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:

Children from rural areas and disempowered homes are ideal targets for trafficking in India and elsewhere. Credit: Neeta Lal/IPS

By Neeta Lal
NEW DELHI, Jun 20 2016 (IPS)

Sunita Pal, a frail 17-year-old, lies in a tiny bed in the women’s ward of New Delhi’s Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital. Her face and head swathed in bandages, with only a bruised eye and swollen lips visible, the girl recounts her ordeal to a TV channel propped up by a pillow. She talks of her employers beating her with a stick every day, depriving her of food and threatening to kill her if she dared report her misery to anybody.

“I worked from 6am until midnight. I had to cook, clean, take care of the children and massage the legs of my employers,” Sunita recounts to the journalist, pain writ large on her face. “In exchange, I got only two meals and wasn’t even paid for the six months I worked at the house. When I expressed a desire to leave, I was beaten up.”

Sunita is one of the fortunate few who got rescued from her hell by an anti-slavery activist and is now being rehabilitated at a woman’s home in Delhi. But there are millions of Sunitas across India who continue to toil in Dickensian misery for years without any succour. Trafficked from remote villages to large cities, they are and sold as domestic workers to placement agencies or worse, at brothels. Their crime? Extreme poverty and illiteracy.

The Global Slavery Index released recently by the human rights organisation Walk Free Foundation states that globally, India has the largest population of modern slaves. Over 18 million people are trapped as bonded labourers, forced beggars, sex workers and child soldiers across the country. They constitute 1.4 percent of India’s total population, the fourth highest among 167 countries with the largest proportion of slaves. The survey estimates that 45.8 million people are living in modern slavery globally, of which 58 percent are concentrated in India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Uzbekistan.Between 2011 and 2013, over 10,500 children were registered as missing from Chhattisgarh, one of India’s poorest tribal states.

Grace Forrest, co-founder of the Australia-based foundation, told an Indian newspaper that all forms of modern slavery continue to exist in India, including inter-generational bonded labour, forced child labour, commercial sexual exploitation, forced begging, forced recruitment into non-state armed groups and forced marriage.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), trafficking of minor girls — the second-most prevalent trafficking crime in India – has surged 14 times over the last decade. It increased 65 percent in 2014 alone. Girls and women are the primary targets of immoral trafficking in India, comprising 76 percent of all human trafficking cases nationwide over a decade, reveals NCRB.

As many as 8,099 people were reported to be trafficked across India in 2014. Selling or buying girls for prostitution, importing them from a foreign country are the most common forms of trafficking in India, say experts. Sexual exploitation of women and children for commercial purposes takes place in various forms including brothel-based prostitution, sex-tourism, and pornography.

Last year, the Central Bureau of Investigation unearthed a pan-India human trafficking racket that had transported around 8,000 Indian women to Dubai. Another report about a man who trafficked 5,000 tribal kids from the poor tribal state of Jharkhand also caught the public eye.

Equally disconcerting are thousands of children which go missing from some of India’s hinterlands. Between 2011 and 2013, over 10,500 children were registered as missing from Chhattisgarh, one of India’s poorest tribal states. They were trafficked into domestic work or other forms of child labour in cities. Overall , an estimated 135,000 children are believed to be trafficked in India every year.

Experts point to the exponentially growing demand for domestic servants in burgeoning Indian cities as the main catalyst for trafficking. A 2013 report by Geneva-based International Labour Organization found that India hosts anywhere from 2.5 million to 90 million domestic workers. Yet, despite being the largest workforce in the country, these workers remain unrecognized and unprotected by law.

This is a lacuna that a national policy in the pipeline hopes to address. Experts say the idea is to give domestic workers the benefits of regulated hours of work with weekly rest, paid annual and sick leave, and maternity benefits as well entitlement of minimum wages under the Minimum Wages Act of 1948.

“Once these workers come under the ambit of law,” explains New Delhi-based human rights lawyer Kirit Patel, “it will be a big deterrent for criminals. But till then, domestic workers remain easy targets for exploitation.”

Despite growing awareness and media sensitization, however, registered human trafficking cases have spiralled up by 38.3 percent over five years from 2,848 in 2009 to 3,940 in 2013 as per NCRB. Worse, the conviction rate for such cases has plummeted 45 percent, from 1,279 in 2009 to 702 in 2013.

Not that human trafficking is a uniquely Indian phenomenon. The menace is the third-largest source of profit for organised crime, after arms and drugs trafficking involving billions of dollars annually worldwide, say surveys. Every year, thousands of children go missing in South Asia, the second-largest and fastest-growing region in the world for human trafficking after East Asia, according to the UN Office for Drugs & Crime.

To address the issue of this modern-day slavery, South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation recently held a conference on child protection in New Delhi. Ministers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan and the Maldives agreed to jointly combat child exploitation, share best practices and common, uniform standards to address all forms of sexual abuse, exploitation and trafficking.

One of the pioneering strategies adopted at the conference was to set up a toll-free helpline and online platform to report and track missing children. “We need to spread the message to support rescue efforts and rehabilitate victims. With the rapid advance of technology and a fast-changing, globalized economy, new threats to children’s safety are emerging every day,” said India’s Home Minister Rajnath Singh at the conference.

Rishi Kant, one of India’s leading anti-trafficking activists, says it all boils down to prioritizing the issue. “For poor Indian states, providing food, shelter and housing assume far greater importance than chasing traffickers. Besides, many people don’t even see trafficking as a crime. They feel it’s an opportunity for impoverished children to migrate to cities, live in rich homes and better their lives!”

Initiatives like anti-trafficking nodal cells — like the one under the Ministry of Home Affairs — can be effective deterrents, say experts. The ministry has also launched a web portal on anti-human trafficking, while the Ministry of Women and Child Development is implementing a programme that focuses on rescue, rehabilitation and repatriation of victims.

But the best antidote to the menace of human trafficking, say experts, is a stringent law. India’s first anti-trafficking law — whose draft was unveiled by the Centre recently — recommends tough action against domestic servant placement agencies who hustle poor children into bonded labour and prostitution. It also suggests the formation of an anti-trafficking fund.

The bill also makes giving hormone shots such as oxytocin to trafficked girls (to accelerate their sexual maturity) and pushing them into prostitution a crime punishable with 10 years in jail and a fine of about 1,500 dollars. Addressing new forms of bondage — such as organised begging rings, forced prostitution and child labour — are also part of the bill’s suggestions.

Once the law is passed, hopefully, girls like Sunita will be able to breathe a little easier.