John Bowe
Mother Jones

Citation
A result of a two-year investigation, John Bowe's "Bound for America" exposed practices that amounted to human trafficking by a U.S. firm that recruited Thai farmers for agricultural jobs in the United States and charged them $10,000 to $20,000 apiece --plus interest--for job placement. After arriving here, the farmers worked only sporadically and didn't earn enough to even cover their loan payments. Five months after the publication of Bowe's story, which was supported by The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, a federal grand jury indicted company officials for engaging in "a conspiracy to commit forced labor." The offices of the company, Global Horizons, are now closed.

Excerpt
Bound for America
May/June 2010

In the spring of 2004, Nikhom Intajak, a 35-year-old rice farmer in Thailand's Lampang province, met a labor recruiter who made him an attractive offer: a contract to do farm labor in the United States. He'd work for three years and earn the minimum wage of $7 to $10 an hour, depending on where he was deployed; best of all, he'd be a legal temporary worker, protected by American laws.

Intajak, who weighs 139 pounds and stands 5 feet 4 inches tall in a baseball cap, had worked overseas before, spending a total of about seven years in chemicals, electronics, and luggage plants in Taiwan. The money he'd sent home helped build a new house and pay school fees for two daughters. For each of his stints abroad, Intajak had paid a recruiting fee somewhat higher than the Thai legal maximum (currently about $2,000), and so he wasn't surprised when the new recruiter, Pochanee Sinchai, asked for one as well. He was, however, taken aback by the size of her demand: The job in America would cost him $11,700 up front.

Intajak's home, a hamlet called Banh Santicome, is poor, but not destitute. The climate is suitable for growing rice and produce, and earning opportunities range from farming garlic to foraging for mushrooms, bamboo, and wood. A formal job, if one can be found, might pay $2,000 a year. Three years of work in America at $7 an hour would come out to about $50,000. If one-fifth of that went to Sinchai, Intajak figured, then so be it. He asked his mother to put up her new house as collateral to borrow the money from a bank at 15 percent interest. Then he traveled to the Bangkok office of the recruiting firm that hired Sinchai, AACO International Recruitment, where he signed a number of documents, including several written in English, and also some blank pieces of paper.

Intajak (who asked me not to use his real name for fear of retribution) landed in Seattle on the Fourth of July. He was met by an employee of Global Horizons, the American company for which Sinchai and AACO had recruited him. According to Intajak, the man drove him and a vanload of new arrivals from Thailand to an isolated Yakima Valley apple grower named Green Acre Farms, where he confiscated their passports. Global Horizons agents stayed in the barracks and came to work in the orchards, Intajak says, to make sure the Thais didn't run away.

Intajak worked there for about three months. The pay, $8.53 per hour, was reasonable enough, he told me, but the work was so unsteady that he earned far less than he had been promised. Some days there might be eight hours of work, other days four - or none. After witnessing 30 or so coworkers get sent home after only a few months' work, Intajak began to realize that the contract he had signed back in Bangkok guaranteed nothing like three years of steady employment. Rather, he was eligible to work as many hours as Global saw fit to give him, for up to three years.as long as Global chose to renew his visa. If it didn't, if the work ran out, or if he did anything to displease his bosses, he'd have no way to pay off the $11,700 he'd borrowed. Ever.




Biography
John Bowe, 46, is the author of several books, including Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy. He has contributed to The New Yorker, GQ, The American Prospect, Mother Jones, PRI's This American Life, and is currently a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. His other books include US: Americans Talk About Love, as editor, and Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs, as co-editor. He was also a co-screenwriter of the film Basquiat. His journalism has garnered several awards, including the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, the Sydney Hillman Award, the Richard J. Margolis Award, and the Harry Chapin Media Award for coverage of hunger and poverty-related issues. He lives in Manhattan.