INTERDEPENDENCE between the world's economies has brought many benefits, but this globalisation also has a dark side that includes increased trafficking of human beings. Rights advocates say that as capital moves ever more freely in search of low-cost labour, people will also move across borders in search of those jobs, even if the legal means for such migration does not exist. And whether these migrants are legal or illegal, they are often at the mercy of those they depend on for their livelihoods. At the most appalling end of the spectrum, they can be stripped of identity, sold and forced to work for little or no pay. This was the topic that 300 academics, government officials and social workers gathered to discuss last week in Honolulu, and has been the subject of similar meetings over the past year. While few would argue that globalisation can be reversed, many are interested in both understanding the causes of the increase in trafficking and in finding solutions. According to author Kevin Bales, there are 27 million slaves in the world today, more than at any time in human history. Several years ago, Bales was involved in revealing that slave labour was widely used in the production of cocoa. His organisation, Free The Slaves, is working with groups to change that. The conference may have been staged in a place often promoted as an idyllic paradise - and part of the United States - but a trial unfolding at the federal courthouse on the other side of town served to illustrate that no part of the world is immune from the problem. The case involves about 300 employees of the now-closed Daewoosa garment factory in American Samoa - Vietnamese and Chinese nationals brought to the territory to sew sportswear that was then shipped to Los Angeles and sold in leading US department stores. The US Department of Justice, bringing its first and biggest case under an anti-trafficking law passed in 2000, accuse the factory owner Kil-soo Lee and two managers of underpaying the women - and in some cases withholding pay for months, maintaining unhygienic conditions at the factory and dormitory, and imprisoning the women on factory grounds. Before leaving their home countries to work at the Daewoosa factory and entering into contracts for wages of about US$400 (HK$3,120) a month, the women also paid fees of more than US$4,000 to Daewoosa and its agents, fees that a judge in American Samoa has already decided were illegal. At one point over the years-long dispute, some workers got a court order for US$2,000 in back pay, but were forced to hand it back to the factory to be allowed to continue working there. The workers this year won a civil case filed in American Samoa against Lee and against two of the agents, Vietnam's Tour Company Number 12 and International Manpower Supply. The judge in that case awarded the workers an average of US$17,000 each, but the lawyer representing the 251 Vietnamese women, Virginia Sudbury, holds little hope of collecting damages from Lee. Tour Company Number 12 and IMS, agencies of the Vietnamese government, have not responded to payment demands. But she hopes that a desire to avoid bad publicity will force them to pay up. 'They want to maintain trade with the United States, they want to look good in the eyes of the world. But a good first step to me would be to make good on what they have done to 250 of their own,' she said. The arrest of Lee and others in this case was the first time any federal US agency had made an arrest on American Samoa, an unincorporated territory in the South Pacific. The Marianas and Saipan are other South Pacific US territories where some say sweatshops have been set up to make clothing or other goods that can be labelled 'Made in the USA'. The US anti-trafficking law and the Honolulu case are part of an international trend towards classifying human trafficking for the purposes of labour exploitation as a criminal act, and towards viewing the people who are trafficked as victims rather than illegal migrants. A United Nations protocol on human trafficking was passed in December 2000 and has been signed by 105 countries, although only a handful have passed laws to implement the protocol. Trafficking has also been recognised as a crime that can be tried by the recently established International Crime Court. Not everyone at the conference thought a law-based approach to the problem was the right one. Ann Jordan, who was involved in drafting the UN protocol, said such laws had not reduced the number of people being trafficked, and advocated other solutions, including more flexible migration and guest worker programmes and greater protections for migrant workers. But having such laws on the books is important, as it sends a message that globalisation's driving imperative, ever-cheaper goods produced in greater volumes, will not take precedence over basic human rights. Anh-Thu Phan is Associate Editor of the Post's opinion pages
