Indian brick kiln owner faces decade in jail in rare win for...

"A court in southern India has sentenced a brick kiln owner to 10 years in prison for trafficking workers and keeping them in slave-like conditions, in a rare victory for victims battling slow and drawn-out trials."

Indian brick kiln owner faces decade in jail in rare win for...

(Reporting by Anuradha Nagaraj, Editing by Ed Upright; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking and climate change. Visit www.trust.org)

Held in bonded labour, Afghan returnee children make bricks ...

"Samina, an eight-year-old Afghan girl, hasn't been to school since she was forced to return home with her family from Pakistan."

"She spends each day at a dusty, dirty brick kiln near the eastern city of Jalalabad, making bricks with her father to help repay the money the family borrowed to pay the truck driver who brought them across the border."

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Held in bonded labour, Afghan returnee children make bricks ...:

(Reporting by Zabihullah Noori @ZNoori; Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)

Study aims to tackle hospitality's role in human trafficking | The Caterer

"As a result of the finding of the study, led by Oxford Brookes University working in partnership with the University of West London, the Lapland University of Applied Science in Finland and the Ratiu Centre for Democracy in Romania, a toolkit has been created to enable hospitality businesses to identify and prevent human trafficking."

"Co-funded by the Prevention of and Fight against Crime Programme of the European Union, the research has uncovered examples of child sexual exploitation, domestic servitude, labour exploitation in supply chains and hotel construction, forced criminality in hotels, forced prostitution and bonded labour."

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Study aims to tackle hospitality's role in human trafficking | The Caterer:

Meet the Journalists: Ann Hermes and Michael Holtz | Pulitzer Center

Meet the Journalists: Ann Hermes and Michael Holtz | Pulitzer Center:

BBC News - Why India's brick kiln workers 'live like slaves'

Source:BBC News


By Humphrey Hawksley
BBC News, Andhra Pradesh



"Like a scene from a long-gone age, men and women walk in single file up and down steps as if climbing a pyramid. They strain under a load,balanced in yoke-like hods, to deliver freshly moulded bricks to the
furnace."


Read  Humphrey Hawksley's report here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-25556965

Toddlers freed from brick kiln bondage – The CNN Freedom Project: Ending Modern-Day Slavery - CNN.com Blogs

(CNN) – A flaring furnace blasts another wave of searing heat on the faces of workers hauling bricks under a southern Indian sun.

They work up to 22 hours a day propping heavy stacks of bricks on their heads. None expects to be paid for this labor. None knows how long they'll be kept here. Some are as young as three years old.
Manoj Singh was one of 149 people rescued this year from a brick kiln outside Hyderabad, India. Like millions of other Indians, the toddler was born into extreme poverty.


Toddlers freed from brick kiln bondage – The CNN Freedom Project: Ending Modern-Day Slavery - CNN.com Blogs

Secretariat - Office of the Special Representative and Co-ordinator for Combating Trafficking in Human Beings - OSCE Special Representative calls for private sector to ensure supply chains free from exploitation

BRUSSELS, 19 October 2010 - Ensuring that supply chains are free from all forms of exploitation is an important element of companies' social engagement and contribute to fighting human trafficking, said the OSCE Special Representative and Co-ordinator for Combating Trafficking in Human Beings, Maria Grazia Giammarinaro, in a keynote address at the EU Anti-trafficking day in Brussels today.

Giammarinaro spoke at a two-day conference organized by Belgian Presidency of the European Union to mark the EU Anti-Trafficking Day. The conference focuses on multidisciplinary approach in prevention of trafficking in human beings, prosecution of traffickers and protection of victims.
Giammarinaro stressed the adverse effect that globalization, the push for profits, competition and the need to cut production costs, including labour costs, have on the situation with human trafficking in the OSCE region.

"Increased demand for cheap labour worldwide makes some economic sectors prone to the systematic use of trafficking for labour exploitation - something traffickers take advantage of," Giammarinaro said. "This results in the placement of workers - in the OSCE area, mainly migrant workers - in exploitative, indeed slavery-like conditions, by organized criminal groups."

"Addressing demand for goods and services produced and provided by trafficked persons has increasingly gained visibility and become part of some companies' corporate social responsibility agenda. A number of companies have put into place initiatives to ensure that their supply chains are free from labour exploitation, forced labour, bonded labour and child labour, and this is an important contribution to international fight against trafficking in human beings."

In industries where self-regulation has not been undertaken, the third sector and trade unions should step in to place pressure on governments and producers, and raise awareness amongst the general public of the exploitation, she added.

Giammarinaro also stressed the important role of the private sector in providing training and employment opportunities to ensure social inclusion of trafficked persons and marginalized groups at risk of human trafficking, especially women, girls, and ethnic minority representatives.
 

Maria Grazia Giammarinaro, the OSCE Special Representative and Co-ordinator for Combating Trafficking in Human Beings, at the opening of the tenth Alliance against Trafficking in Persons conference. Vienna, 17 June 2010. (OSCE/Alberto Andreani)

Contacts

Caraigh McGregor
Public Information Officer

• Office of the Special Representative and Co-ordinator for Combating Trafficking in Human Beings
• Wallnerstrasse 6
• 1010 Vienna
• Austria
• Tel: +43 664 8847 4913 (mobile)
• +43 1 51436 6207
• Send E-mail

Source: OSCE

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• Julia Ormond: Slavery and Supply Chains (huffingtonpost.com)
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On the trail of child labor in Bangladesh - CNN.com

By Siddharth Kara

August 3, 2010 11:36 a.m. EDT

 

Child labor in Bangladesh

 

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Siddharth Kara is in Bangladesh documenting human trafficking and child labor.
• Kara focused much of the week on the shrimp industry in the region.
• Kara will travel to urban and rural regions in several south Asian countries

RELATED TOPICS

• India
• Human Trafficking
• Social Issues

Editors Note: Harvard human trafficking fellow Siddharth Kara is undertaking a research trip around South Asia, looking at issues of forced labor, trafficking and child bondage. He will be getting access to the heart of the problem, and telling CNN.com readers what he has discovered every week over the next ten weeks.

Mushiganj, Bangladesh -- This week I want to write to you about shrimp. Portions of the shrimp industry in Bangladesh involve almost every aspect of contemporary forms of labor exploitation: child labor, bonded labor, forced labor, and indirectly human trafficking.

I have traveled to the farthest tip of the southwest quadrant of Bangladesh, beyond which lies the uninhabitable Sundarban mangrove forest.

The shrimp supply chain starts here and it possesses three steps: baby shrimp collection, shrimp farming, and shrimp processing.

In the pouring rain, I took a rickety wooden boat into the muddy-brown Kholpetua river. Soon, I came upon more than four hundred smaller wooden boats. Each had one or two shrimp collectors who spread a fine blue mesh in the water. Once an hour they pulled out the net out for the yield.

"I catch thirty or forty baby shrimp each hour," a twelve year-old boy named Abdul told me.
Children like Abdul will spend most of the day collecting shrimp, then return to shore to sell their catch to the shrimp farmers. Roughly seven out of ten collectors I counted were children. They make around $0.01 for each baby shrimp they sell.

The second step in the process is shrimp farming. Fifteen years ago, large commercial interests overran this area with shrimp farming, so there is no other option for the local inhabitants.

Black tiger shrimp are the main crop, and they require saline water. This means nothing else can grow -- no agriculture, horticulture, or land for grazing animals.

Shrimp farmers like Aziz have to borrow money from the landowner in order to lease land for shrimp farming.

"The landowner charges me fifty percent interest," Aziz told me.

This makes it difficult for Aziz to earn enough money each season to pay back his debts, forcing him to undertake unpaid labor for the landowner during the off season. In other words, he is a shrimp farming bonded laborer.

Aziz harvests the baby shrimp for roughly three months until they are fully grown. He can sell top grade shrimp for $0.13 each. After expenses there is very little left over, especially when faced with a ruined crop thanks to natural disasters like Hurricane Aila.

Giant shrimp farms require far fewer people to manage than say, a rice field. This means that tens of thousands of farmers are now out of land and livelihood.

This scenario is a human trafficker's dream.

"I took one offer with an agent" Mohammad told me, "He said he can get me work for twenty thousand taka ($285) each month."

Mohammad was presented with a contract from a man who purported to be a government authorized agent for migrant workers.

After eight months in construction in the Middle East, he was paid for one month of work and told the company was closing and he had to leave the dorms. He was on the streets for weeks before an NGO helped him return home.

The last step in the shrimp supply chain is the exceedingly secretive shrimp processing. Big companies control this step, which includes sorting, de-heading, de-scaling, freezing, and shipping.

I heard many anecdotes of child labor and forced labor inside the processing plants, but my attempts to verify this were unsuccessful. No one would speak to me, and even when approaching some plants by foot, I was met by armed guards who told me to leave.

One plant did open its doors, but I did not find anything untoward, other than the fact that the workers were paid only between $1.30 and $2.00 per day for a company that will make almost $8 million this year.

Overall, Bangladesh shrimp processors exported approximately $550 million in shrimp last year. Almost one-half went to the EU and about one-fourth to the U.S.

So remember, each time you bar-b-que your shrimp this summer, it may have arrived to you by virtue of forced labor, debt bondage, human trafficking, or a child like Abdul at the bottom of the supply chain, who earns no more than $0.01 for that delicious shrimp you will enjoy with cocktail sauce and a frosty beer.

On the trail of child labor in Bangladesh - CNN.com