Lured Into Bondage

Some of the world's leading computer makers don't want you to know about Local Technic Industry. It's a typical Malaysian company, one of many small makers of the cast-aluminum bodies for hard-disk drives used in just about every name-brand machine on the market. But that's precisely the problem: it's a typical Malaysian company.

About 60 percent of Local Technic's 160 employees are from outside Malaysia—and a company executive says he pities those guest workers. "They have been fooled hook, line and sinker," he says, asking not to be named because others in the business wouldn't like his talking to the press. "They have been taken for a ride." It's not Local Technic's fault, he insists: sleazy labor brokers outside the country tricked the workers into paying huge placement fees for jobs that yield a net income close to zero. "They say they were promised 3,000 ringgits [$950] a month," the manager says. "How can we pay that? If we did, we would be bankrupt in no time."

So why don't those foreign employees just quit? Because they can't, even after they find out they've been cheated. Malaysian law requires guest workers to sign multiple-year contracts and surrender their passports to their employers. Those who run away but stay in Malaysia are automatically classed as illegal aliens, subject to arrest, imprisonment and sometimes caning before being expelled from the country. "Passport, company take," says a Bangladeshi who has worked at Local Technic. (Like other workers in this story he fears possible reprisals if he is named.) "They say, 'You come to this company, must work for this company, and cannot work other place.' They say, 'If you work [for] someone else, the police will catch you'." He paid a broker in Bangladesh $3,600 to get him a job at Local Technic. When he arrived, he says, he learned he was making $114 a month after deductions for room, board and taxes. The math is simple: minus the broker's fee, his net monthly pay is $14. If he never spends a penny on himself, three years of labor will earn him a grand total of $504.

This is a new chapter in the globalization story: a growing migratory work force trapped in conditions that verge on slavery. When Nike came under intensive media pressure in the 1990s for contracting with sweatshops in the developing world, those shops were typically subcontracted factories that used local labor. Now, as labor demands a bigger share of the profits in nations that are beyond the early stages of development, like Malaysia or Taiwan, cheaper labor is increasingly shipped in from poorer nations, like the Philippines and Cambodia. Often the conditions these migrants work in make a sweatshop look relatively benign by comparison. Lured from their homes by labor brokers making false promises of high wages, the trafficked workers often find themselves in a land where they don't speak the language, are saddled with impossible debts and are deprived of the passport they need to get home. "The old way of slavery was that the boss really owned you," says Rene Ofrenco, director of the Center for Labor Justice at the University of the Philippines in Manila. "But now legal recruiters and employers work in tandem to deceive workers who, vulnerable and isolated in a strange culture, are forced to accept harsh terms. It is in that context that you have endemic forced labor today."

The rise of forced migrant labor is so newly recognized that it is hard to trace the scope and roots of the trend. The most authoritative study comes from the United Nations' International Labor Organization, which first tried to gauge the scope of the problem just three years ago. Its 2005 report estimated that there are now 12.3 million people trapped in forced labor—defined as jobs that trap workers using mental pressure, debt bondage, deceit, physical duress or threats of violence, arrest, imprisonment or deportation.

Other estimates place the number as high as 27 million and as low as 4 million. While no one knows exactly how many of those forced laborers have been lured across borders, the ILO identifies trafficking as one of the "new forms" of forced labor that is intensifying in an increasingly competitive global market. "We seem still to see only the tip of a disturbing iceberg," warns the ILO. The U.S. State Department's 2007 Trafficking in Persons Report estimates 800,000 people are trafficked worldwide each year. The risks of their voyages are constant: last week, in the latest incident, 54 Burmese suffocated in a cargo container en route to the Thai resort of Phuket, the apparent victims of people smugglers.