3071-The political economy of new slavery

60 Trafficking and International Law
town, where they rapidly sink into debt to small lodging houses and
bars and are so forced into an unending round of similar contracts.
In only one of these cases, concerning Haitians, are those trafficked
crossing an international border, but the workers in Brazil are just as
vulnerable, and the abuse is very similar.
USA fashion companies have been purchasing finished items of
clothing from operations based in Saipan, an offshore American
‘commonwealth’ in the Pacific Mariana Islands. Workers in the factories
are mainly migrants from Bangladesh, China, Philippines and Thailand.
They have often taken loans to pay the fee to an agency for finding the
job. The loan was used as a way of forcing the employees to work very
long hours or offset against their agreed pay in ways solely under the
control of the employer. In 2001 several workers began a court case
against the main US importing companies. In an agreement, reached in
2002, a group of US companies and Saipan manufacturers, including
Gap, J.C. Penney, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren,
set up a $20 million fund to pay back wages to workers and create a
monitoring system to prevent labour abuses. Thirty thousand current and
former garment workers in Saipan are eligible to share about $6.4 million
compensation for unpaid back wages (San Francisco Chronicle, 29
September 2002).
Recently a trade in illegal aliens from China and Vietnam moving to
the USA to work in the garment industry has been exposed. Migrants
have been found working long hours in bad conditions at minimal rates
of pay. They are particularly vulnerable to such exploitation as they are
afraid of being deported if they complain to the authorities, and are
willing to work without social security or other protection.
Statistical evidence of trafficking
There is a general lack of good statistical information concerning
trafficking of people. Some figures have been gathered by organizations
such as the IOM, the ILO, Interpol and the United States Department of
State. These figures are difficult to compare and the level of global
research on the issue remains weak. In its annual report on Trafficking in
Persons, released in February 2002 (US Department of State, 2002), the
US Department of State estimated that between 700,000 and 4 million
trafficked persons are victimized annually. No country is unaffected.
This report is issued annually and looks at all the countries in the world
for which information on trafficking in people is available. A panel then
groups the countries into three tiers: