Every type of trafficking that I've discussed today can occur anywhere in the world whether there are regulations against it or not, and they can occur to anyone at any age and any time. And anyone and everyone can and will interact with trafficking whether they know it or not.

This week on the podcast, I’m going to be sharing about the unseen world around us named human trafficking, or in some cases more accurately - modern day slavery—as part of my participation in the month-long fashion challenge Dressember.

Dressember is a social campaign to raise awareness and funds for anti-human trafficking efforts. If after listening to this episode, or before, you feel a call to donate to support the fifteen organizations that have partnered with Dressember, please do so via the links to my campaign page found in the episode show notes and on my Instagram account.

This year, I have a goal of raising $1000 for Dressember and its partner organizations to support programs that aid in the prevention of trafficking, as well as the rescue of victims and the holistic aftercare programs for survivors of trafficking.

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Today, I’m talking about some of the many ways that we all may interact with trafficking in our everyday lives .

But, before we get going, I want to make a few notes about the show today:

1) that any scenarios or situations given throughout this episode are hypothetical, unless otherwise stated.

2) I will be uploading a transcription of the episode on my website alifemoreconscious dot com soon after each episode is released where I will be linking to all resources used and referenced in the episode.

And 3) in the episode, we will be discussing some difficult topics involving forced labor and commercial sex operations-I am not going into detail on these topics in this episode, but may in future episodes. So please learn with caution and push your comfort zone, but don’t jump out of it. Feel free to stop listening to the episode or reading the blog posts at anytime and don’t feel bad about it. By showing up for this opportunity, you have already opened your mind to the issue—this is simply an opportunity to learn more about human trafficking.

Now that that’s said, let’s get on with the show.

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I said yesterday that we interact with human trafficking every day. And I mean it.

I'm not assuming that everyone has a domestic servant that's being trafficked, or hires a person being prostituted, or watches pornography every day. But I am assuming that you wear clothes, eat food, and use stays at hotels - after all, how else are you listening to this podcast?

Even in the US where the majority of cases reported to the national human trafficking hotline are sex-trafficking-related (about 70% of cases), we interact with labor trafficking every day.

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While everyone's lifestyle and daily routine are different, we can likely all agree that we share these four areas of interactions in common:

Clothing, and other item manufacturing

Food, agricultural production, harvesting, processing

Technology, the designed- and marketed-for-extinction electronics that are produced en mass every year and thrown out soon after

And, general services - from hair and nail salons to domestic servants and maid services, traveling sales crews, and more.

The vast majority of daily interactions will be with the production of goods - whether that be clothing, food, or technology.

Most of this manufacturing happens around the world, but there have been several recorded cases of it in the US, in sweatshop factories in which men, women, and children are forced to work for below-minimum wage rates in working conditions with long hours and hazardous conditions.

In 2013, the Rana Plaza factory fire led to the deaths of over 11 hundred garment workers caused by an unsafe building structure and unsafe procedures including employing more than the building's maximum occupancy and ignoring recommendations to condemn the building the day before the accident.

But sweatshops aren't only used for the production of clothing and other soft goods, many foods and electronics are produced with conditions extremely similar to the garment industry sweatshop factories.

Take chocolate and tomatoes for example.

The average cost of a child slave to work on a cacao plantation is $250. these children are usually either kidnapping victims or being held in debt bondage as they attempt to pay off their accrued debt to the plantation operators with the little money they make working.

Now most people who I have talked about trafficking in chocolate production to have said: "I don't buy that kind of chocolate." So I will normally ask them, "where was your chocolate made and grown?"

Only 5% of cocoa used comes from a farm that has been certified to have non-slave workers. That means the other 95% can't be proven to show whether it does or does not use slaves.

In the US, we see this sweatshop-like working conditions in the agricultural industry, like with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers' twenty-year fight about the working conditions on tomato farms in Florida. They won the battle in 2015 after seven slavery cases came from Florida to federal court. Some of the farms the workers were on would pay little to nothing for each day of work, require workers to live in company housing with high rent (think a mobile home with 20 people sharing the space), and no breaks during the long 10-to-12 hour days.

So yes, even in the US, some of our food is produced with slavery conditions, leaving people in situations just like those of older forms of slavery.

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These are only a few of the many ways goods manufacturing industries and products that utilize sweatshop labor. And that is all before the goods come to you, the consumer. What happens after you get rid of an item is another story.

But we need to move on, let's talk about the service industry.

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The service-industry is about as broad of an area of industries as is the manufacturing-industries. But the one addition is that sex trafficking and the areas it encompasses are also included.

Some services where trafficking and exploitation are used are salons & spas, hotels, cleaning services, traveling sales crews, nanny services. And many of the manufacturing-industry areas can also be considered service-industry, especially in agricultural manufacturing like with the chocolate and tomato farms.

Let's talk about three of these service areas:

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• Health and beauty industry with massage parlors, salons, and spas
  
• Hospitality - hotels and motels
  
• and domestic work
  

Quick note: All of the information used in this section comes from a report from Polaris Project titled The Typology of Modern Slavery in which Polaris looked at data from the National Hotline to create a comprehensive list of the types of trafficking found in the reports made in the US.

These service-industry sectors can include either instances of labor trafficking or labor exploitation depending on whether the victims are being forced to perform the service - which would be trafficking by the means of force, fraud, or coercion - or if they are voluntarily choosing the sub-standard conditions because they have no other options. In many instances, these are difficult to distinguish, and in some, impossible to. They do get treated differently when it comes to action against the situations, but they are both bad conditions.

Massage parlors, salons, and spas have long been known to have ties with trafficking and slavery. Some are fronts for commercial sex operations with the workers being forced to have sex for payment. The victims are mostly women from Asia who came to the US as an immigrant looking for work.

Other times the salons and spas are legitimate businesses, but they exploit their employees for profit. These employees, also typically adult women from Asian countries, are often recruited through fraudulent practices typically by local recruitment agencies in their home countries who offer promises of better wages and working conditions, as well as educational and immigration benefits. These victims are forced to work long hours with minimal breaks and pay. Some locations even hold their victims to an "intern" period where the new employee doesn't get paid but works long hours to learn the services.

The Polaris Project's report gathered all of the data from December 2007 through December 2016 and found that there were 124 trafficking cases and 510 labor exploitation cases involving the hospitality industry in hotels, motels, resorts, and casinos.

These victims work as desk attendants, bell staff, and housekeeping. And this trafficking and exploitation can occur intentionally or unintentionally in any and all businesses in the industry as sometimes the traffickers may be in the management staff at the hotel or be a subcontracted recruiter who doesn't let the management know about their practices.

These trafficking victims are often held in debt bondage as the trafficker makes them pay off any costs that they may have accrued, based on the trafficker's word. Most of the victims are women and men from Jamaica, the Philippines, and India and are in the country with an employer-specific visa.

And lastly, trafficking in domestic services makes up the largest sector of trafficking cases with over 11 hundred cases in the period from 2007 to 2016. These situations involve victims beings forced or required to take care of many of the household tasks including cooking, cleaning, and taking care of children for long hours with little chance to leave the home. And they are also frequently forced to perform sexual acts for their employers.

Victims can come into the situation via fraudulent recruitment practices similar to the other service-industry sectors, by forced marriage, or voluntary acceptance of the position because it's the best option.

It is not uncommon to hear of domestic trafficking cases involving domestic and international government employees and representatives.

This is also one of the sectors with the broadest range of possible victims--children, along with women and men of all ages.

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Every type of trafficking that I've discussed today can occur anywhere in the world whether there are regulations against it or not, and they can occur to anyone at any age and any time.

And anyone and everyone can and will interact with trafficking whether they know it or not. So to finish off this episode, I want to help you be able to act on what you see. So here is a list of signs of trafficking to look for throughout your life:

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• The individual is not free to leave or come and go at will
  
• Is under 18 and is providing commercial sex acts or is not under 18 and appears to have a pimp or manager overseeing their work
  
• Is unpaid, paid very little, or getting paid only through tips
  
• Works excessively long or unusual hours
  
• Is fearful, anxious, depressed, submissive, tense, or nervous
  
• show signs of physical or sexual abuse, physical restraint, or confinement
  
• Shows signs of poor hygiene, malnourishment, or fatigue
  
• Has few or no personal possessions
  
• Is being frequently monitored
  
• Is not in control of their own identification documents
  
• Shares scripted, confusing, or inconsistent stories
  

This is a basic list that I got from the more extensive list available from the Polaris Project. Please check the linked list out to see more.

If you do ever come across any of these signs, please report it. It doesn't take long and can be completely anonymous. It's better to report the possibility with all the information you can gather than to ignore the situation and let it keep happening.

Some ways to report possible trafficking:

Call the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-3737-888

or text the word "help" to BeFree or the number 233733

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If you have more questions, message me on Instagram or send me an email and I can connect you with more information and resources to learn more.

And please if you’ve been gaining value from these episodes, consider donating to my Dressember campaign page linked in the show notes and on the transcript post available on alifemoreconscious.com.

And if this topic piques your interest, or you are excited to start learning more now--subscribe to this podcast. And follow along on Instagram where I will be sharing facts about sustainable and ethical issues, links to my newest podcast, and other random tidbits from my journey toward conscious living.

And lastly, check back tomorrow, December 6th, when I will be talking about more ways that you and your community can answer the call to help end human trafficking.

Love y’all and hope this episode helps make your life a little more conscious.

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Resources:

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• Polaris Project
  
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  • Polaris-Typology-of-Modern-Slavery.pdf
    
  • Recognize the Signs | Polaris
    
  • Polaris_National_Hotline_2018_Statistics_Fact_Sheet.pdf
    
  
  
  
• Other
  
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  • List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor | U.S. Department of Labor
    
  • Labor Trafficking and Forced Labor Exploitation
    
  • You Need to Know: The Slavery Conditions on Tomato Farms | HuffPost
    
  • 8 Things You Didn’t Know Were Made with Sweatshop Labor | Green America
    
  • Why Won’t We Learn from the Survivors of the Rana Plaza Disaster? - The New York Times