Settlement of Human Trafficking Case

In a story “Trafiicking Case ends for 48 Thai welders: A firm settles claims of immigrants who arrived on work visas and were forced into near-slavery” by Teresa Watanabe, the L.A. Times (Dec. 8) reports that federal authorities will announce a $1.4-million settlement in a case involving 48 Thai welders brought to California four years ago. The case, settled by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Trans Bay Steel Corp. of Napa, represents what experts call the hidden face of human trafficking: migrant laborers legally recruited — largely from Asia and Latin America — but exploited and abused while here. Though most public attention about human trafficking has focused on women and children in the sex trade, experts say laborers constitute at least half of the approximately 16,000 people trafficked into the United States annually.  Click here to read the story.

Unfortunately, there have been increasing reports of human trafficking and involuntary servitude over the last decade.  As the U.S. government increased border enforcement operations in the mid-1990s, with Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego and Operation Hold-the-Line in El Paso, fees charged by smugglers to migrants seeking to unlawfully enter the United States increased from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand.  Some migrants have been forced to pay off smuggling debts through labor upon arrival in the United States.

As the L.A. Times story states, human trafficking is not simply a problem in the sex industry but a general labor market problem.  A few years back, stories of immigrant slavery hit the national news, including a case of Thai immigrants working behind razor wire in a sweatshop in El Monte (a suburb of Los Angeles) and another of deaf and mute Mexican migrants forced to panhandle on the streets of New York City (only to be beaten or worse if they failed to produce sufficient revenues).  In May 2006, a federal court in Oklahoma court found that a company lured 52 laborers from India under false pretenses and then subjected them to underpayment of minimum wage and overtime, substandard living conditions, food rationing, lock-downs with armed guards, inadequate medical assistance, humiliating and demeaning working conditions and restrictions in religious practices. The court awarded $1.24 million to the men for violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act, 42 USC §1981, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The court further found that the corporation committed deceit, false imprisonment, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and that the president of the corporation was personally liable for injuries the aliens suffered because he personally acted to recruit the workers and was personally involved in many of the decisions that resulted in the underpayment of minimum wage and overtime pay. Chellen v. John Pickle Co., 434 F. Supp. 2d 1069, 2006 (N.D. Okla.  2006).  Michael A. Scaperlanda has an excellent article about the case, Human Trafficking in the Heartland: Greed, Visa Fraud, and the Saga of 53 Indian Nationals “Enslaved” by a Tulsa Company, 2 Loy. Int’l L. Rev. 219 (2005). Scaperlanda. served as an expert witness for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the case.  More generally, Jennifer Chacón has an excellent article on human trafficking (Misery and Myopoa: Understanding the Failures of U.S. Efforts to Stop Himan Trafficking, 74 Fordham L. Rev. 2977 (2006)) that I commend to you.

KJ