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Unscrupulous Employers Robbing Latino Wages

Compliance in Human Trafficking?

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Unscrupulous Employers Robbing Latino Wages

(CNN)  Low-income Latinos are routinely discriminated against in the South, a  report released by the Southern Poverty Law Center says.  The study’s author and others say the problem exists nationwide, with millions of Spanish-speaking immigrants living “beyond the protection of the law.”

The report, released by the Southern Poverty Law Center, documents the experiences of 500 immigrants in the South, finding that Latinos routinely are cheated out of wages, are denied basic health protection and fall victim to racial profiling.

“Under Siege: Life for Low-Income Latinos in the South” details stories such as that of a Tennessee woman who says she was jailed at a cheese factory for asking for pay, a bean picker in Alabama who says his life savings were taken by police at a traffic stop, and a rapist in Georgia who was not arrested because the suspect’s victim was an undocumented immigrant.

Forty-one percent of the people surveyed said they had experienced theft of their wages by employers. Forty-seven percent said they know someone who was treated unfairly by police. Seventy-seven percent of women surveyed said they have been sexually harassed by bosses, many saying that bosses used their immigration status as leverage.

“This report documents the human toll of failed policies that relegate millions of people to an underground economy, where they are beyond the protection of the law,” said Mary Bauer, author of the report. “Workplace abuses and racial profiling are rampant in the South.”

But such discrimination is also rampant nationwide, she said. The human-rights law center focused on the South because that’s the area the Montgomery, Alabama-based group knows best, she said.

Teodoro Maus, president of the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, has heard thousands of discrimination complaints from Mexican immigrants during the past two decades.

“It’s absolutely correct that there’s generalized discrimination,” he told CNN. “There’s a general feeling that discrimination is valid because these people are illegal, because these people have no right to be here.”

But the attitude toward discrimination has changed throughout the years, said Maus, who was also the Mexican consul general in Atlanta, Georgia, from 1990 to 1994 and from 1995 to 2001.

“The big difference from previous years is that there were discriminatory acts before, but not the belief that discrimination is allowed,” he said.

Bolstered by what Maus called “an ultraconservative element,” some people “realized they could have open aggression against a group of people who could not defend themselves.”

Bernardo Mendez Lugo, Mexico’s deputy consul in Tucson, Arizona, said he sees three main forms of discrimination: racial profiling by law enforcement officers, problems in the workplace and difficulties in the rental housing market.

In the workplace, he said, employees often find they are passed over for promotions despite their qualifications or length of employment. The abuse, Mendez Lugo said, is generally aimed at undocumented workers.

“They are told, ‘I’m going to call immigration [authorities] if you keep asking,’ ” Mendez Lugo said.

Federal officials say there are more than 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Most of them come from Mexico and other Latin American countries.

The center urged the federal government to strengthen labor laws and crack down on racial profiling.

“We’re talking about a matter of basic human rights here,” said Southern Poverty Law Center President Richard Cohen. “By allowing this cycle of abuse and discrimination to continue, we’re creating an underclass of people who are invisible to justice and undermining our country’s fundamental ideals.”

Source: CNN

Compliance in Human Trafficking?

Ever wonder where traffickers advertise their victims? Turns out it’s in one of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers - The Washington Post. Advertisements for massage parlors that are often fronts for brothels selling trafficked women are run in The Post every day, despite the fact that the publication has reported on human trafficking in massage parlors. You can tell The Washington Post to stop making money off exploitation!

During my tenure at Polaris Project, a non-governmental organization combating modern-day slavery, we’ve worked with dozens of women who’ve been victims of human trafficking within brothels disguised as massage parlors. Almost all of the women from commercially-fronted brothels we’ve worked with in the DC area have been victimized in locations that have been advertised in The Washington Post’s Sports section.

These women are often offered legitimate jobs, but then forced into prostitution. Many are unable to leave the brothel. Several are threatened with gang violence and others are threatened with harm to family members if they tried to leave. Some women are in debt bondage, and most have experienced some type of sexual violence or coercion from customers frequenting the brothels. All of them want to escape.

I picked up yesterday’s paper and saw that while there were only six advertisements for commercial sex-oriented parlors and spas in the Sports section, The Washington Post was still accepting such ads. I attribute the decrease in overall ads (which was up to 35 at one of its high points in 2002) mostly to the work of the DC Task Force on Human Trafficking and the general state of the economy.

In 2006, even the Ombudsman of The Washington Post, Deborah Howell, agreed that the paper should join the Los Angeles Times and its peers- The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, and the Boston Globe- by not facilitating the sexual exploitation of women through these advertisements.

Author: Katherine Chon

Source: Change.org