English SBA Human Trafficking

Labour exploitation
Materials collected draft (not organized)

1) The many faces of labour exploitation

It’s an unpalatable truth but for all our technological advances, for all our rights enshrined by
international law, the majority of the world remains crushed underfoot by the wheels of global
capital. This exploitation is racialised as it is gendered. Children in Asia make our clothes; Black
and Brown women working in fields, factories and private homes endure untold violence and
abuse; Indigenous people are evicted from their ancestral land by big business backed by
governments, or killed and harassed for their resistance; and economic migrants from the
‘wrong countries’ are trafficked and criminalised, forced to choose between insurmountable
poverty at home, or a life of debt bondage, wage theft and other forms of exploitation and
discrimination abroad.

According to the International Labour Organization, 40.3 million people are victims of modern
slavery globally, while 24.9 million people are affected by forced labour. This Monday marked
the World Day Against Trafficking in Persons, of which 71 percent of victims are women and
girls. These horrifying statistics demonstrate the scale of the problem but what they don’t
highlight is the scale of the effort being made to stop the extreme exploitation of workers, as this
fourth edition of our themed summer series hopes to prove.

In the Middle East, for example, where tens of thousands of migrant women from Asia and
Africa work in the care industry, primarily as domestic workers, the kafala “sponsorship system”
continues to drive economic growth while leaving workers vulnerable to abuse. The persistent
efforts of trade unions and civil society have resulted in significant reforms for migrant workers
in Qatar for example, but in Lebanon, where Florence Massena tells the story of the Ethiopian
domestic worker who jumped from a second-floor apartment to escape the abuse of her violent,
fashion designer boss, local activists are limited in their ability to protect domestic workers, due
to their exclusion from the country’s labour laws.

Globally, an estimated 152 million children between the ages of 5 and 17 are victims of child
labour, and almost half work in hazardous conditions. Approximately 62.1 million child labourers
can be found in the Asia-Pacific region, and as Laura Villadiego reports from Indonesia, the
country is seriously behind on its pledge to eradicate child labour by 2022. In Indonesia’s case,
while the laws to protect children from labour exploitation exist, enforcement is a major issue.

https://www.equaltimes.org/the-many-faces-of-labour#.X3j95GhKjIV
By Tamara Gausi, Equal Times Newsdesk
2) Palm oil labor abuses linked to world’s top
brands, banks
PENINSULAR MALAYSIA (AP) — Jum’s words tumble out over the phone, his voice growing ever more
frantic.

Between sobs, he says he’s trapped on a Malaysian plantation run by government-owned Felda, one of the
world’s largest palm oil companies. His boss confiscated and then lost his Indonesian passport, he says,
leaving him vulnerable to arrest. Night after night, he has been forced to hide from authorities, sleeping on
the jungle floor, exposed to the wind and the rain. His biggest fear: the roaming tigers.

All the while, Jum says his supervisor demanded he keep working, tending the heavy reddish-orange palm
oil fruit that has made its way into the supply chains of the planet’s most iconic food and cosmetics
companies “I am not a free man anymore,” he says, his voice cracking. “I desperately want to see my mom
and dad. I want to go home!”

An Associated Press investigation found many like Jum in Malaysia and neighboring Indonesia – an
invisible workforce consisting of millions of laborers from some of the poorest corners of Asia, many of
them enduring various forms of exploitation, with the most serious abuses including child labor, outright
slavery and allegations of rape. Together, the two countries produce about 85 percent of the world’s
estimated $65 billion palm oil supply.

like Unilever, L’Oreal, Nestle and Procter & Gamble.

Palm oil is virtually impossible to avoid. Often disguised on labels as an ingredient listed by more than 200
names, it can be found in roughly half the products on supermarket shelves and in most cosmetic brands.
It’s in paints, plywood, pesticides and pills. It’s also present in animal feed, biofuels and even hand
sanitizer.

The AP interviewed more than 130 current and former workers from two dozen palm oil companies who
came from eight countries and labored on plantations across wide swaths of Malaysia and Indonesia.
Almost all had complaints about their treatment, with some saying they were cheated, threatened, held
against their will or forced to work off unsurmountable debts. Others said they were regularly harassed by
authorities, swept up in raids and detained in government facilities.

They included members of Myanmar’s long-persecuted Rohingya minority, who fled ethnic cleansing in
their homeland only to be sold into the palm oil industry. Fishermen who escaped years of slavery on boats
also described coming ashore in search of help, but instead ending up being trafficked onto plantations --
sometimes with police involvement.

The AP used the most recently published data from producers, traders and buyers of the world’s most-
consumed vegetable oil, as well as U.S. Customs records, to link the laborers’ palm oil and its derivatives
from the mills that process it to the supply chains of top Western companies like the makers of Oreo
cookies, Lysol cleaners and Hershey’s chocolate treats.
Reporters witnessed some abuses firsthand and reviewed police reports, complaints made to labor unions,
videos and photos smuggled out of plantations and local media stories to corroborate accounts wherever
possible. In some cases, reporters tracked down people who helped enslaved workers escape. More than a
hundred rights advocates, academics, clergy members, activists and government officials also were
interviewed.

___

This story was funded in part by the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at CUNY’s
Newmark Graduate School of Journalism

https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-only-on-ap-indonesia-financial-markets-malaysia-
7b634596270cc6aa7578a062a30423bb

3) Lost
by Zahra Hasnain
https://wavewritingandvisualexpression.wordpress.com/slavery-in-the-21st-century-a-wave-
exhibit-of-writing-art-and-activism/college-writing-workshop-research-and-creative-writings-that-
work-to-end-slavery/slavery-in-the-21st-century-poems/

I am unheard, unspoken, unsaid,

Standing in silence, suffocated by cold hands,
Mentally paralyzed, my limbs stiff and rigid.
I struggle; I scuff; I spar,
Fighting to no avail.
No escape and no hope,
Chained in an anguished jail,
I am fragile, feeble, frail.
Covered in haunting marks from lashing whips,
I stumble, stammer, stutter.
Voiceless, my screams fail to escape my lips.
I am small, hidden, invisible,
Yet exposed, bare and open
To the horrors of my deepest nightmares
That has left me scarred and broken.
I am confused, lost, misplaced,
Left feeling empty without love.
Rekindling that inner flame of joy
Is something now I only dream of.
I am scared, terrified, frightened
By a world that has left me behind.
Exposed to all my biggest fears,
I am a child slave in decline.

Definition
Human Trafficking is a process that involves the transportation, recruitment,
harboring or recipe of people from all ages, gender, races and nationalities
through means of fraud, force, abduction or coercion for improper and abused
purposes including labor exploitation, sex exploitation and domestic servitude. In
other words, it is call modern slavery. It is an illegal crime industry earning
approximately 150 million a year. Today, there are approximately 45.8 million
people trapped in this industry around the world, about 10 million being children.
However, it is difficult to determine exact statistics because so many cases go
undetected and unreported.

Plan of investigation

I remember my dad carrying me to a dim sum restaurant and I witnessed a middle aged
Chinese man, he was with a Venezuela girl that looked my age, but the more shocking part was
when he violently grabbed her neck and forced her to kiss him, that definitely didn't sit well with
me. Weeks later news appeared that the same place i went, there were 17 minor Venezuelan
girls human trafficked right behind the restaurant. I felt so guilty, I saw it with my own eyes but I
chose to ignore it. This lesson I will never forget and thus I choose this topic to create
awareness for innocent lives. .

Plan of investigation

As a young teenage girl, I witnessed a real case of human trafficking. My guilty conscience haunted
me till today because I stayed silent. I chose this topic because I want to create awareness, educate
myself and classmates to make a difference.
As an English student I expect to learn new vocabulary, devices and writing techniques existing in
the relevant poems, articles and stories. I will also expect to learn analyzing, summarizing and
further writing skills, and importantly, gaining knowledge on this topic.

I intend to collect relevant resources via mostly the internet (web browsing), books, and articles. I
will use my English language skills to interpret, analyze and summarize these pieces of information,
then further use this to write and present my oral presentation.