In the past month, the State of New York has introduced 11 new Human Trafficking Intervention Courts (including Buffalo and Rochester, near where I live in upstate NY). According to the New York Times, the new courts are modeled after three pilot projects that had been established earlier in New York City, and the “initiative is believed to be the first of its kind in the nation.”

The NY law resembles the federal U.S. law in targeting force, fraud and coercion (what the national law dubs “severe forms” of trafficking). Included in its list of punishable offenses is withholding of a passport or other identity document.

The initiative follows criticism of the weak implementation of NY’s 2007 antitrafficking law. As of 2009, there had been one conviction. This seems to be reflected in anti-trafficking more generally: as of 2009 there had been 196 cases under the federal law, by contrast with the  estimate of 14,000+ trafficked persons annually into the US given by the State Department.

Anti-trafficking advocates argue that low conviction rates reflect a lack of training and understanding among conventional police forces, perhaps coupled with chauvinistic prejudice. Critics suggest that the mismatch may have more to do with the flawed and overblown data supporting the annual estimates. (The “Data Matters” section of this website contains some further discussion.)

The law, which focuses on sex trafficking (labor trafficking is also included albeit as a lesser offense), provides those charged with prostitution with a way out of direct criminal prosecution — the law reframes who is a victim versus a perpetrator – although, since prosecutions often seek testimony from trafficking victims, involvement with the criminal justice system may continue in some form. Questions around implementation will include:  what proportion of prosecutions will look at labor trafficking rather than sex trafficking? how well will victims fare following identification by the criminal justice system? what proportion of resources will be spent on victim assistance versus criminal prosecution?

This Article seeks to prioritize the civil workplace rights of undocumented immigrants over the goals of immigration enforcement by placing primacy on the role of the immigrant undocumented worker as private attorney general. In developing this concept, this Article draws from the legal framework addressing human trafficking. In theory, undocumented workers victimized by exploitive employment practices may act as private attorneys general in the enforcement of workplace harms and may sue their employers under many of the same civil rights laws that protect citizen workers. Regardless of whether workers are foreign-born, the substantive guarantees of our civil rights laws protect all workers against exploitation. The Thirteenth Amendment guarantees freedom from slavery and involuntary servitude, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment provides all individuals with equal protection of the laws, and various civil rights statutes, most prominently the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibit discrimination in a variety of settings. In practice, however, the goals of immigration enforcement take precedence over the individual rights of undocumented workers. These workers are often deported and deprived of access to civil courts. As a result, workplace violations are not prosecuted and basic workplace protections are undermined. Consequently, both the workers and the nation suffer deterioration in civil rights. In the human trafficking context, undocumented workers forced to labor in exploitive conditions may sue their traffickers and may also obtain immigration status pursuant to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, thereby ameliorating the divergent goals of immigration enforcement and civil rights laws that adversely impact other undocumented workers. This Article examines the ways in which the trafficked plaintiff fulfills the role of private attorney general by not only obtaining individual relief, but by also vindicating important societal interests in the advancement of constitutional and civil rights. A comparative analysis of litigation in the undocumented worker context demonstrates similar individual and societal benefits. This analysis supports an additional policy objective: The trafficked worker as private attorney general represents a model of civil rights enforcement. If replicated by other undocumented victims of workplace abuse, this model would allow these victims, unimpeded by restrictive immigration laws, to advance civil rights imperatives. Read the full PDF at: 01-Trafficked_Worker_as_Private_Attorney_General-_A_Model_for_Undocumented_Workers.pdf.Pdf

This Article offers a new analytical framework for understanding the distributive role of legal regulation in the interaction of “home ” and “work. ” Using this framework, the Article maps the “double exceptionalism ” of the family in U.S. federal employment law. It suggests that employment law treats familial care responsibilities as exceptional in two different ways: first, through family leave benefits that affect the primary labor market, labeled here “affirmative exceptionalism”; and, second, through the exclusion of inhome care workers from protective employment legislation in the secondary labor market, labeled here “negative exceptionalism. ” This double exceptionalism of the family in employment law serves as a basis for an assessment of the distributive outcomes of employment law across class and gender lines. The Article shows that the combined study of affirmative and negative exceptionalism—of how employment law affects the availability of labor, as well as the working conditions, of both care workers and their employers—is crucial to a holistic understanding of the formative and distributive effects of employment law on markets of care. A central implication is that employment law should be understood as an accessible, if obdurate, legal tool which holds the potential for achieving distributional shifts from current social and political divisions of power among members of households and classes alike.

Between Home and Work

Current legal responses to the problem of human trafficking often reflect a deep reluctance to address the socioeconomic root causes of the problem. Because they approach trafficking as an act (or series of acts) of violence, most responses focus predominantly on prosecuting traffickers, and to a lesser extent, protecting trafficked persons. While such approaches might account for the consequences of trafficking, they tend to overlook the broader socioeconomic reality that drives trafficking in human beings. Against this backdrop, this article seeks to reframe trafficking as a migratory response to current globalizing socioeconomic trends. It argues that, to be effective, counter-trafficking strategies must target the underlying conditions that impel people to accept dangerous labor migration assignments. The article recommends that existing counter-trafficking strategies be assessed with a view to assessing their potential for long-term effectiveness. It also advocates strategic use of the nondiscrimination principle to promote basic economic, social, and cultural rights, the deprivation of which has sustained the trafficking phenomenon.

Beyond a Snapshot: Human Trafficking and the Politics of Labor Migration in a Globalized Economy

The current wave of international migration is larger than ever before. It is also “feminized” both in that approximately half of the world‟s migrants are now women and in that the work that many of them engage in is traditional “women‟s work” such as cleaning; taking care of children, the elderly, and the disabled; and sex work. The workers migrate to the “receiving” countries through formal (legal) as well as informal (illegal) routes, some temporarily and others with the hope of settling permanently. While these jobs do not necessarily have to be exploitative, unskilled migrant workers tend to be employed in low-wage secondary market jobs that are characterized by weak legal regulation and/or problems of enforcement, which often lead to high degrees of vulnerability and exploitation. Read the article here: shamir whats the border 2011 FINAL