Modern Slavery Comes to Kansas

Workers who were exploited abroad tend to be exploited here.

• By THOMAS FRANK

Prairie Village, Kan.

Back in grade school our teachers would take us to the statehouse in Topeka, Kan., and maneuver us in front of John Steuart Curry's terrifying mural of John Brown, trying to make abolitionism seem fresh and vivid. But we were children of the 1970s and knew that slavery was a brutish subject from long ago. This was the modern world. If we thought about such things at all, we understood that the concerns of our time were matters like inflation and the Problem of Conformity.

Over the intervening years, however, bonded labor has made a comeback, spotted by journalists in places like Saipan. And now it has apparently come all the way home, from the exotic periphery to the beige office building you pass every day in your air-conditioned sedan.

On May 27, a federal grand jury indictment was unsealed accusing a group of 12 people, mainly Uzbekistanis along with a company called Giant Labor Solutions, of running a labor trafficking ring in Kansas City, Mo., and its suburbs. If the indictment is to be believed, the scam involved the same sort of debt-bondage tricks that have pushed workers elsewhere into servitude for years.

The way it allegedly worked was this: The Kansas City ring recruited hundreds of workers from Jamaica, the Philippines, and the Dominican Republic with promises of visas through the federal H-2B seasonal worker program. To get the process started, however, the indictment says that workers had to pay the accused racketeers hefty fees.

Once in America, the workers found themselves at the mercy of the traffickers, who allegedly kept "them as modern-day slaves under threat of deportation," in the words of James Gibbons of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The recruiters apparently took care to keep the workers in debt, charging them fees for uniforms, for transportation, and for rent in overcrowded apartments. Paychecks would frequently show "negative earnings," in the words of the indictment. And if the workers refused to go along with the scheme, the traffickers held the ultimate trump card, the indictment claims: They "threatened to cancel the immigration status" of the workers, rendering them instantly illegal.

So the workers allegedly had no choice but to do as they were bid, cleaning up rooms at some of the best-known hotels in Kansas City and elsewhere -- including Branson, Mo., that symbolic capital of red-state culture.

This is where our story takes a turn from the grotesque and the sordid to the uncomfortably familiar. I have stayed in some of the very hotels that were allegedly cleaned by the victims' barely compensated toil. The office of the main labor leasing firm accused in the indictment of racketeering and visa fraud, Giant Labor Solutions, is located only five or six blocks away from my father's office on a street I have probably driven on hundreds of times in my life.

The Web site of Giant Labor Solutions, still accessible as of yesterday, dazzles with its ordinariness, its stock photos of perky businesspeople and its sultry soundtrack. "Let us worry about your labor needs so you may focus on your business!" it crows. This homage to entrepreneurial zeal is followed by a guarantee that your labor troubles are over, that a Giant Labor work force is a work force that will remain servile and smiling: "Our clients receive happy appreciative employees that will thank you for allowing them the opportunity to work for you."

The days of appreciative servitude are over now, however, and a spokesman for the city's hoteliers told the Kansas City Star that they had nothing to do with the labor recruiter's alleged distasteful practices.

But I suspect this problem won't be brushed off so easily. Hotel chains may denounce their former labor recruiter, but the Web site of the hotel industry's trade association still bellows its support for the federal H-2B visa program that may have made it all possible.

However, according to Ana Avendano, the director of the Immigrant Worker Program at the AFL-CIO, the federal visa program builds worker powerlessness into the equation. When workers sign up with labor recruiters overseas, she told me, they often "have to leave a deed to their house or some other collateral to ensure they don't leave the program." Once here in America, of course, they can't quit, or else they lose their visa status.

It's a recipe for indenture even without the old-school flourishes allegedly added by the Kansas City recruiters. As I was told by the author John Bowe, an authority on modern slave systems, if you import workers without rights equal to ours "of course they're going to get exploited."

What I keep wondering is why we have such a program. Unemployment is over 9% and climbing. Why make it worse?

The answer comes in another choice phrase from the Web site of the accused: Bring on Giant Labor and "your recruiting, hiring and payroll expenses will drastically drop."

It's a "labor solution," all right. It's "a win-win situation," even. For everyone but the workers.