tagged w/ forced labor
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In what could be considered the most modern form of prisoner torture know, prisoners in a labor camp in northeastern China have allegedly been forced to play MMORPG's like World of Warcraft in an elaborate scheme said to net prison bosses approximately $800 to $900 per day.
A former prisoner who identified himself as "Liu Dali" told the Guardian that guards forced prisoners to work 12-hour shifts on a procedure commonly referred to as "gold mining." The process essentially requires long hours of playing the game to build up credits, which are then in turn sold for real money.
Prisoners did not see any of the money they made for their bosses, he told the publication.
(read all about it at link)In what could be considered the most modern form of prisoner torture know, prisoners... more
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March 9th, 2011
07:41 AM ET
The challenges of counting a 'hidden population'
By Manav Tanneeru, CNN
Slavery still exists. Of that there isn’t much dispute, if any. But how widespread is what many experts call modern-day slavery?
Estimates range from about 10 million to 30 million, according to policymakers, activists, journalists and scholars.
The International Labour Organization, an agency of the United Nations that focuses on, among other things, labor rights, put the number at a “minimum estimate” of 12.3 million in a 2005 report.
Kevin Bales, a sociologist who serves as a consultant to the United Nations and has authored several books about modern-day slavery, estimated the number was 27 million people in his book “Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy.” The book was published in 1999.
There is yet another estimate. Siddharth Kara, a fellow on trafficking at Harvard University and also an author, recently told CNN that his calculations put the range between 24 million and 32 million. That number was current as of the end of 2006, he said.
There are several reasons behind the variance in numbers, said Ben Skinner, who published a book about modern-day slavery – “A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-day Slavery.”
“There are two big problems with the count,” Skinner, a Senior Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University, said during a telephone interview. “The first is that the people we are counting are, by definition, a hidden population.
“The second problem is more of a theoretical one where the definitions are not in place. We don’t have a common definition still as to what slavery is.”
‘A hidden population’
Slave labor has been a part of civilization for much of history. It was practiced openly and its legality wasn’t much of a question. During the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, its scale was carefully documented.
Today, slavery is illegal in every country. Yet it persists, in secret, exploiting the poor and the marginalized – which poses immense challenges for legal authorities, activists and experts working to track the problem.
Skinner recounted a conversation he had with John Miller – the former State Department ambassador at large on modern slavery from 2002 through 2006 during the George W. Bush administration – about the inherent difficulty of counting a population that is difficult to find.
“These are not people that stand in line, raise their hands and wait for the census to be taken,” Miller told Skinner.
And, even when found, they may not want to be identified, Skinner said. “They are victims of a crime and that is still oftentimes missed as a crime,” he said.
The enslaved may be involved in prostitution or might be in a country illegally as a result of trafficking – activities that could land them in trouble with the law. So, they’d rather keep quiet about their condition, Skinner said.
“They are individuals who will be seen as perpetrators of a crime against the state rather than victims of a crime against humanity,” he said. “They are aware of that so they don’t self-identify.”
It also isn’t the easiest thing for observers to get data from countries about how big of a problem slavery is within their borders.
For example, South Asian countries will acknowledge problems with sex trafficking because of a perception that it’s not just a South Asian issue, Skinner said, echoing a theory from John Miller.
However, they may not be as forthcoming about their problems with debt bondage – when someone has to pay off a loan through work and may be trapped in the situation because the amount earned is too little to pay off the amount of money borrowed.
“There’s a self-perception that debt bondage is a rather embarrassing part of the continuing underdevelopment in parts of their countries,” Skinner said.
Definitions and divisions
Before you can count something, you have to define it, and a broadly accepted definition of what modern slavery encompasses has been elusive.
In 1926, a treaty signed in Geneva under the auspices of the League of Nations, the precursor to the U.N., defined slavery as “the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.”
The ILO, in 1930, used the terms "forced or compulsory labor" to describe “all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily.”
Roger Plant, who worked at the ILO from 2002 through 2009, said during a telephone conversation that forced labor is “when you get into work or service without the freedom of choice and you can’t get out of it without punishment or the threat of punishment."
Kevin Bales offered this description: “To me slavery means one person who is completely under the control of another person, that they use violence to maintain that control, they exploit them, make money out of them, and that the person just can’t walk away.”
There is, then, the term “human trafficking,” which is sometimes used interchangeably with the word “slavery.” According to the U.S. State Department, “human trafficking” describes “activities involved when one person obtains or holds another person in compelled service.”
The State Department says the term includes sex trafficking, forced labor and bonded labor. It also includes, among other things, the use of child soldiers and forced child labor.
The terms and their meanings seem straightforward, but the divisions come to light when legislators try to reconcile the definitions with their country’s situation.
“Within the trafficking community, there really isn’t a consensus on what slavery means,” Skinner said. “That’s harmful, that’s detrimental.”
The biggest consequence of incorrect data, not knowing the full scope of the problem or where it’s concentrated can lead to poor decisions on where to focus resources and how best to solve the problem, Skinner said.
“Slavery, on its face, is monstrous,” he said. “I think it’s important to be motivated by emotion but to, very quickly, come to the point of getting to the cold, hard business of figuring how best to free as many slaves as possible.
“Part of that is understanding how many slaves there are and understanding where they are."March 9th, 2011
07:41 AM ET
The challenges of counting a 'hidden... more
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Before I get to the grit, here’s a base of information for us to start with:
* Most consumer chocolate comes from cocoa beans that are farmed in West Africa.
* West Africa is known for forced labor, human trafficking and child labor – sometimes all three at once.
* Hershey, which has the largest market share in the US at 42.5%, gets the majority of their chocolate from – you guessed it! – West Africa.
* Out of every major (and a bunch of relatively minor) companies that produce chocolate, Hershey is the only one that refuses to certify their chocolate as fair trade.
In fact, not only does Hershey refuse to use chocolate from certified fair trade sources, it won’t even list them publicly. Does Hershey get its cocoa beans from the same places that practice forced child labor? We don’t know, because they won’t tell anyone: When asked by companies like Global Exchange and The International Labor Rights Forum, Hershey refused to provide public information about its cocoa sources in West Africa, period.
Here’s what we do know: the majority of Hershey’s cocoa is sourced from West Africa; the company has no purchasing policies that would prevent labor exploitation of those in West Africa; it refuses to shift to third-party fair trade certifications (which almost every other major chocolate manufacturer has); and even when Hershey’s investors asked the company to “institute supply-chain transparency programs for its cocoa,” the company refused.
Read more about Hershey and what you can do to stop child labor in West Africa:
http://www.awakenedaesthetic.com/2011/02/exposed-hersheys-chocolate/Before I get to the grit, here’s a base of information for us to start with:... more
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Jimenez and 11 other Mexican guestworkers arrived in Smyrna, Tennessee, to work for a company called Vanderbilt Landscaping. Vanderbilt obtained guestworker visas by claiming to the U.S. Department of Labor that it could not find a single American to fill its highway-side landscaping jobs—at a time when Tennessee suffers a 10.1 percent unemployment rate.Jimenez and 11 other Mexican guestworkers arrived in Smyrna, Tennessee, to work for a... more
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My friend Sin Yi fled Burma when the Burmese military junta started coming to his village and forcing boys like him to join the army.
"They stop us at the bus station or on the street and by gun point they say to us:
'Come, you must join the army. If you don't join we will kill you. Come, join...'"
Aye Aye Cho told me she left Burma because the junta used to come to her village and separate the women from the men.
"Then they would come and take any woman they wanted to sleep with them in a little hut for the night."
"If you refused to go with them you had to pay them instead. One night they came for me, I told them to come back later and I would pay them. But I didnt have any money, so that night I ran from one bush to the other. I ran away from Burma."
"In Thailand i had friends who told me to go to Malaysia where I would be safe."
"Sadly," she told me, "I listened to these friends."
Unfortunately, what Sin Yi and Aye Aye Cho found waiting for them in Malaysia was equally as tragic as what they left behind.
Burma is bleeding well beyond its borders.
To date there are more than 2,100 political prisoners in Burma, including Buddhist monks and one Nobel Peace Laureate (Aung San Suu Kyi). Military and civilian officials are involved in the unlawful conscription of child soldiers and wide-spread acts of forced labor inside of Burma. And scores of people are perishing due to the extreme poverty caused by the regime's mis-use of power and by its handling of the Cyclone Nargis crisis.
Yet there is another Burma-related tragedy, which until now has not been widely told.
In April 2009 the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee published the results of a year-long investigation into allegations that the Malaysian government has been complicit in the human trafficking of people seeking refuge from the extreme persecution they faced in Burma. Once in Malaysia, through a highly organized process between police, immigration officials and traffickers, the refugees are sold to prostitution rings and fishing trawlers.
Please Don't Say My Name is an audio documentary; it stems from my friendship with a small group of Burmese refugees who work together in a restuarant in the heart of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I spent a year and a half getting to know them and in early 2009 I traveled to Kuala Lumpur to record their stories. Many of them have been sold to traffickers by Malaysian Immigration Officials--and some of them were arrested while I was there.
The audio-only documentary is one hour in length; the interviews are intimate in tone and record many aspects of their lives both inside and outside of work, prison, detention camps and RELA immigration raids highlighting their continued vulnerability in Malaysia--as well as their ability to create family-like bonds despite the severity of their circumstance.
Listen to the whole doc or just to selected clips, and read a photographic essay.
Learn how to help and share with your friends!
www.pleasedontsaymyname.orgMy friend Sin Yi fled Burma when the Burmese military junta started coming to his... more
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Not understanding is NOT an excuse...
ROBOTISM© Will Succeed for PRECISELY the Reasons Communism Failed...
...People Intelligently CHOSE to NOT Work as Robots, real ROBOTS will have no such choice.
Any remaining "work" not associated 100% with FAST-TRACKING
the ROLLOUT of The INEVITABLE ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY is a complete waste of time !!
The only way to free humans from the tyranny of others
is to perform ALL work with Robots & Computers, PERIOD...
Everything else is just rearranging the chairs...
Just suppose, "saving" jobs that are not fit for humans, is NOT HUMANE, just STUPID
1. Any job a Robot can do is beneath a human's dignity....
2. CA Farm Association is replacing Migrant Workers with Robotic Fruit Pickers, TODAY !
3. Start REALLY CARING for your Fellow Humans, TODAY !
4. DEMAND a WAGELESS ROBOTIC ECONOMY from your LEADERS TODAY !
5. Free your fellow humans to be beings, & you will, of course, free yourself too !
6. Many of your LEADERS & the POWER CLASS Think of YOU and your CHILDREN as FLESHBOTS, to be harvested and used to "run" THEIR GAME, you know, "Human" Resources, JUST another resource, like coal, oil etc. Many is not all, so there are some in the POWER CLASS who can help. Contact them !
7. Let them know that you and yours deserve the leisure they enjoy, and that REAL ROBOTS, not HUMAN ROBOTS should do the "work" to run the "show", EXPECT, ACCEPT, DEMAND NOTHING LESS !!
"...A generation that wearies of technology is bound to turn to magic.
Those who refuse to use machines that move mountains will pray for a faith that moves mountains..." Hoffer
http://RoboEco.com/current Not understanding is NOT an excuse...
ROBOTISM© Will Succeed for PRECISELY... more
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sysop
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added this
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3 years ago
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Sickly and malnourished, Kirana Kapito began his working life on a large commercial tobacco estate in Malawi's northern region. The farms sell their produce on the country's auction floors directly to international corporations including Limbe Leaf Tobacco, majority owned by the Swiss-registered Continental Tobacco Company and U.S.-based Alliance One Tobacco.
Kirana is one of 250 million children across the world involved in work that is damaging to their mental, physical and emotional development. Some 57 million of these endangered children live in Sub-Sahara Africa. And with an estimated 1.4 million child laborers, the small, southern African nation of Malawi has the highest incidence of child labor in southern Africa, according to the Olso, Norway-based, FAFO Institute for Applied Social Science.
Kirana was eight years old when he first went to work in the fields. Estate owners transported him and his parents from their home village, Mulanje, along with 45 other families. The truck journey covered more than 1,000 kilometers and ended in the tobacco fields in Rumphi in northern Malawi.
Kirana's mother, Jane Kapito, 45, says the family left home seeking a better life. “Four years later, my whole family is still struggling with poverty. My son has to work as hard as everyone else if we have to afford the basic necessities. The money that my husband and I receive from the tobacco estate is not enough,” she says.
Now 12, Kirana has never been to school. For the past six months, his health has been failing and he can no longer work as hard as he used to. His mother says her little boy is malnourished and therefore contracts different infections easily. The family often goes without a proper meal for up to three days.
“Just in the past two months, Kirana has been afflicted by malaria, diarrhea and pneumonia,” Jane Kapito said. “He's my only child and I am so scared of losing him.”
This family's struggle is repeated throughout Malawi's tobacco industry, where poverty ensures that every member must contribute to the workload. Sickly and malnourished, Kirana Kapito began his working life on a large commercial... more
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