Category — Labor Trafficking

On November 15, Polaris Project hosted the first ever National State Legislators Conference Call on Human Trafficking. More than 40 legislators from 26 states joined a conference call and webinar put together by Polaris Project to collaborate, share ideas, and advocate for anti-trafficking legislation. Each state has taken its own approach to combatting human trafficking and the purpose of the call was to give legislators an opportunity to learn more from each other on what has worked and the challenges others have confronted in successfully carrying anti-trafficking legislation.

Executive Director and CEO Bradley Myles provided an introductory statement on the need for strong local action against trafficking. Then, legislators that worked closely with Polaris Project offered their insight and guidance to veteran and freshmen legislators on how to pass anti-trafficking legislation. [Read more →]

Capitol Rotunda, Harrisburg

October 18, 2011 at 3:00 p.m.

30 victims, held in debt bondage. Sexual and physical violence used to force them to work long hours at very little or no pay. You may think that you would never come across this type of crime, but in Pennsylvania, these 30 labor trafficking victims were working in plain sight at stores like Walmart, Kmart, Safeway, and Target. These stores hired contractors to clean, and were unaware of the horrific conditions that their cleaners were working under. This is just one of many human trafficking situations that have emerged out of Pennsylvania in recent years, and a reason why PA Senator Daylin Leach yesterday hosted a press conference in the Harrisburg Capitol Rotunda calling for legislation that requires the posting of the National Human Trafficking Resource Center (NHTRC) hotline number.

[Read more →]

Part I of this two-part blog series discussed three websites that can help you be a socially responsible consumer. Here are three more sites that sell goods made by survivors of human trafficking or that use fashion as a way to educate the public about human trafficking. [Read more →]

As consumers we face countless choices for the goods and services we can buy. However, for socially conscious consumers who are aware of the frequent intersections between human trafficking and corporate supply chains, there is the added desire of purchasing goods that are socially responsible. But how do we really know how things are produced? [Read more →]

This year’s TIP Report includes country narratives on 184 countries, featuring seven new profiles on Aruba, Curacao, Marshall Islands, St. Lucia, Seychelles, Solomon Islands, and Tonga. One of the most notable components of the TIP Report is the tier placements, and of course everyone wants to know how their country measured up this year. The 2011 TIP Report boasts upgrades for 23 countries and demotions for 22 countries, a quasi-equilibrium in shifts. But what does this re-shuffling mean? [Read more →]

Early each morning two white vans pull up to an ordinary home on a dead-end street and after honking the horn a group of men and women, mostly Latinos or Asians, pile into the vehicles and are taken away, not returning until late that night or early the next morning. Although this behavior would seem suspicious if it occurred in your neighborhood, how many people would actually identify this as human trafficking? [Read more →]

In recent weeks, neighborhood watch groups have warned community members to be vigilant for higher incidents of burglary and fraud that occasionally coincide with the seasonal influx of magazine solicitors operating without permits from out of state. But what these watch groups fail to address are the dangers posed not just to consumers, but the solicitors or salespeople themselves and the potential for human trafficking in traveling sales crews. [Read more →]

We’re unleashing a new series on the North Star Blog: Tip Tuesday. Each Tuesday for the next few months, we will write about different types of human trafficking in the United States. We hope that you’ll tune in to learn the signs of these types of trafficking. [Read more →]

When I was in London last April, I walked into a local convenience store for a chocolate fix to help relieve some jet lag.  I browsed through options for chocolate, looking for bars that I wouldn’t necessarily find back home in the United States.  My scanning stopped when my eyes fixed on a Cadbury Dairy Milk bar that looked like this:

Here were my immediate thoughts:  Cadbury?  Fair trade?  When did this happen?  This is so exciting! Oh, but why don’t I see the little Fair Trade logo on the Cadbury eggs?

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Bradley Myles with activists and Bush administration officials at the TVPRA 2008 bill signing

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) was signed on October 28, 2000, making last Thursday its 10-year anniversary.  At the time, this law truly was ground-breaking legislation because it was the first comprehensive federal law that addressed human trafficking in the modern era. One of its most important contributions was the formulation of a victim-centered paradigm for addressing the crime and a three-pronged approach that included: [Read more →]