FARM SLAVES,
`Frontline' reveals `Trafficked' teens slaving on farms
Tuesday's “Frontline” makes a great case for the argument that slavery did not end with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865.
Those who wish to subjugate others for personal gain just got smarter about it.
And we as a nation have closed our eyes to it.
That's one takeaway from “Trafficked in America” (Tuesday at 10 p.m. on PBS), a disturbing hour from the Emmy Award-winning investigative news show. It tracks how teenagers smuggled in from Latin America were forced to work in sweatshop conditions.
As producers Daffodil Altan and Andres Cediel (“Rape in the Fields”) document, the young workers at Trillium Farms in Ohio, one of the nation's largest egg producers, turning out 10 million eggs a day, found the American dream to be a nightmare.
At one facility, captured on a bit of harrowing hidden camera footage, conditions were hellish, there were narrow halls barely big enough for a person, with rows atop rows of caged, squawking hens.
“The manure falls in your eyes,” one worker says.
Shifts started at 6 a.m. and, if workers were lucky, ended at 5 p.m. The plant temperature was over 90
degrees. The stench was so bad, many had to bolt to an exit to hurl.
Workers' quarters were about as vile as the living conditions for the hens. They were packed into trailers with no heat, no air conditioners and no running water. Their earnings were confiscated. If they tried to leave, they were threatened and abused.
Fearing for their safety and for their families, most of the teen workers here refused to be interviewed on camera.
In Guatemala, an impoverished family talks about the beloved son they haven't seen in years. He was 14 in 2014 when they heard about a neighbor who was smuggling others into America for good jobs. The price? Fifteen thousand dollars — an impossible sum. So the smuggler took the family's land deed as collateral and told the kid he could work off the debt — trapping him and the entire family in a cycle of debt and despair.
Most of the youths were detained by border patrol when they crossed over. They would need sponsors to continue on as workers. And here's where things got worse for the boys.
The Department of Health and Human Services has in recent years relaxed its vetting of sponsors, most of whom were not fingerprinted or checked for criminal records, we are told. The government, in effect, washed its hands of more than 180,000 unaccompanied minors, and no one has any idea what happened to them or what conditions they are working under.
“I don't care what you think about immigration policy, it's wrong.” says U.S. Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio.
John Glessner, the former CEO of Ohio Fresh Eggs, is asked about the use of these teen workers. It came down to using subcontractors who delivered labor at the cheapest price.
“Will Americans do this work?” he is asked.
Glessner seems genuinely stumped, acknowledging that even with a wage increase, “Boy, I don't think so.”
In case anyone is wondering, Trillium Farms is now hiring.
The business is also working with an anti-trafficking organization.
That should make a difference. At one company.