When Melissa Hope Ditmore co-founded the Urban Justice Center Sex Worker Project in 2001, she initially focused on the intersection between human trafficking and the sex trades. It did not take her long to realize that trafficking extends to workers in manufacturing, farm work, door-to-door sales, prisons, and in-home domestic labor. Her first book, Unbroken Chains: The Hidden Role of Human Trafficking in the American Economy—explores this “tidal wave” of labor exploitation.
Ditmore defines trafficking as a foundational injustice— woven into the social, economic, and political development of the United States. “Capitalism is inextricably linked to the exploitation of forced or unpaid labor in every economic sector,” she writes.
So why, when we imagine victims of human trafficking, do we solely envision young women taken against their will and forced into sexual servitude?
“Trafficking into agricultural, industry, and domestic work has always received scant attention compared with trafficking into sex work, despite its enormous scale and impact on the economy,” Ditmore explains.
Penguin Random House
Unbroken Chains: The Hidden Role of Human Trafficking in the American Economy, Melissa Hope Ditmore, Beacon Press, $27.95, 256 pages. Release date: May 9, 2023.
In fact, when human trafficking is presented as confined to sex work, it is seen as separate from the United States’ economy. Call it a masterful diversion, a bait-and-switch to turn attention from capitalist excess and blatant workplace abuse.
Ditmore highlights how women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ workers caught in trafficking schemes are often paid less than white men. At the same time, she focuses on the humanity of people who are trafficked—people who have fallen victim to coercion, deception, force, and fraud.
Despair, she adds, allows trafficking to persist, since those desperate to flee poverty, violence, and environmental calamity in their home countries make ready targets for exploiters. Nonetheless, the native-born are not immune to the allure of traffickers’ promises.
In a chapter titled “Young Americans on Traveling Sales Crews,” Ditmore describes roving bands of vendors who move from city to city selling cleaning supplies and magazine subscriptions. “They frequently go unpaid or are not paid in line with fair practices, and are often threatened or physically abused, and may be held in a kind of debt bondage in which they are unable to earn money no matter how much they work,” she writes. Some are school dropouts or runaways for whom assurances of travel, shelter, food, and a salary hold tremendous appeal.
The reality is that many “sales agents,” unprotected by fair labor laws, end up mired in debt, forced to buy necessities from overpriced “company stores” that deduct purchase fees from future earnings. The vicious cycle leaves victims with few options, something that will not change unless worker protections are extended to include them and employers are held to account by oversight agencies.
Farm laborers face similar challenges. Although groups like the United Farm Workers and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers have made headway in improving conditions for those who pick our crops, wages remain low and abuse remains endemic. And, since many farmworkers are undocumented, fear of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement allows bosses to dangle the threat of deportation over workers who demand better conditions.
Likewise, domestic laborers—a largely female immigrant workforce of nannies, cooks, house cleaners, and eldercare aides—who are routinely underpaid and exploited.
It should not be this way and the law should not allow it, but when the Fair Labor Standards Act was enacted in 1938, it exempted the aforementioned groups—door-to-door salespeople and farm workers, as well as in-home “babysitters,” elder care “companions,” and convicts serving prison time—from minimum wage and overtime protections. Although the act was meant to curtail workplace abuses and impose salary and overtime rules, these blind spots have left many vulnerable workers without needed safeguards.
So what to do? Ditmore believes it is essential for organizing to address workers’ human rights, whether they toil in fields or in hotel rooms. “The focus on sex obscures the historical roots of labor exploitation, promoting a corporate anti-labor agenda,” she writes. “To craft effective solutions, one key question to ask is: ‘What kind of help is truly helpful?’ The people who can best answer this are survivors; most people in trafficking situations rescue themselves.”
What they need, she continues, is practical support; affordable and available housing, healthcare, educational programs, living-wage jobs, and trauma-informed counseling. Protective legislation can also be useful, as long as it focuses on the actual needs of survivors.
The author offers one model in the work of Freedom Network USA, a coalition working to ensure that trafficking survivors have access to “justice, safety, and opportunity.” Like Ditmore, the group recommends a shift away from law enforcement, in favor of community organizing and social service support. “Saviors,” she concludes, “are not needed or wanted. Assistance, on the other hand, is welcome.”