To this end, the author provides three sharply written case studies of what he calls "labor slavery."
In one case, a manufacturer of oil tanks imported 53 welders from India to Oklahoma, then asked them to surrender their documents and stay in dormitories with steel doors that made their quarters seem like jails. Facing bad publicity and a lawsuit, the manufacturer closed his business, but he never believed he was doing anything wrong, writes Bowe, never understood why his employees felt intimidated and terrorized.
An even more alarming case study takes place in South Florida - "ground zero for modern slavery" in the nation - where a ruthless labor contractor named Ramos kept his Mexican and Central American tomato pickers in bondage at an isolated camp. A federal court convicted Ramos and his brothers of conspiring to hold people in involuntary servitude, and on various other charges.
This was one of six successful federal cases prosecuted in South Florida, none of which involved charges against corporate executives of food chains because purveyors like Taco Bell are exempt from prosecution under federal anti-slavery laws, even if they benefit from coerced labor.
Bowe's final case concerns the fate of Asians working in the sex trade and the garment industry of Saipan, in Micronesia. The island became a US commonwealth in 1978, and in the 1990s a haven for garment production where apparel giants like Gap and Ralph Lauren could import clothes made for $3 an hour without paying tariff duties.
Bowe spent two years on Saipan talking to native islanders as well as Asian factory workers and prostitutes. He writes evocatively about the awesome beauty of the island and the "depressing tawdriness of everything human beings have done to it." People on Saipan seemed universally "doleful." This is what Bowe calls the "dark side" of globalization - a condition ignored by prophets of the new global age of market freedom.
