THE TRAFFICKER NEXT DOOR

A study of peonage, debt bondage, indenture, and other forms of forced labor.

University of Southern California sociologist Parreñas draws on two decades of research on domestic workers from the Philippines to examine de facto—and sometimes actual—enslavement. She opens with the case of British track star and Olympian Mohamed Farah, who, born in Somalia, “was trafficked to the United Kingdom from Djibouti and subjected to domestic servitude.” As is often the case, the woman who brought him into her household “likely saw herself as Farah’s savior, freeing him from a life of destitution in Africa.” So it is with an American expatriate in Dubai who, although wealthy, pays her domestic worker $400 a month but demands that she work 12 hours a day, six days of the week, netting her a “measly hourly rate of less than $1.40.” That worker wants to find a higher-paying job but cannot do so without her present employer’s permission—just one of many ways in which a substantial number of the world’s 67 million domestic workers are maltreated. Some of the stories Parreñas delivers are shocking, including the case of a Filipina who was enslaved without pay in New Jersey for 56 years. Such anecdotes lend some flair to what is otherwise a rather dry recitation of facts and a tendency to make the same point several times in different words, as when that savior complex is restated so: “Most domestic employers who engage in forced labor or trafficking truly believe that their horrible treatment of domestic workers represents a better option than whatever these workers had experienced prior to their employment.” Still, Parreñas’s conclusion merits consideration, calling less for legal reform than for employers to simply do the right thing: “Being an anti-­exploiter ultimately means having the moral wherewithal to bring dignity to the home as a workplace.”

Repetitive and often arid, but a strong indictment of modern enslavement.