Report: 10,000 People in U.S. Work in Forced Labor

[Stone_Spirits]

Report: 10,000 People in U.S. Work in Forced Labor

The Associated Press

Saturday 25 September 2004

SAN FRANCISCO - At any given time, some 10,000 people in the United States are forced to work against their will under threat of violence, a new report found.

The report, "Hidden Slaves: Forced Labor in the United States," released Thursday by the Human Rights Center at University of California, Berkeley, and a Washington, DC-based nonprofit group called Free the Slaves, was based on interviews with social service providers, government officials, and labor advocates, as well as newspapers stories published between 1998-2003 that described incidents of forced labor.

One of eight cases explored in the report concerned Lakireddy Bali Reddy, the Berkeley landlord and restaurateur sentenced to more than eight years in federal prison in 2001 for smuggling teenage girls from India for sex and cheap labor.

Reddy came under investigation in 1999 after a 17-year old girl died of carbon monoxide poisoning in a Berkeley apartment he owned.

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/092704Z.shtml