Trafficking of Thai farm workers in the United States results in indictment of California job recruiter

14 September 2010

In what has been deemed as the largest incident of human trafficking in the United States to culminate in federal charges, six job recruiters were recently accused of running an operation that lured at least 400Thai workers to the United States to work in poor, substandard conditions. Workers were told they would receive highly paid farm work positions, with good accommodation options and other benefits.

In the indictment, six people were officially charged with conspiracy to commit the act of human trafficking. Global Horizons President and CEO Mordechai Orian, 45, is accused of spearheading this conspiracy. Two other individuals that were charged in the case are job recruiters based in Thailand.

The Thai workers were recruited to work on different farms on the Hawaiian Islands and the mainland.  Once they arrived in the United States, their passports were more often than not taken from them and withheld for the duration of their stay, throwing the workers into a vulnerable position where they had little choice but to do the work asked of them. Many of the workers involved ended up working in very poor conditions, often going without the promised salary or forced to work without pay, and lived in bleak conditions.  In one case, several Thai workers were held at a pineapple farm in Maui and told that they must pay a fee of nearly $4,000 dollars each in order to retain their job position, or be sent back to Thailand with outstanding debts.

The companies involved in the conspiracy charged high fees for their job placement services, sometimes reaching as high as $9,000 to $21,000 USD. This in turn led the workers deeper into debt.  The workers were also often told that the company was in the process of applying for a true work visa for them that would be viable for three years, as stated in their recruitment agreement, but in reality the company often only applied for a temporary visa that expired a few weeks after approval.  The workers were initially brought over to the United States under the federal H2-A visa program, which allows foreign workers be legally hired by U.S. farms. This type of visa is different from numerous other types of US visas for Thais  [http://www.thailand-lawyer.com/us_visa.html] , that would enable a Thai citizen to legally reside in the United States for a certain period of time.

The workers will have a chance to apply for temporary legal status if the FBI determines them to be true victims of human trafficking. This special type of visa would allow them to remain in the United States for up to four years, and possibly bring family members from Thailand to the United States. 

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Thai Court Dismisses Map Ta Phut Industrial Estate Pollution Case

4 September 2010

In a Thai Central Administrative Court ruling on September 2nd, seventy four projects at the Map Ta Phut industrial estate, 115 miles (185 kilometers) southeast of Bangkok, were allowed to resume operation.

An alliance of local environmental groups and residents successfully obtained an injunction on the projects in September 2009, after suing the government for putting the public at health risk and breaching the Thai constitution when it granted licenses to the companies. The groups claimed that state agencies illegally issued industrial permits to the companies, as Thailand’s charter asserts that projects deemed harmful to public or environmental health must be considered by a public hearing before being approved. The local villagers and environmental groups accused the companies of releasing toxins into the air and water that have caused record cancer rates and respiratory diseases in the area.

The court ruling also states that the projects will now be subject to a newly approved list of eleven types of industrial activities that have been deemed harmful to the environment and local communities. These activities include mining, power plants, petrochemicals, dams and airport runways. Only two of the original seventy six companies are still under the injunction, are still at risk of having their licenses revoked. The activities of these two companies fall under the new list of harmful activities.

The case was highly publicized and attracted substantial attention from Thai and foreign investors, as it was viewed as a large obstruction to investment and effectively froze billions of dollars of investment into Thailand.

The Map Ta Phut industrial estate is home to several large petrochemical companies, including several of Thailand’s largest companies, and provides jobs for about 100,000 employees. Some environmental activists state that although in reality the ruling will not cause much of a change for local communities, it does set a precedent for other communities to protect themselves for similar cases in the future.

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