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International Market in ‘Forced Laborers’ Over 12 Million

By emily
Created 03/20/2008 - 15:20

Newsweek’s disturbing and revealing article, Bottom of the Barrel, takes a closer look at the millions of Asian workers producing goods sold in the U.S. who are trapped in servitude in the country’s they work in.

“This is the dark side of globalization: a vast work force trapped in conditions that verge on slavery. Most media coverage of human trafficking tends to focus on crime, like the recent scandals involving migrant laborers who were kidnapped and forced to work at brick kilns in China. And forced prostitution, of course, which accounts for roughly 2 million people worldwide, according to the United Nations' International Labor Organization. "We talk a lot about trafficking for sexual exploitation [because] sex and violence sells newspapers," says Richard Danziger, of the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration (IOM). But the international market in "forced laborers" (the ILO's term) is far larger—and generally ignored. The ILO reckons the worldwide number of forced laborers today at some 12.3 million. It's a conservative estimate; other approximations rise as high as 27 million.” Click here [1] for the full article.


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