US farming profits from 'modern-day slavery': The Guardian

LONDON - Findings from a multi-year investigation have exposed a longstanding issue of "modern-day slavery" in the US agricultural industry as people were smuggled from Central American countries to the United States and imprisoned as contracted farmworkers, The Guardian has reported.

The investigation, which was launched into a massive human smuggling and labor trafficking operation based in southern Georgia that extended to Florida and Texas, has led to the indictment of two dozen defendants on federal conspiracy charges in October, the report said.

At least two workers died as a result of the living and working conditions and another was repeatedly raped, it said, citing the indictment.

"Farmworkers in the US, especially immigrant workers ... are regularly subjected to abuses ranging from high occurrences of sexual assault and harassment, wage theft and safety issues including injuries, fatalities on the job, and exposure to hazardous chemicals," the report said.

They have few protections as they are excluded from the National Labor Relations Act passed in 1935, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, it noted.

Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, a US thinktank, was quoted as saying that a severe lack of labor law enforcement in the US agricultural industry was a driving factor in widespread abuses of workers.