c. 2007 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ Each Labor Day, Americans celebrate workers, but one aspect of today’s workplace is a source of shame: human trafficking. In the United States today, we are seeing the growth of a labor market of exploited people _ mostly women _ who are in a bondage as horrific as slavery two centuries before.

Catholic social teaching impels us to speak out and act against this social blight. There has been some progress. In the past 21 months, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has facilitated services for 547 foreign nationals from 59 countries who are victims of human trafficking here in the United States. Additionally, 83 persons, mostly spouses or children of the victims, have also been served.

The numbers are enlightening. Of the 630 people assisted, 73 percent are female; 50 percent are victims of labor; 27 percent are victims of sexual exploitation; and 10 percent as victims of both kinds of human trafficking.

Human trafficking is not just about sexual exploitation. And forced labor is not just a problem in Third World countries. Helping these people is but a start to stemming a problem that is a disgrace in the Land of the Free.

Who are these people? Fundamentally, they are men and women who have entered the United States by virtue of force, fraud or coercion. Seduced or misled by false promises, or abducted, they are then detained by psychological or physical force.

According to the U.S. government, to be a victim of human trafficking, one must experience force, fraud or coercion in one of two activities: sexual exploitation for commercial purposes, or labor of some sort. This labor can occur in the form of debt bondage, peonage, or any work with slavelike conditions. The victims we have served have been forced to work in a wide range of venues including brothels, factories, farms and private homes.

People fall victim to trafficking for a number of reasons. For some, it is the absence of possibility and the basic demands of life in their home countries. Limits around legal migration in countries where they seek a better life also make victims vulnerable. People in desperate straits will risk the unknown, especially if it promises honest work with money they can share with families back home.

Often coerced with threats to their loved ones, these workers are not only victims of poor labor practice, but also captives. Preying on the susceptibilities of desperate people, greedy employers in the United States exploit laborers in hostile and even brutal ways. These victims cannot move on to something else without great peril; human trafficking is lucrative, and the victims are the operative commodity. Human traffickers, like traffickers of drugs and arms, protect their product. In this case, the product is reusable. People can be _ and often are _ sold over and over again.

Ironically, of all the benefits available to victims of human trafficking when they are freed from bondage, the one they universally cherish is the right to work in the kind of jobs celebrated by Labor Day.

For most of us, work is a necessity. For many, it is also a creative expression of who we are; it gives shape and direction to what we believe. It empowers us and, at best, it also empowers others. For others, work is clearly a burden, but one we freely engage in for the sake of greater necessities.

Whatever work is for us, we choose it within the confines of possibility and the constraints of reality. While our own limitations may keep us in places we do not want to be, we have choices _ victims of human trafficking do not. For them, every day is filled with hope for the kind of Labor Day Americans celebrate the first Monday of September every year.

(Sister Mary Ellen Dougherty is coordinator of education and outreach in the U.S. Bishops’ Migration and Refugees Services Office for Anti-Human Trafficking.)

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