SOLIDARITY CENTER: KENYA CASE STUDY
SHOWS HUMAN TRAFFICKING WIDESPREAD

A new case study of labor conditions in Kenya, undertaken by the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center, shows that human trafficking and indentured servitude--including forms of slavery--is still widespread, panelists told Congress in mid-November.

And U.S. consumers, as well as U.S. workers, have a direct stake in the problem, because, as the lone Bush government official on the panel admitted: “A significant portion of the use of child and forced labor is for goods for export.”

The Nov. 13 session for aides to lawmakers who are members of the Human Trafficking Caucus--a bipartisan group dedicated to stopping the trafficking and exploitation of workers in the developing world--saw panelists lay out a wide range of details about the extent and types of human trafficking.

They included forced and indentured labor in Chinese factories, rural African families usually forced by economic need to sell young children to wealthier city dwellers to serve as domestic servants, and even cases where diplomats in the U.S. forced workers from other countries to toil for them as virtual unpaid prisoners.

But the Solidarity Center report ‘uses Kenya as an example” of many of the conditions workers subject to trafficking face, explained center analyst Neha Misra.

Trafficking is so widespread, however, that “we conduct anti-trafficking programs in South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Africa and Latin America,” she added.

A typical story came from a Kenyan woman sent to work in an “export processing zone” in Uganda. Such zones are industrial area established elsewhere whose exports are free from tariffs and other barriers erected by developed nations such as the U.S. The woman was prevented from returning to Kenya and her papers were taken away.

“Though Ugandan and Kenyan unions do not call that slavery, it is exploitation,” Misra said.

And in another case, a Malaysian-owned firm opened a factory in the southern African nation of Namibia and imported Bangladeshi and other South Asian workers “put them in deep debt” to pay for their transfer to Africa and “sent them to work” in the plant, she added. “And Middle Eastern countries prefer African workers” including Kenyans “because they have less-organized support systems, know less about their rights and are less likely to speak out” against being exploited.

Ironically, exports from the Ugandan zone and the Namibian factory come into the U.S. virtually duty free under a law pushed several years ago by the Congressional Black Caucus to promote sub-Saharan exports to the U.S.

The report points out that globalization not only increases exploitation of workers worldwide--as well as in Kenya--but also widens the wealth and income gaps within countries, as well as between nations.

Panelists urged lawmakers’ aides to brief their bosses on the four main forms of trafficking and human exploitation, to craft or support legislation to make stopping it a foreign policy priority. The top forms of exploitation, according to a medical researcher on the panel, were the use of women and girls for commercial sex, exploitation of agricultural labor on large plantations, and use of children as domestic help.