analysed carefully”, because they can lead to misleading conclusions, Plassat, a Dominican friar, warned in an interview.

Xavier Plassat, a French friar of the Dominican Catholic order, who has lived in Brazil since 1989, gives Pope Francis, during an audience at the Vatican in April 2019, a booklet from the Brazilian Pastoral Land Commission’s campaign against slave labour, which he coordinates. Credit: Courtesy of the Pastoral Land Commission

The large number of workers rescued in the first decade of this century, for example, was due to inspections in the sugar industry, which identified in one fell swoop hundreds of workers subjected to abusive conditions during the sugarcane harvest, he pointed out.

That situation changed quickly with the mechanisation of cane cutting, imposed by local governments in response to air pollution in nearby cities, created by the practice of pre-harvest sugar cane field burning.

In the sectors of cattle breeding and farming, where some employers are abusive, there was a similar attempt to reduce the workforce by means of mechanisation, and to reduce the use of agrochemicals as well, said Plassat, who is from France and has lived in Brazil for 31 years.

In the charcoal industry, modern-day slavery was reduced by the heavy scrutiny and inspections triggered by multiple complaints, as well as by the loss of a large part of its market due to the crisis in the pig iron trade.

Finally, Plassat added, the economic recession in Brazil, which began in 2015, led to high unemployment, which made it less likely for workers afraid of losing their incomes – even when earned in terrible conditions in poor-paying jobs – to report abuses.

Complaints, and thus inspections and rescue operations, also fell off, possibly because employers resorted to different tactics to circumvent the crackdown on this form of trafficking in persons.

“They started to use smaller groups of workers, in short-term tasks, to avoid the risk” of being caught, said the friar, who also explained that employers abandoned the practice of transporting workers in large groups over long distances, to escape detection.

In the Amazon, “there is ‘surgical’ deforestation, which is on a smaller-scale and takes place in protected areas, where satellite images reveal nothing,” he said.

The result is that fewer workers in slavery conditions are detected, even though inspection operations have not been reduced.

Efforts to combat the phenomenon now require “more intelligence in the inspections, examining the companies’ books,” for example, he said.

The central government reduced the budget for the agencies fighting slave labour. However, the rescue operations continue because local authorities in some states are making a great effort, albeit with limited resources, to fight the problem.

Minas Gerais, Bahia, São Paulo and Goiás are the states that presented the best results in recent years, said Plassat from Araguaina, the city of 180,000 inhabitants where he lives in the central state of Tocantins, near Maranhão and Pará, the areas where the most numerous rescue operations were carried out in the first decade of the century.

The CPT and the CDVDH, which form part of the Integrated Action Network to Combat Slavery (Raice) that promotes initiatives aimed at “breaking the cycle of slave labour” in the heavily affected states of Maranhão, Pará, Tocantins and Piauí, stress the need for prevention rather than merely repression.

Addressing the vulnerabilities and lack of local alternatives that drive people into migration and forced labour, and training rescued victims to keep them from falling back into the trap, are necessary measures to effectively eradicate the new types of slavery.

This is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Airways Aviation Group.

The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7 which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms’.

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalisation of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking” and so forth.

Teenage girls harvest tomatoes on a farm in the state of Sinaloa, in northern Mexico. It is in this part of the country that migrant workers, mainly from the southern states, work in exploitative conditions facing serious violations of their rights. Credit: Courtesy of Instituto Sinaloense para la Educación de los Adultos (Sinaloa Institute for Adult Education)

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Apr 9 2019 (IPS)

“They mislead the workers, tell them that they will be paid well and pay them much less. The recruiters and the employers deceive them,” complained Marilyn Gómez, a migrant farm worker in Mexico.

Gómez, a member of the Mixteco Yosonuvico of Sonora Cerró Nublado cooperative and the mother of two girls, told IPS that the migrant workers are forced to buy whatever they need in their employers’ stores – “where everything is super expensive” – because they aren`t allowed to leave the farm.

“There’s no social security, no contracts, we work very long hours. They take advantage of the fact that people need work,” said Gómez, who began to work in the fields with her family at the age of 13, picking grapes and vegetables in the northern state of Sonora."There is a recruitment chain in which the recruiters offer people work and an advance payment to draw them in, but there is no contract. In some places, they don't get paid until the end of the work period." -- Mayela Blanco

The 27-year-old migrant worker and activist, who has worked sick and has frequently worked for more than 12 hours a day for just a few dollars, has harvested fruit and vegetables near the town of Miguel Aleman, part of the municipality of Hermosillo, about 1,600 kilometers north of Mexico City.

Her account illustrates the working conditions of migrant farm workers, who provide substantial returns to their employers and who put vegetables and fruit on the tables of Mexican and U.S. consumers.

They are generally peasant farmers who migrate temporarily or permanently from the southern states to harvest export crops in central and northern Mexico.

They routinely suffer violations of labour rights, and of their rights to housing, education, health and a healthy diet.

And they lack work contracts, adequate working conditions, social security and overtime pay, according to the report “Violations of the rights of agricultural day laborers in Mexico“, launched on Mar. 21 in Mexico City by the National Network of Agricultural Day Labourers, to which Gómez belongs.

In Mexico, migrant farm workers or day labourers are the main victims of slave or forced labour, according to this and other local and international studies. The National Network, made up of workers’, indigenous and academic organisations, has identified cases of labour exploitation, human trafficking and forced labour and/or services.

The latest National Survey of Occupation and Employment, from 2017, placed the number of migrant farm workers at 2.9 million, while the governmental Programme of Care for Agricultural Day Laborers put the figure at 1.54 million, plus 4.41 million family members who follow them as they move about.

The government of leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who took office on Dec. 1, dismantled the programme and has not yet put in place its successor.

Regional context

There are 1.95 million victims of slave labour in the Americas, five percent of the world total, according to the 2018 Global Slavery Index, produced by the non-governmental Walk Free Foundation, based in Australia.

Forced labour represents 66 percent and persons, especially women, in forced marriage, account for 34 percent. The region has, on average, a prevalence of 1.9 people living in modern-day slavery per 1,000 inhabitants.

Participants in the Network of Agricultural Day Labourers – including Marilyn Gómez (C) – take part in the Mar. 21 presentation in Mexico City of a report that illustrates the modern-day slavery conditions faced by migrant workers in Mexico. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

And one-third of the victims of forced labour were in debt bondage, while the Latin America and Caribbean region accounted for four percent of all exploited labourers in the world.

While Haiti, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic had the highest rates, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia had the absolute largest numbers of people in situations of slavery.

In Brazil, Latin America’s giant, with a population of 208 million, 369,000 people were living in modern-day slavery, representing 1.8 per 1,000 inhabitants.

In Mexico, the second largest regional economy with 129 million inhabitants, 341,000 people were living in slavery conditions, or 2.71 per 1,000 people, while in Colombia, the fourth largest regional economy with a population of 45 million, the figure was 131,000, or 2.7 per 1,000.

Modern-day slavery includes human trafficking, forced labour, debt bondage, forced marriage, and commercial sexual exploitation, according to the Walk Free Foundation.

For Mayela Blanco, a researcher at the non-governmental Center for Studies in International Cooperation and Public Management, migrant farm workers in Mexico are vulnerable to falling prey to trafficking for labour exploitation.

“There is a recruitment chain in which the recruiters offer people work and an advance payment to draw them in, but there is no contract. In some places, they don’t get paid until the end of the work period,” Blanco told IPS.

There are a growing number of studies on this phenomenon in the Mexican countryside, and there has been no improvement for day labourers.

The “2018 List of goods produced by child labor or forced labor“, published by the U.S. Department of Labor, includes reports on people forced to work in the production of chili peppers in Mexico.

“Many of these victims report being recruited by middlemen, called enganchadores, that lie to workers about the nature and conditions of the work, wages, hours, and quality of living conditions,” the document states.

Cases of forced labour in chili peppers production predominantly occur on small and medium-sized farms and have been found in states such as Baja California, Chihuahua, Jalisco, and San Luis Potosi, according to the report.

“Once on the farms, some men and women work up to 15 hours per day under the threat of dismissal and receive subminimum wage payments or no payment at all,” it adds.

Meanwhile, “Some workers face growing indebtedness to company stores that often inflate the prices of their goods, forcing workers to purchase provisions on credit and limiting their ability to leave the farms,” the report says.

In Mexico, the company stores on factories and rural estates in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were known as “tiendas de raya”, where the workers were forced to buy their provisions – just like the company stores of today.

The U.S. list also includes cattle ranches and peanut farms in Bolivia, textile factories and logging companies in Brazil, and Brazil nut harvesting and the logging industry in Peru.

Washington bans the entry of goods produced with forced labour, under the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act, in force since 2016 and based on the old Tariff Act of 1930.

Since 2015, the governmental National Human Rights Commission has issued at least six recommendations for violations of the rights of migrant farm workers, which are non-binding proposals.

In one of them, issued in 2018 for violations of several human rights for trafficking in persons, such as child labour in the form of forced labour, the Mexican Commission highlighted abuses against at least 62 migrant workers belonging to the Mixtec indigenous people, including 13 adolescents.

The members of the indigenous group, originally from the central state of Guerrero, were harvesting cucumbers in the western state of Colima.

Of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, number eight, which promotes decent work, sets among its targets the implementation of “immediate and effective” measures to eradicate forced labour, ban modern forms of slavery and human trafficking, and ensure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour.

Despite some advances and international commitments, Latin America and the Caribbean are making only moderate progress in the fight against this phenomenon.

The Global Slavery Index gave the region an average rating of “B” and indicated that Argentina, Chile and Peru improved their status compared to 2016, while Brazil, Mexico and Central American countries remained the same.

Blanco says the conditions faced by migrant workers in Mexico are seen as normal and that they are not considered victims. “They run the risk of losing their jobs. We have not seen a response from the authorities,” she said.

Gómez, who is still a migrant worker harvesting fruit and vegetables but now in decent conditions, said the government should intervene. “The institutions don’t do what they are supposed to do; we are asking that they take action and ensure our rights,” the activist said.

The National Network made recommendations such as a census of employers, the monitoring of working conditions, a comprehensive programme to address the issue and a census of migrant workers.

The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) http://gsngoal8.com/ is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7 which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms’.

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalization of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking” and so forth.

Excerpt:

Africa's children still stand as the number one victims of suffering and destitution across the continent. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Aug 26 2015 (IPS)

“Poverty has become part of me,” says 13-year-old Aminata Kabangele from the Democratic Republic of Congo. “I have learned to live with the reality that nobody cares for me.”

Aminata, who fled her war-torn country after the rest of her family was killed by armed rebels and now lives as a as a refugee in Zimbabwe’s Tongogara refugee camp in Chipinge on the country’s eastern border, told IPS that she has had no option but to resign her fate to poverty.

Despite the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, African children still stand as the number one victims of suffering and destitution across the continent.“Poverty has become part of me. I have learned to live with the reality that nobody cares for me” – Aminata Kabangele, a 13-year-old refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo

“In every country you may turn to here in Africa, children are at the receiving end of poverty, with high numbers of them becoming orphans,” Melody Nhemachena, an independent social worker in Zimbabwe, told IPS.

Based on a 2013 UNICEF report, the World Bank has estimated that up to 400 million children under the age of 17 worldwide live in extreme poverty, the majority of them in Africa and Asia.

According to human rights activists, the growing poverty facing many African families is also directly responsible for the fate of 200,000 African children that the United Nations estimates are sold into slavery every year.

“Many families in Africa are living in abject poverty, forcing them to trade their children for a meal to persons purporting to employ or take care of them (the children), but it is often not the case as the children end up in forced labour, earning almost nothing at the end of the day,” Amukusana Kalenga, a child rights activist based in Zambia, told IPS.

West Africa is one of the continent’s regions where modern-day slavery has not spared children.

According to Mike Sheil, who was sent by British charity and lobby group Anti-Slavery International to West Africa to photograph the lives of children trafficked as slaves and forced into marriage, for many families in Benin – one of the world’s poorest countries – “if someone offers to take their child away … it is almost a relief.”

Global March Against Child Labour, a worldwide network of trade unions, teachers’ and civil society organisations working to eliminate and prevent all forms of child labour, has reported that a 2010 study showed that “a staggering 1.8 million children aged 5 to 17 years worked in cocoa farms of Ivory Coast and Ghana at the cost of their physical, emotional, cognitive and moral well-being.”

“Trafficking in children is real. Gabon, for example, is considered an Eldorado and draws a lot of West African immigrants who traffic children,” Gabon’s Social Affairs Director-General Mélanie Mbadinga Matsanga told a conference on preventing child trafficking held in Congo’s southern city of Pointe Noire in 2012.

Gabon is primarily a destination and transit country for children and women who are subjected to forced labour and sex trafficking, according to the U.S. State Department’s 2011 human trafficking report.

In Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, a study of child poverty showed that over 70 percent of children are not registered at birth while more than 30 percent experience severe educational deprivation. According to UNICEF Nigeria, about 4.7 million children of primary school age are still not in school.

“These boys and girls, some as young as 13-years-old, serve in the ranks of terror groups like Boko Haram, often participating  in suicide operations, and act as spies,” Hillary Akingbade, a Nigerian independent conflict management expert, told IPS.

“Girls here are often forced into sexual slavery while many other African children are abducted or recruited by force, with others joining out of desperation, believing that armed groups offer their best chance for survival,” she added.

Akingbade’s remarks echo the reality of poverty which also faces children in the Central African Republic, where an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 boys and girls became members of armed groups following an outbreak of a bloody civil war in the central African nation in December 2012, according to Save the Children.

Violence plagued the Central African Republic when the country’s Muslim Seleka rebels seized control of the country’s capital Bangui in March 2013, prompting a backlash by the largely Christian militia.

A 2013 report by Save the Children stated that in the Central African Republic, children as young as eight were being recruited by the country’s warring parties, with some of the children forcibly conscripted while others were impelled by poverty.

Last year, the United Nations reported that the recruitment of children in South Sudan’s on-going civil war was “rampant”, estimating that there were 11,000 children serving in both rebel and government armies, some of who had volunteered but others forced by their parents to join armed groups with the hopes of changing their economic fortunes for the better.

Meanwhile, back in the Tongogara refugee camp, Aminata has resigned herself. “I have descended into worse poverty since I came here in the company of other fleeing Congolese and, for many children like me here at the camp, poverty remains the order of the day.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

Village women in Nalgonda district near Hyderabad leave for the city to work at construction sites. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS.

By Stella Paul
HYDERABAD, India, May 1 2014 (IPS)

The southern Indian city Hyderabad is witnessing a construction boom as it prepares to become the joint capital of two states – Andhra Pradesh and the soon to be formed Telangana. Buildings are coming up in almost every neighbourhood.

Under one such building coming up, three-year-old Amlu is scrubbing a plate. Her parents Sai Mohan, 33, and Sri Lakshmi, 29, work at the construction site. Mohan is paid the equivalent of 50 dollars a month, Lakshmi works without payment.“There is no better way to help a rural woman than providing her a village-based job. Once she migrates, it is very difficult to restore her life.”

With both parents labouring all day, Amlu is learning to take care of herself.

Mohan and Lakshmi come from Nelapatla village in Nalgonda district, 39 km east of Hyderabad. Mohan gave up cotton farming in 2011 after several crop failures, and migrated to Hyderabad to work for a real estate developer from whom he had taken an equivalent of 500 dollars as a farm loan.

Mohan was employed as a guard, but a few weeks later he was asked to do other work such as laying bricks, making concrete, and plastering walls. Unable to handle so much work alone, Mohan brought wife Lakshmi to help him.

“Our employer says if I don’t work, he won’t pay my husband any salary,” Lakshmi told IPS.

Asia has nearly 12 million forced, according to the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The Global Slavery Index 2013 report suggests there are nearly 14 million forced labourers in India alone. They are mostly employed at construction sites, farms, brick kilns, mining quarries, private homes, and in the sex trade.

“Today some people are still being born into hereditary slavery, a staggering but harsh reality, particularly in parts of West Africa and South Asia,” the report says.

Lakshmi comes from a Dalit community of shoemakers. The ministry of labour and employment in India estimates that 86.6 percent of bonded or forced labourers belong to Dalit and tribal communities.

Mary Madiga, a Dalit rights defender in Hyderabad, says the caste system makes Dalit workers, especially women, vulnerable to exploitation. Now 39, she spent six years in Nalgonda as a forced farm labourer. When her family tried to send her to school at age 14, they were beaten and thrown out of the village by her employer, she said.

“I was lucky to escape, but many others stay in the job due to fear of physical violence,” Madiga, who is contesting to be a member of the state legislative assembly told IPS.

Fear of physical violence forces thousands of migrant women into the sex trade, says Jayamma Bandari, member of the planning committee for the National AIDS Control Programme. “Hyderabad has over 25,000 sex workers.  Sixty percent of them are rural women who migrated to the city and were forced into sex work,” Bandari told IPS.

In 1998, Bandari came to Hyderabad with her husband who then confined her to a room and forced her into sexual slavery for three years before she was rescued by a city-based NGO.

“A forced sex worker is often underfed and tortured by her employer. Almost every such sex worker has marks of torture on her body,” says Bandari, who runs the Chaitanya Happy Home in Hyderabad, a shelter for minor girls of sex workers rescued from the clutches of pimps.

Social norms also lead women into forced labour, says Tathagata Sengupta from the group Solidarity for Brick Kiln Workers. On Jan. 27 this year, Sengupta led a team that rescued 60 forced labourers from a brick kiln near Hyderabad. Over half of them were women, including one in an advanced stage of pregnancy, says Sengupta.

“At brick kilns, most migrant women workers are married to men who took loans from a local moneylender to meet the expenses of their marriage. After marriage, the moneylender forces both husband and wife to work to recover the loan. Since social norms require a good wife to share her husband’s burden, the woman doesn’t refuse,” Sengupta told IPS.

Under India’s Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976, forced labour is punishable by three years imprisonment. But conviction for forced labour is almost unheard of, says Satyavati Kondaveeti, a city-based lawyer associated with the Andhra Pradesh Human Rights Commission.

Employers of forced labourers make only verbal agreements, and it is threfore not possible to prove that the labourer was forced, says Kondaveeti. “They are smart, know the loopholes of the law well, and use these to their advantage.”

Most activists believe that organising workers is an effective way to end forced labour. “In an organised sector, it is easy to track or monitor the growth or decline of the industry. We can count the number of workers and, through workers unions, find out how well the law is being followed. None of this is possible in the unorganised sector,” says Bandari.

Officials say that India must address the reasons for worker migration if it has to end forced labour.

Nalgonda’s district collector T. Cheeranjivalu, the highest-ranked official in the district administration, says government programmes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) and the National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM) are helping.

“These programmes are designed to provide livelihood security and create durable assets in villages for poor people who are vulnerable to migration,” he told IPS.

Despite accusations of widespread corruption in these schemes, Cheeranjivalu says they are the most effective tools to end forced labour, especially for women. “There is no better way to help a rural woman than providing her a village-based job. Once she migrates, it is very difficult to restore her life.”

Meanwhile, Lakshmi hopes that Amlu will be able to go to school some day. “I and my husband can’t read or write. But if our daughter is educated, she can have a free life.”

A rural worker on a cassava plantation in Pesqueira, Pernambuco in northeast Brazil holds out his damaged hands, testimony to the appalling slave labour conditions he was forced to work under. Credit: Alejandro Arigón/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 30 2014 (IPS)

The upcoming mega sporting events in Brazil are paving a new route for slave labour among those migrating from rural areas to the cities in search of work.

The dream of a good job draws many rural migrants from Brazil’s poorest regions, as well as neighbouring countries, to try their luck in big cities. But sometimes their dreams turn into nightmares.

Slave labour remains largely a rural phenomenon in Brazil, where it still occurs on cattle ranches, sugar cane plantations and charcoal farms in remote areas. But it has been growing more recently in the textile and garment industry as well.

The shift to urban areas has made it difficult to fight, said experts consulted by IPS.

Cícero Guedes survived several decades of work in slavery conditions, like thousands of other rural workers in Brazil who move around the country in search of work and fall victim to forced labour.

“I worked hungry many times, without anything to eat,” he told IPS some time ago during a meeting of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST). “No one can work a whole day without eating a thing. My lunch was sucking on sugar cane; the suffering is marked on your face. I worked in plantations, sugar mills, factories, and the pay was next to nothing.”

Born in the state of Alagoas in Brazil’s impoverished Northeast, Guedes started to work at the age of eight and never went to school. He began to travel around the country in search of work on sugar cane plantations.

“I worked and worked and couldn’t see any way to improve my situation,” he said. “Slavery is when a person’s dignity isn’t respected, and when they are humiliated.”

In 2002, thanks to the government’s agrarian reform programme, he managed to settle on a piece of land in the north of the state of Rio de Janeiro with his wife and their three children.

But on Jan. 25, 2013, Guedes was shot to death at the age of 58 near the Cambahyba sugar mill in the municipality of Campos dos Goytacazes, in the north of Rio de Janeiro state, where he was organising an MST occupation of a 3,500-hectare complex of seven sugar plantations.

Nearly 20 years ago, Brazil recognised that slave labour exists in the country, formally labelling it “slavery-like labour”, since slavery as such was abolished in 1888.

There are widespread abusive labour recruitment practices in Brazil which lead to debt bondage and deprivation of liberty.

“We are far from putting an end to the problem and not only in Brazil, which took a big step by recognising it. There are countries that don’t acknowledge that it exists, and don’t take measures to fight it,” said Luiz Machado, national coordinator of the International Labour Organisation’s Special Action Programme to Combat Forced Labour.

By ratifying the ILO Forced Labour Convention in 1957, Brazil committed itself to eradicating the practice and promoting decent work.

But a public system to combat the crime was not created until 1995. According to the Labour Ministry, 44,415 people were rescued from slave-like working conditions between 1995 and 2012, and the victims received a combined total of 35 million dollars in compensation.

The ministry also reported that some 2,600 workers a year have been rescued since 2010.

Machado said the United Nations is worried about a sharp increase in slave labour ahead of and during the Jun. 12-Jul. 13 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games, to be hosted by Brazil.

“These major events draw workers from around the country, and immigrants, for the construction of stadiums,” he explained. “Major infrastructure works also have a social impact, in terms of sexual exploitation and even child labour.

“We are on the alert, and we have negotiated agreements with the government and the private sector to promote and guarantee decent work,” he said.

A number of rescue operations have already been carried out this year by a special Labour Ministry mobile inspection team. On Apr. 4, the team rescued 11 crew members working in slave-like conditions on the MSC Magnifica, an Italian cruise liner, after raiding the ship in the northeastern city of Salvador de Bahía.

According to the authorities, the crew members were forced to work up to 16 hours a day and suffered from abuse, bullying and fraudulent recording of the hours they worked, while some were subjected to sexual harassment.

The ship belongs to the Italian company MSC Crociere, one of the world’s biggest cruise operators.

On Apr. 20, a Brazilian court rejected an appeal by Zara, an international fashion chain that belongs to the Spanish company Inditex, regarding its responsibility for the slavery conditions to which 15 workers were subjected. They were discovered in 2011 in a factory where the chain’s garments were produced.

The corporation argues that it was unaware of the irregularities committed by the factory, one of its 50 subcontractors in Brazil. But the court found Zara to be directly responsible for the abuses and asked for it to be included on a list of companies with exploitative labour practices.

In March, 17 Peruvian workers were freed from a textile sweatshop in the southern Brazilian city of São Paulo. They worked more than 14 hours a day, seven days a week, monitored by cameras. Their documents were being held by the owners of the company.

The workers were between the ages of 18 and 30 and earned 1.03 dollars per garment, which in clothing stores sold for 45 dollars each.

The ILO’s Machado said there is a new trend of exploiting mainly foreign workers.

“There is a large contingent of Bolivians, Paraguayans, Peruvians, and recently, Haitians, who come in search of a dream and the chance of a better life. Many of them come in to the country without papers and are afraid of being deported,” he said.

Fear of being caught by the authorities gives rise to “a pact of silence” among the immigrants, who do not file complaints about their employers, which would activate an investigation.

The slave workers tend to be mixed-race young people between the ages of 18 and 35. But in urban areas, there is a growing proportion of women and underage minors in clandestine textile sweatshops.

Nevertheless, slave labour continues to be more common in the agricultural sector in this country of 198 million people. Campos dos Goytacazes, a municipality of 463,000 people in a farming area in the north of the state of Rio de Janeiro, won the dubious title of the “national capital” of slave labour in 2009.

“The biggest rescue operation ever of sugar cane cutters in Brazil was carried out that year,” social worker Carolina Abreu, with the Pastoral Land Commission, which forms part of the Popular Committee for the Eradication of Slave Labour in the Northern Fluminense, told IPS.

“During harvest time, one single sugar mill can hire as many as 5,000 workers, and those who come from outside the area end up becoming trapped in debt to survive, working in precarious conditions.”

In 2009, the Labour Ministry rescued 4,535 workers from slave-like conditions, and 715 cases were discovered in Campos de Goytacazes alone.

“That’s why [the municipality] won the prize,” Abreu said. “Besides the sugar cane sector, irregularities have been found on pineapple plantations and cattle ranches. Workers do not have contracts, and they earn less than the minimum wage [of 320 dollars a month].”

The mechanisation of sugar cane production worries cane cutters, who are afraid of losing their jobs, and as a result accept exhausting hours. According to the Pastoral Land Commission, workers cut between seven and 10 tons of sugar cane each per day.

Labour accidents are frequent. An average of 70 workers a year with machete cuts are rushed to the municipal hospital where Abreu works, in Travessão, a rural area of Campos de Goytacazes.

Then there are the sugar cane cutters who come in because of cramps and other problems caused by the repetitive nature of their work, which are not registered as work-related cases.

“Many come to save up some money to send their families, because in their home regions there is no work,” Abreu said. “They live in the most absolute poverty, and are underfed and exhausted.”

Trafficked persons in Iceland often live in cramped living conditions and work up to 16 hours a day. Credit: Sunbeam photos/CC-BY-2.0

By Lowana Veal
REYKJAVIK, Dec 27 2012 (IPS)

For 18 months, a Chinese immigrant named Xing Haiou slept on a massage table in a windowless room in Reykjavik after completing his 12-hour workday.

Brought to Iceland by his distant relative, Lina Jia, Haiou received no wages between June 2002 and December 2003, although Jia paid his parents a monthly pittance for “borrowing” their son to work in her massage parlour.

Xing Haiou eventually accused Jia of non-payment of salary, and received a sum equivalent to 18 months’ work at minimum wage, including overtime.

At the time, he was not formally recognised as a victim of trafficking and forced labour. Today, authorities in Iceland are making a concerted effort to broaded the definition of those terms to better protect victims and survivors.

According to one source, who spoke to IPS under strict condition of anonymity, three questions can determine whether or not human trafficking has occurred: what was actually being done to the person, what methods were used, and what was the purpose of it?

The Icelandic police’s guidelines for trafficking are largely derived from the Norwegian ‘Guide to Identification of Possible Victims of Trafficking’.

These guidelines also seek to correct three common misconceptions of trafficking: that if the person did not take opportunities to escape, he or she is not being coerced; that individuals cannot be said to be victims of trafficking if their current living conditions are better than their previous ones; and that for a specific case to be termed trafficking, the person or group of individuals concerned must have crossed over a national border.

“If people use a definition of trafficking that is too limited, we are excluding most of the victims.  Basically, if a person’s vulnerable situation is being exploited, then it’s trafficking,” according to Margret Steinarsdottir from the Icelandic Human Rights Centre (ICEHR).

“If people come to Iceland of their own free will, even if they know they will be entering a situation in which they will be exploited, they could still be called victims of trafficking,” she added.

Her opinion reflects the framework of the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings, which was adopted in Warsaw in 2005.

Steinarsdottir, a lawyer, has worked with numerous people she says could be classified as victims of trafficking. Contrary to popular opinion, not all victims of trafficking are ensnared in the sex trade, nor are the victims always women.

In Iceland, she says that forced labour is prevalent in sectors like construction and agriculture, while a large number of trafficked persons end up as au pairs in private houses.

Restaurants also conceal a large number of forced labourers, mostly from Eastern European countries, who sometimes work up to 16 hours a day.

According to Steinarsdottir, many people mistakenly believe that trafficking is masterminded by groups of gangsters, when in fact many cases involve individuals who are lured by false promises of stable employment.

Sun Fulan, a young Chinese woman, was promised an “eight-hour workday doing light household chores, with Sundays off”.

Instead, she ended up working 14 to 15 hours a day delivering newspapers and leaflets, working in a massage salon and helping to renovate three properties owned by Lina Jia, the same woman who brought Xing Haiou to this country.

Despite the long hours, which also included housework, Fulan received only a fraction of her promised salary. Finally, in February this year, she wrote to the authorities in Iceland and China, informing them of her plight.

Steinarsdottir has also talked to immigrant women who got married in Iceland and were then forced by their husbands to work as prostitutes. In many cases, the men take away the women’s earnings and threaten to send them back to their home country if they complain.

This situation too, she claimed, can be classified as trafficking.

Steinunn Gydu- og Gudjonsdottir, who manages the newly established ‘Kristinarhus’, a refuge for women victims of prostitution or trafficking, has also dealt with a case of forced labour.

“It wasn‘t clear whether the woman had been brought to Iceland only for forced labour or also for prostitution, but all the typical signs were there: she didn‘t have her passport, all of her earnings were taken away from her, and she was threatened,” Gydu- og Gudjonsdottir told IPS.

Asked how authorities deal with cases of forced labour, which primarily occur around the capital, Reykjavik, Asgeir Karlsson from the Icelandic National Commissioner of Police, told IPS, “We normally send people to the trade unions, but otherwise the local (police) branch in the person’s vicinity deals with such cases.”

“I have not heard of any cases of forced labour this year, and cases do not seem to pop up as often as before the bank crash in 2008,” according to Steinarsdottir.

“But that may be because the people concerned are scared of coming forward and complaining, fearing that they will not be able to get another job,” she concluded.

(END)