Many organizations have tried to capitalize on promoting “awareness” of human trafficking. But awareness-raising without a call to action is ineffective and often misleading. Awareness campaigns, especially those tied to fundraising, typically focus on girls in the sex trades, but recently reported instances involving youth and undocumented people have been associated with industries like food processing.
Meat-packing and chicken-processing plants have been sites of extreme exploitation that may meet the definition of trafficking. However, rather than address such exploitation, Republicans in the state legislatures of Minnesota and Iowa have introduced bills to allow minors to work later hours and in more dangerous jobs. In Iowa, fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds would be legally allowed to work in meatpacking plants, and sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds would be legally eligible for construction work in Minnesota. These bills would undo a century of child labor laws. Today, workers between the ages of fourteen and seventeen have restricted working hours, and they are not allowed to work with certain kinds of equipment or chemicals or in some industries.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has exposed abusive working conditions in meat processing plants and more recent exposés have documented children working in dangerous conditions in meatpacking plants. Many of the workers involved are undocumented, and fear that they will be deported if they report workplace abuses. It’s also worth noting that children did not travel to meatpacking plants in Minnesota and Iowa to apply for jobs. In many instances, people were brought to the plants as contractors by businesses that sought them out.
Labor rights are for everybody, not only citizens, and they should be enforced for all workers, especially the most vulnerable. Undocumented minors working overnight shifts on dangerous equipment may be the most vulnerable workers in the United States, and a multilingual awareness campaign informing young people of their rights would be a great step toward workers being able to realize their rights.
While people often imagine labor trafficking happening elsewhere, American adolescents and young adults, particularly those from economically deprived backgrounds, have been targets for schemes in which they are hired to sell magazines or cleaning products door-to-door. But these jobs do not pay wages and expenses deducted from sales commissions exceed sales, effectively keeping young people trapped.
These examples show that people in positions of power evaded rules in order to squeeze the most money possible from workers.
Young people are not the only ones exploited in the workplace. People without regular work status are aware that employers know that undocumented people can be fired at will. In one case in the American South, thousands of workers were hired with H-2B visas for skilled work involved in clean up efforts after Hurricane Katrina. Rather than hire local workers, the federal government allowed contractors to hire skilled workers from other countries for between $2 and $4 less per hour than local workers would have earned. This case is the subject of a new book by Saket Soni, The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America. More recent cases include Venezuelan asylum seekers hired to work on other cleanups, including after tropical storm Arthur in 2020 and hurricane Michael in 2019.
Awareness campaigns that inform recent immigrants and people with irregular immigration status of how to report workplace safety violations would help them advocate for their rights. The workers who helped clean up after Katrina found support from grassroots groups like the Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity and Congreso de Jornaleros, which helped the workers organize themselves to advocate for their interests. The workers were also covered by The New York Times and traveled to Washington, D.C., to press their case against being misled when they were brought to the United States and falsely promised visas and permanent residency. Ultimately, they were successful, and received back wages and damages in a large monetary settlement with Signal International in 2015.
These examples show that people in positions of power evaded rules in order to squeeze the most money possible from workers, and officials who knew of these situations and chose to let them persist. Awareness campaigns informing employers that their business, like Signal, could be rendered bankrupt could avert such cases before they start.
The ongoing successful union drives at Amazon, Starbucks and elsewhere remind us that we are stronger working together. This might be the most important awareness campaign of all.
This column was produced for the Progressive Media Project, which is run by The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.