Labor trafficking cases bring penalties
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Indian workers leave the John Pickle Co., Inc. after requesting but not receiving return of their passports, in February.
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(AP) -- Federal officials in recent years have stepped up efforts to curb the trafficking of workers for cheap labor, something that occurs most often in the garment and agricultural industries.
Trafficking involves some element of fraud, force or coercion in luring people to the United States and then keeping them here -- sometimes by holding their passports. It involves workers brought to this country both legally and illegally.
Among cases in recent years that have resulted in substantial penalties:
• In Hawaii, a jury Friday convicted the owner of an American Samoa garment factory of involuntary servitude for enslaving hundreds of Chinese and Vietnamese garment workers. He faces up to 20 years on each of 11 counts of involuntary servitude and more time for money laundering, conspiracy and extortion. The company also has been fined by federal authorities and ordered by a court in American Samoa to pay $3.5 million to the Daewoosa Samoa Ltd. workers, who often slept two to a bed and were sometimes beaten by guards.
• In Florida last year, three citrus contractors were sentenced to lengthy prison terms for harboring hundreds of undocumented workers, threatening them with violence and holding them hostage over alleged $1,000 debts.
• In California in the 1990s, more than 70 Thai employees in an El Monte sweatshop worked 18-hour days for less than $2 an hour, holed up behind razor-wire fences, sleeping on roach-infested floors. That case resulted in prison terms and multimillion-dollar settlements.
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