[AMERICA 123]

Originally Posted by joemac

Well when your literally imprisoned in what seems can be a life of death scenario, one would do a fantastic job of bolting the thing together.

Yes certainly ' highly' motivated, but sometimes...... - depends if they're given proper tools, lighting, food, water, shelter and 'rest'.

Usually they aren't.

Here's one that ties everything together on this thread.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...slavery21.html

Sunday, January 21, 2007 - Page updated at 12:00 AM
Permission to reprint or copy this article or photo, other than personal use, must be obtained from The Seattle Times. Call 206-464-3113 or e-mail resale@seattletimes.com with your request.
CLAUDIO PEREZ / BLOOMBERG NEWS
A policeman, armed with a submachine gun, stands watch over a group of workers at the camp.

CLAUDIO PEREZ / BLOOMBERG NEWS
Thick, gray smoke engulfs a man in a charcoal camp in Tucurui, Brazil. Government inspectors and police discovered 29 slaves at this camp last fall that supplied charcoal used to make pig iron exported to the United States to make steel.

BLOOMBERG NEWS
A man rests against a tin-roofed shack where slaves sleep in unventilated rooms without running water or bathrooms at the Transcameta camp near the city of Tucurui in the Brazilian Amazon.

Enslaved workers make charcoal used to make basic steel ingredient

By Michael Smith (and David Voreacos
Bloomberg News

Labor inspector Benedito Silva Filho and six armed police officers move cautiously through the gray smoke that hugs the ground in the Carvoaria Transcameta work camp near Tucurui in the Brazilian Amazon. Enveloped in the haze is a solitary man, dressed in soiled red shorts and worn-out plastic sandals.
Alexandre Pereira dos Reis stops shoveling charcoal from a kiln after working eight hours and, wheezing, walks slowly toward the inspectors. The laborer says malaria, a chronic cough and the 95-degree heat have gotten the best of him.
"This hits you hard," says dos Reis, 32. "I would leave if I could, but I need the work."

Many laborers go months without pay or see their wages whittled to nothing because of expenses such as tools, boots and gloves. Lack of money, an impenetrable jungle and a long distance to get home make it impossible for the slaves to leave.

Dos Reis toils six days a week and can't afford to leave; he doesn't have enough money to get back to his home in Teresina, 500 miles away in northeastern Brazil.

He lives next to the brick kilns at Transcameta in a shack with no ventilation, running water or electricity.
The charcoal he and the other laborers produce by burning scraps of hardwood will be trucked south to a blast furnace six hours away. It will be used to make pig iron, a basic ingredient of steel.

"This is slavery," Silva says. His eyes tear from the acrid smoke.
Silva has descended unannounced in September on this charcoal-making camp — one of about 1,000 in the Amazon — to investigate reports that it uses unpaid labor.
The policemen who flank him wield automatic weapons, ready to fend off the deadly violence that Silva says is part of his job.

They determine all 29 workers are slaves who haven't been paid in months.

More than a century after Brazil became the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888, nearly 1 million men and women work for little or no wages as forced laborers in Latin America, according to the Geneva-based International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency that tries to improve working conditions.
Recruiters dispatched by slave-camp owners promise steady paying jobs, says Marcelo Campos, who runs the Brazilian labor ministry's Special Mobile Enforcement Group.

Once at the Amazon camps, some workers are forced — at times at gunpoint — to work off debts to their bosses for food and clothing bought at company stores.

- and he gets exhausted early in the day and has to stop work. Twenty feet away, a man walks by a patch of ground covered with human excrement that serves as a camp bathroom.

Brazilian pig iron is part of almost any product in the U.S. that uses steel, says Hogan, who's been trading scrap metal and pig iron for 30 years.
"It could be in your car, your refrigerator," he says. "It could be in beams for the roadway, any kind of construction, any kind of oil industry stuff. Everything."

Toyota didn't join Ford, DaimlerChrysler, General Motors and Honda on Dec. 4 <2006> when they announced plans to work together to train suppliers to avoid buying materials made by slaves.

But a Toyota spokesman said it did change its decision Dec. 21 and joined the anti-slavery effort.

- after the following was discovered and leaked.....

U.S. Customs records show Toyota's trading company, Toyota Tsusho's U.S. unit, bought at least seven shipments of pig iron from Usina Siderurgica de Maraba, or Usimar, in 2006.

Usimar purchased charcoal from a camp where Brazilian inspectors in May found 22 people, including three children, who weren't being paid for their work.

They were living in squalid shacks without electricity and plumbing, and drinking unsanitary water, the inspectors reported.

Usimar, a privately held company, has dropped out of a Brazilian association of pig-iron producers that's sponsoring programs to combat slavery in charcoal camps, says Marta de Lima Cavalcanti, a spokeswoman for the industry group.

Copyright © The Seattle Times Company

Naaaaahhhhh, these guys don't need a union.