Not for Sale | David Batstone | Talks at Google

So my name is Daniel Conrad. For those that don't know me, I will get out of the way in a second, but it is my pleasure to introduce to you David Batstone. I met Dave in San Francisco a few months ago at a talk that he gave where he introduced some hundreds of us to what's going on in global slave trading and human trafficking. I'll let him introduce himself on the Not For Sale campaign and what his work is in that area. One of the other great things about Dave is that he speaks our language here at Google. He was founding editor of Business 2.0, the magazine. So he'll have a talk for us, which I think is something that we'll be able to understand. Also a professor at USF in San Francisco. So my pleasure to introduce Dave Batson.

Good. Hey, it's great to be here. And just to start us off, I want to give some images to give you a sense of what it means to be not for sale or to be for sale in the world today. It's. It's. I want to talk a little bit about the reality of slavery or human trafficking in the 21st century. And I have to first admit to you that no more than a year and a half ago, I had no clue that this was going on at such a massive layer in the world today. And also I'd like to begin by saying that my discovery of this came at the same time that personally I was exploring how could I use my interest in technology and investment after I left business 2.0, fortunately, Time Warner took that off our hands. I went into investment banking and worked in bringing technology companies from Europe into the US While this life as a technology and business investor was going on, I also had a parallel life working in human rights, mostly in Latin America. And I could talk about that a little bit later. But bringing together my social advocacy and with my interest in entrepreneurial activity and technology was always a very kind of rough and uneven path for me. And so the Not For Sale campaign brought that together in a very unique way as well. So I'd like to talk about the trafficking itself, because the way I discovered it was by being in my local restaurant, my own backyard here in the San Francisco Bay area. I would regularly go to a restaurant in Berkeley. I'd get my PhD in Berkeley. And I was. And I have a lot of friends in that area. And it never struck me as unusual that the young girls who were taking me to my table, who were taking my order or washing the dishes, might be anything than young members of a family who were connected to the restaurant. It was then with some surprise, that I read the San Francisco Chronicle, the front page that talked about this restaurant being the center of a trafficking ring that had been bringing as many as 500 young girls from India into the United States, of all things, under an HB1 visa program, using the fraud of that program. And they would then get to the U.S. their passports were taken from them, and they were forced to work either in the retail industry of hotels and restaurants, or commercial sex industry. And if they somehow tried to escape or go to the authorities, their owner said, we know where your families are back in India. We will make sure that they are taken care of. And also you will be thrown in jail here. You have no identity documents. And so these young girls, at 16, 17 years old, were being forced into a life of bondage. The way it was discovered was that this landowner or this owner of restaurants and apartments crammed as many as 20 girls into one apartment. There was a gas leak, and one of the young girls died, and another couple were critically injured. When the police came to say that, you know, we're here to rescue you, to get you out, they said, help us escape, help us escape. I said, yeah, that's why we're here. And they said, no, not from the gas, but from the owner. And so it came out that this was part of an international trafficking ring through a series of family and business connections stretching from the north of India into the United States. Now, I thought perhaps this was just a very strange, idiosyncratic, one off event. I did not imagine at that time that it was something larger than this one relationship. So I began to look deeper. And as I began to discover more of the trafficking rings that stretched across international borders from origin countries like Southeast Asia, India, Africa, Latin America, to destination countries like the United states, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, I began to discover this is a $32 billion industry. So I took some time off to go around the globe and figure out how people are being bought and sold in the year 2006, 2007. Who are the people being targeted? How do the traffickers get away with it? And who are they? How do they become so profitable? How are they able to cross borders? And where do these people end up? So I want to share a little bit of that journey and then look at what we can do about it. I decided first to go to India, and that's not it. This patient with me for a second. Okay, I'm going to jettison that for a second, all right? So I first went to India. And when I got to India, what I discovered when I was there was that I met a young girl by the name of Nagaraja. Nagaraja was 11 years old. And when Nagaraja came to meet with me, she said that all her memories, she had no memory outside of a life in a rice mill. She'd been working in there her entire life. And then she took me to meet her mother. Her mother was 23, 24 years old, and all of her memories go back to working in this rice mill. And then she took me to meet her mother, the grandmother, and she was about my age, middle 40s, and her whole life had been inside the same rice mill. And then she took me to meet her mother. All four generations of women who had spent their entire lives in one rice mill, taking rice from the field, processing it so that then it ends up into a shelf in a store that we would buy it from. The way that they all four had passed into a life of slavery was that the great grandmother's father had taken a loan of $10 during the time of drought, had no way to pay for the food for the family. So they went to a landowner and said, I will work this agricultural season for you for $10. When they gave him the $10, then at the end of the agricultural season, three or four months later, he came and said, I fulfilled my obligation. I've worked every day, long hours. I've now paid my debt. The landowner said, you know what? You forgot to take into account that I gave you a place to stay while you were working here. You also forgot to take into account that I gave you rice to eat and water to drink. And also there's interest on that loan. You owe $15. Then the next season would pass, he'd work again long days, and his debt was up to $18, then $20, and it kept growing. And this is a form of slavery that is very common in the world today. It's called debt bondage or debt slavery. And when the great grandfather was not able to work off that loan, then his daughter had to take his place in the rice mill. And then the daughter's daughter, then the daughter's daughter. Four generations of young women paying off one debt. So that was one form of slavery that I found very common as I went across the continents to find how it is that people fell into slavery in the first place. My next travel then went from south, from India, into Thailand and Cambodia. And in Thailand and Cambodia, the most common form of slavery I found was that of the Commercial sex industry. The common scenario is a young girl will be bought or sold in a refugee camp or Vietnamese who have traveled into Cambodia because they are refugees from either war or from poverty. And traffickers will look for these families. Now sometimes on occasion, a parent will outright sell one child so that he or she, the parents can take care of the rest of the children. But more commonly a trafficker will make a promise to the family that if you give us one of your daughters, we will get her a job in a garment factory or in a restaurant. We will get her a job somewhere in the world where they can have a livelihood and send money back to you. As soon as the child leaves the family, then the trafficker will probably take them across the border so that they will leave Cambodia and they'll end up in Burma or they'll end up in Myanmar or sorry, in Singapore or they'll end up somewhere else or they might end up in the United States so that they are then trafficked once they've been released from their families and Cambodia and Thailand. This happens usually to girls, sometimes to boys between the ages of 12 and 16. This is the range of the demographic that they attach. Probably one of the most difficult experiences I had in this whole investigation was going into a brothel that specialized in 12 year old girls in Cambodia that we were brought into the brothel even at the, even in Phnom Penh. To have to traffic in 12 year old girls can be something that might get you into legal trouble. The police might act on that. If nothing else, the owner would take us in, make sure that no one is from international or from local police is watching. Take you through the back door, up a back staircase into the second floor and there will be three sofas like these sofas here, perhaps all lined with 11 and 12 year old girls. The owner will tell you to go over and try to flirt with you. And I tell you that was the most difficult thing to pretend that you were this slime ball that was there to buy these 11 and 12 year old girls and try and keep kind of the act going that you were there to see what you could get for the night. Two young girls, $20 a night. And so the transaction takes place and we say, oh, you know what, we forgot we haven't eaten dinner. Could you save these girls for us? We're going to come back after dinner. All of this being taped by a hidden camera that we have embedded in our backpack. And it was with a group that I was working with that was seeking to gather evidence on trafficking rings around the globe and provide that this evidence could shut down this trafficking ring. Because what I discovered is that slavery or trafficking in human beings is illegal in every country in the world today. Every country. But what we lack is enforcement. What we lack is a will to enforce and the leverage to enforce actual laws. We lack justice. There's no justice, public justice, certainly not economic justice. And so when we gathered all this evidence on these young girls, we saw the transaction. Now we can get them for $20. Yes, the money's paid. We have this evidence. We gather testimonies from the young girls who have been taken from families if we can get them alone. And part of the investigative genius of some of these groups is being able to figure out which girl you can talk to so that she won't go back to the owner and rat on you. So that this girl here, she seems like she has the kind of fortitude that she would talk to us and might participate in her freedom, gather testimony, take all of that to an honest police officer, and they exist everywhere in the world, but not in the same numbers in every place. Work with them to then intervene, shut down the trafficking ring and take them to a court, and you try and find an honest judge that will do that piece by piece, building a public justice system from the ground up, supporting the police officer and the judge with the kind of evidence and also support that they'll need to carry out the prosecution. This group that carried this out in Cambodia was one of my partners called International Justice Mission, and they work in countries around the globe. I didn't know much about this group, ijm, but I discovered, like ijm, there were other groups that were actually involved in hands on grassroots activism, advocacy to free people from situations of slavery. They would go in, help rescue them, and then build a life for them after they were released. But we didn't know about them. The first is that most of us don't know that there's 27 million people in the world today that find themselves in situations like this. The second is that there are actual practical things that people are doing to help free people and undermine trafficking rings, but we didn't know about them. And it was at that stage that it became clear that this needed to be more than me just going around investigating and writing a book as a journalist. But I really wanted to launch an international campaign that would provide a wave of awareness and resources and volunteers and the best intellects we have in order to fight it. Because we needed an abolitionist movement to end slavery in the 21st century. People being bought for their labor, capped against their will, and not paid for their work. One of the groups, one of the abolitionist groups that I met in Cambodia, was thinking about the fact that once you free someone from slavery, well, what do you do next? You say, you're free. You're no longer in the rug loom. You're free. We'll put you right here on the street corner. So, really free to do what? Free for what? Some of you might have read some columns by a New York Times columnist by the name of Nicholas Kristof. And Christoph has gone into some brothels in Thailand. He'll buy a girl out of slavery. He'll pay the owner, say, I'll give you $20, $50 probably for that girl. And then he'll say to the girl, okay, you're free to go home now. Now, the problem with that. And then Christoph goes back to New York, he comes back a year later, and he writes a column about how distressed he is that this girl's back in the brothels again. And it kind of leaves this impression, well, there's nothing you can do. Look, problem is that this young girl probably has been betrayed by a family member, an uncle, an aunt, a cousin, a neighbor. That she has been deceived and brought into this slave trade because of that betrayal. And then she has been brought at the age of 16 or 15, into a situation where she has been only given food and shelter for her labor. And then now what's she going to do? She has no skill. She has no place to go. So began working with a group called Hagar in Cambodia. What Hagar does is they create enterprises that give jobs and equity to former slaves, emancipated slaves, so that when these young girls come out of rug looms or these young boys come out of brick kilns, or when these young women come out of a brothel, out of a karaoke club, they set up an organization that allows them to find not just work, but profitable work. One job that they had, they first started with, it was really kind of from the ground up, is that there was no soy milk ever distributed in Cambodia. There was no distributor for soy milk, couldn't buy it. So an entrepreneur by the name of Pierre Tommy decided to get these carts that you would wheel that you, if you've ever gone to, perhaps in a Hispanic area where they have ice cream vendors carrying around these trucks, a hand truck, and in it they would dish out soy milk. So they'd give a uniform to each of the members of this team, and they go out and sell. Okay, very low grade entrepreneurial activity. But as they began to sell more around city squares and they had franchise about 30 carts, the USDA came to them and said, you know what? We want to promote the use of soy milk in Southeast Asia. We heard you have a company to distribute soy milk. We'd like it to go to every child in a public school in Cambodia. Now the entrepreneur is thinking right now what we're doing. If you've ever been to an underdeveloped nation, you've ordered a, a Coke even and you want it to go, you know, how do they give it to you? They pour it into like a Glad bag, right? Pour it in a Glad bag, tie it up and okay, you can. That's to go. Well, that's how they sold their soy milk. They would put it into a Glad bag, tie it up and off you go. Well, now you're going to do it for every school child. You're thinking, how many Glad bags would I need to distribute soy milk? Well, he was able to work with the IFC International Financial Corporation to get a loan, low interest loan to build a factory and then with the factory able to not only distribute soy milk, but also then to start distributing green tea, other fortified drink products. Today, Hagar Soy and Drink Company employs 150 women who used to be enslaved in the commercial sex industry. Cambodia. After getting that going, Hagar launched a catering company where they would go in and cook meals for companies like say here at Google. They would be a caterer that would come in. Also created another 125, 130 jobs. And Hagar catering after five years is now profitable and is giving money back to the social services, the non profit arm. So they're a self sustaining enterprise and giving back money to their own social service work with women and children who've been freed. A third one is Hagar design making designer clothes. So it was creating economic opportunities for people who had been former slaves. So this really struck me that if we could launch a series of investments and lawyers and investigators and that this is something we can fight. We can fight slavery in the 21st century. What are our obstacles? What are our obstacles? First, most of us don't know about it. Most of us are not aware of the gravity of the problem. It will surprise you when I tell you that there are 200,000 slaves inside the United States today. 2007. How do they get here? I want to talk a little bit about my investigation here in the United States. A real classic example is one of the first women I met, she almost became a model of how trafficked women and children get into this country. 80%, that's four out of five people who are trafficked are women, females, half are children. So traffickers prey on those who they feel might be most socially vulnerable. Kim Maston was a 19 year old I met on the East Coast. She had been trafficked into this country by an evangelical pastor of a church just in a small town outside of Worcester, Mass. This pastor had gone over to northern, the northernmost part of India to a Tibetan refugee camp. The Tibetans had fled the violence that China had visited on their country, were now in the north in a camp. The pastor came and he spent a couple days. He saw Kim, 14 years old, and went to her parents and said, I want to bring your daughter to the United States in order to, you know, the American dream, to get education, to get a job and send money back to you. Well, Kim's parents were really reluctant to let their 14 year old daughter go. But the pastor persisted and eventually was able to convince the brother in law by paying him a bribe who had married Kim's sister to convince the family. What are you thinking? Look around at this refugee camp. There's no future here. So where there's no future, where there's desperation, promising a golden bridge to a new land, where there is opportunity. When Kim arrived in the United States, her documents were taken from her, which usually happens. So you are now an individual without citizen rights. And she was forced to slave in the work of the church, the grounds, in cleaning the buildings, and in the house of the pastor. And she would do this seven days a week, then the pastor at night would sexually use her. This was the common pattern I found that young women or children, once they became under the ownership of their trafficker, it was always, you know, in all the hundreds of testimony, it was almost like waiting for the shoe to drop. Is that then what happened? Then what happened? Then you say, and then at night and you go, oh no, here it comes. It was a story of serial rape. These young people who have been trafficked because I own your body, I can do what I want with it. So Kim spent five years in this small town in Massachusetts. No one in the town ever thought anything, you know, they didn't have the grid. Just like I was in the Chinese restaurant, the Indian restaurant. I never had the grid to think that these young girls may be slaves. No one had the grid to think that this pastor had taken possession of this young girl. And so for five years she worked there when she was 19, she finally found the courage in the middle of the night to run away, despite the threats to her family back in northern India, who also were very vulnerable with no citizen rights and the threats of the pastor. You know, they're Tibetans in India as visitors. If I tell them that they made a promise that I could be your guardian and you escape, then they're going to be held, I'm going to get them in trouble. Back in India, she ran away. She was able to make phone contact with her parents and said, you would not believe the hell I've been living in the last five years. And then the mother goes, the pastor just came here last week to take your two 14 year old cousins. They said you were off at university now and they needed someone to replace you. It was then that Kim got the courage to go to the police and turned in the pastor who was prosecuted and put in jail. Kim's story is repeated over and over 200,000 slaves in the United States, about 27% come with that kind of promise of domestic labor, being a house servant or being a nanny. The largest areas where that happens are San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Houston, Dallas. Those are the major ports in the US we don't know it's happening. We can't find it. We don't know. Is it really invisible? Am I just making this up? Well, I challenged my students at the University of San Francisco to try to map slavery in the San Francisco Bay Area. I wanted them to do that as a model for what university students could do all over the country in their own backyard. And so if we can make the invisible visible, if I come in here today and say, lookit, there are 50,000 people in the Bay Area in slavery, who's in favor of that? I'm not going to get a lot of hands up. It's not one of those very controversial things. What do you think of immigration? We're talking about people who are being possessed, they are being owned. So that I challenge my students to do this, I said, go talk to police officers, go talk to domestic abuse shelters, talk to journalists, talk to social workers. So they began setting out for a year investigating this, a bunch of 19 year old students. And they began finding it all over the Bay Area. And they were able to find a concentration in massage parlors in San Francisco. In the business district downtown, they located two places that they found were particularly rife with a ring that they were bringing people in. They even promised their clients on Craigslist, we will bring you fresh new Asian girls every month. Well, where are they coming from, these fresh new Asian girls? So they began to then do surveillance on these operations. These 19 year olds sitting in a car with a video camera watching people go. I'm sure their parents are really proud that their professor's training them with a degree in arts and sciences. So they're outside, they're training. And then when they were confident that there was a place right in the center of the business district in San Francisco, a financial district where men at lunch would go and have a lunch break right after work, then the one thing I wouldn't allow them to do was to go inside undercover. So then my team, we went in, pretended that we were out of town, had a bachelor party coming up for some friends in two days. We needed eight young girls that could come to our hotel a block away. First thing they say to us is, no, girls, do not leave here. I said, it's only a block. They do not leave here. You come here. All right, first red flag. The second was, you know, we want to make sure they're not older girls. We really like some young girls. And they say, oh yeah, we have young girls, well, let me see them. So they bring them out. These young girls, probably 16, 17 years old, do not speak any English. Try and talk to them, communicate, don't speak any English. Second red flag. All right, we got all the data about, yeah, Friday we'll have eight girls here. We walked out and from that moment, the clock ticked on. A 24 hour surveillance. Are these girls ever leaving and they weren't. The madame, the owner of the place, as well as the kind of henchman, the big guy that sat at the door, when he came in, they would go in and out and lock the door behind them. Meanwhile, 24 hours, there's lights going on and off, there's activity, but the young girls are not leaving. Take this evidence to the district attorney's office here in San Francisco. District attorney's blown away that a bunch of 19 year old students did all this investigation work and he can't get any investigative work being done. So he says, this is unbelievable. Here in San Francisco, it was very strange. It felt like we were informing them about human trafficking. Then the district attorney took it to the police and said, look it, they gather all this evidence, we need to go do something about this, let's prosecute. The police said, you know, there's no protocols in place for these kinds of things. We're not going to arrest them, we're not going to do anything. I'm about ready to tear my hair out. Right here in our own backyard here it's evidence so that we couldn't get any work done and these girls were allowed to keep in their slavery. So why don't we know about it? Imagine in Sausalito today, seven young blond haired, blue eyed girls are taken out of their homes and they're reported in downtown San Francisco, servicing the pleasures of businessmen at lunch. You think there would be any protocols in place, it's because these girls are from South Korea, they're from China, they're from Mexico, they're from Guatemala. Who cares about them? They have no passport, they have no families clamoring about them. They're people without a voice here in our backyard. So one is, we don't know about, but so how do we make the invisible visible? So that's been our goal with the not for Sale campaign, is to lift the visibility. The second is to say there's something you can do about it. Tell me your passion and you can do something about it. Some people say, well, you know what my passion is riding bikes. We go, great. We have a thing called Free to Play. All children should be free to play, but they're not. So we have athletes, everything from professional football players to Brian Boitano. What would Brian do? Brian would go around and every time he does a triple toe loop, he gives a financial donation to the not for Sale campaign so that all children can be free to play frontline activities like what we described in San Francisco or in Cambodia or in India. If your passion is technology, what we need to do is map slavery in the world today and the abolitionists who are fighting it. We need to be able to make the invisible visible because today in the world, traffickers have no fear of being prosecuted. I just described San Francisco, what was reportedly one of the more progressive or liberal cities in the United States. Couldn't get the police to operate there. Imagine what I find in Moldova, Romania or in Peru or in Cambodia. Imagine how difficult it is to move the public justice system to act there. So we need to make the invisible visible and we need lawyers, business entrepreneurs who can launch new companies for those who have been embroiled in the desperate situation of bondage. We need everyone that can do something. Artists. We have a film coming out in the fall called the Concert to End Slavery. In this movie, artists like Cold War Kids, Moby the Fray, they've all contributed free songs to us. They've performed for us and we're putting it in between. Kind of an MTV style Video quick moving about what's happening in trafficking, how students in San Francisco are doing this, students in Georgetown, in Washington D.C. are doing other things and kind of like you can do something to change this. So really it's not a matter of a lack of ability. It's not like a disease we can't find the cure for. It's a generation that says we will be a generation of justice. Economic justice, to make poverty history, public justice, to take the side, the voice of those who have no defense before the wealthy and the powerful who use the laws against them. A generation of justice. And so what I would love is for the generation that really is represented here for you to be known in the years that look ahead as a generation J. You know, I was like a generation boomer or whatever. And then after that came generation X and generation Y. And it was all a clever way of marketers to sell us a new pair of tennis shoes. But it would be great if the generation came along and said, we want to name ourselves. It is our identity, our generation, that we will use our gifts, our skills, what we have to bring about justice. And we have the tools now we just need to act on it. I want to talk to you about things that you're interested in. You had to hear me rattle on about things I'm interested in. So I'd love to pursue questions or ideas you might have and feel free ranging. Everything you want to talk about. Yeah. You mentioned the difficulty of engaging the San Francisco police to round up the possible trafficking rings. Isn't that the conviction rate that drives their performance? Not really. The good for the slaves raid. Yeah. No, that's a very insightful question. You must work for Google. You know, the truth of the matter is. So, you know, obviously these are not brutish apes who don't care about anybody. Right? But you're right, it's like it's where the incentives are, where the system lies, where there is an easy prosecution. Imagine then a case where you have maybe three Korean girls, two Chinese girls and one Thai girl in one establishment in San Francisco. Now, in order to take this to court, intervening is the easy part. You go in, you get them out, you arrest. But now you gotta have a case. Then you have to figure out, well, how do they get brought here in each case, it's expensive to do that kind of investigation. So it's not as if there's a bank robbery, you have an ATM bank robbery or something like that, and you got it on film. You're going to have to do the painstaking work of investigation and also how are you going to be able to prosecute? What's the cost of it and what's the likelihood of success? So if you don't have a large caseload of cases like this, or there's not a ring that you've done long period investigation, you know, what are your chances of conviction? Whereas I'm presenting it, as you say, on behalf of those young girls who are going to have to face the nightmare of, of being raped 10 to 12 times a night. They're looking at it in terms of the prosecution. And so it's not going to be until there is this outrage. Like the young girls. My hypothetical case of Sausalito, we want them free. That's where our interest is. A public lies. Yeah. Yes. So where do the numbers come from in terms of where you know. You know, just. Did I pull them out of my hat in the middle of the night? And I thought, well, these are good numbers. The numbers that we look at inside the United States are an extrapolation based on two factors. One is a factor of those who are rescued out of situations of, say, agricultural work, hotel work each year. So it's based on cases that are able to free. And then based on the total population, the State Department estimates that there are 17,500 every year being brought into the United States based on their immigration investigation. Now the CIA believes the numbers are higher. They said 50,000 a year are being brought in. I go for the more conservative figure just because. Because then I don't have to stand in front of a crowd and say, well, you know, 50 million. The other figure, the 27 million, if you really want to pursue the case, is a wonderful kind of research oriented book called Disposable People. People who are like disposable batteries. And it's written by Kevin Bales. And he goes around the world trying to find the best data based on police and immigration records in each country that he goes to. And 27 million is the number that he arrived at. I used to live in Indonesia, so I should think there's more. Yeah, thanks. It's a good question. Yeah.

So I know there are lots of different cases for why people get trafficked, but so I know there are some cases where these girls will. So they promised large sums of money that they'll never ever see otherwise. Like if you're working a rice mill all your life.

Yes.

So they go because someone's sick or they have a huge family that they can't take care of. So A, you know, what if they might not want to go back because, you know, what are you going to do then? What are you going to do with your family at home, who needs some money? And I guess on another note, you mentioned that there are companies creating jobs, but you can't create jobs for 23 million people. Right. So what are some of the other solutions in place for that?

Good question. And I'm starting the last one first because I think part of it is to address the demand side of this and I talk a lot about the supply side. Part of our campaign is free to work. Everyone should be free to work. And to have first the largest companies in the world, but any size company to commit themselves that they will not use forced labor or slave labor anywhere in their supply chain or in their subcontractors. The first company that we've had agree to do that is Manpower. And manpower uses almost 10,000 subcontractors around the globe. Their executive who signed off on this order said when he heard about the possibility that people might be trafficked into and forced to work for manpower, said it never happened. So he decided to do a little test. He went to their office in Europe and into Asia and did a test about whether or not someone could be used by a trafficker to take a job that they would be paid for. That is, someone could, someone's slave could be used for that traffic. He was shocked to find out that there was nothing to prevent that from happening. So he signed this pledge. We're having more difficulty getting other companies. It just started four months ago. But the first thing is, well, I don't want to commit myself because of the legal implications. But what our movement really is dedicated to is getting large companies to say, we will make sure that all people are free to work. And after an 18 month period you'll have, here are the free to work companies, here are the companies that are the not free to work, the slave companies. And I don't think IBM wants next to their label IBM slave company. Now you raise a real good question, say in a, a place like China or Southeast Asia or in Peru or in Africa, where a child has been given the obligation or feels the responsibility that you're to take care of the family. And often this happens with oldest daughters, right? The oldest daughter is given the obligation that they have to care for the family. And since you can't get any work and there's no other, you know, even if you have to sell your body in a brothel, that's your responsibility, your obligation. And so Sometimes they will go into that until they find just the sheer hell of this. I mean, in a brothel in Cambodia, 20 to 25 customers a night they have to serve. And the treatment that they are given by the owner of that establishment is just unreal. And many of them die of aids, but still the sense of obligation. So certainly when, you know, they have the opportunity to leave that. What our experience is is that almost 99 times out of 100 they want to leave that, but they need some kind of option because they say, well, I just can't leave and then not think about my family. And so part of it not only is creating small scale operations, micro enterprise, but also is to work on larger scale type of funding that will actually address the needs of people who are in vulnerable situations in refugee camps or in migration. How do you solve those kinds of economic problems? That's why it's about justice, economic justice, and not just public justice. Because it's just about public justice. We'll have a new group of wave of young girls who will take the places of those who escape. So making poverty history is a very important part of this.

So, so back to the San Francisco issue. I remember reading an article in the Chronicle about this massage parlor.

Yeah, right, exactly.

And what I remember, what blew me away there is that these businesses get licenses, right? Somebody licenses.

That's right.

It seems to me that maybe there's something to do there, like, fine, how are they getting this license? I mean, somebody said, proving that, you know, that they're legitimate massage parlors.

That's right. And so in order to get a license, they have to go to the public health department and say, we are a legitimate massage parlor. Well, the place that I described that we honed in on and did surveillance on was actually an acupuncture center. But it's such a thin veil as soon as you were to go in. And when I went in, they didn't say, oh, what kind of acupuncture, what bothers you? What part of your back? They basically said, here's what you get. Massage and then the $60. And after this, all these other services you get. So you're right, though, because when William Wilberforce, who was a great abolitionist 200 years ago in the United Kingdom, shut down the transatlantic slave trade, he didn't do it because he was able simply to say, don't you all think slavery is terrible here in the uk we should make a law against it. What he did is he undermined the economic factors that reinforced it. And so he made Laws that stop the trafficking of people through shipping. So it makes sense. In San Francisco, what we're going after first are all those places that don't have a license to operate or have a license to operate, but they are not actually offering massage and acupuncture, which really is most of those cases. But still, you have to have somebody that is willing to enforce that and shut them down. Absolutely. And that's to make very visible that hidden process who's giving these licenses. In fact, I'll tell you that there was a woman in that office, not the head of the office, not the director, but there was a person in that office who emailed us and said, it is disgusting what I have to do every day and the kind of subterfuge that goes on and let me know how I can help. So you're right. It's making that kind of process accountable. And the labor agreements, you know, how is it that people are being brought in to work in construction and nursery work and that they're obviously being worked as slaves? They're not being paid. It's uncovering how that process is and the immigration process, because this requires fraud in order for people to get into this country.

So, first of all, thanks for coming here to speak to Google. Hi.

Sure. My question.

I was actually thanking you to get your attention.

Oh, thank you very much.

So my question is related to the port authorities. So I'm wondering if there's any way for and if it's a good solution for the port authorities to sync up how they scrutinize shipments that come in and if they can work with. With CIS and TSA to make that happen. Because I know the port authorities have their own individual jurisdiction that's outside of the federal jurisdiction. And I don't know if that's a problem with people coming in through the ports.

Well, certainly part of it is to come through the ports. Part of it is to come illegally through the border. Part of it is coming through a process of they are either getting a guest worker visa, HB1 visa, in some cases in the Berkeley situation, but it is to really track how people are arriving in this country, particularly once they have been rescued, to say, okay, how did you get here? What was the process? Who did you talk to? And really, to undermine those kinds of channels that would also shut off the supply. I will say this, though. Even though into the United States, the vast majority are coming in obviously illegally, and there is domestic trafficking. I investigated a trafficking ring of girls from Detroit area and the Midwestern cities who would be trafficked out of Detroit into Washington D.C. and New York, mostly for the sex industry, young girls, 15, 16 years old. So that exists too, but most of it is that kind of trafficking. But in the world today, most trafficking is domestic. Most trafficking is within Uganda, within India, within Peru. And that's what that kind of surprised me because trafficking seems to supply international borders. Yeah.

I was just curious, in your opinion, what role and I guess what responsibility would you put on large companies like Ikea or Walmart that obviously sell products at ridiculously cheap prices and you have to wonder sort of who's manufacturing and putting together these kind of goods.

Yeah, well, and you know, that's a really difficult question because you said they drive down the demand to such a level that then to be competitive or in order to get the bid, are they out trying to, you know, force labor into that situation? I mean, it's a real good one. And I think it's, you know, for me to get a Walmart or and their subcontractors, because the commitment is to the subcontractors. I was just consulting with a company that was looking at their supply chain in the food industry and they wanted to go to China to do their fruit and vegetable production so they could put on store shelves here so it would be cheaper, more competitive, blah, blah, blah. But when it came to the point in this place, it was a particularly socially conscious or CSR based because they knew their clients would care. And when we said, well, how would you guarantee that in China that there would not be forced labor for that matter, that was really organic. When they decided that they couldn't do that right now, then they said, okay, well we're not going to produce there. Well, it's have that discussion at the boardroom or at the operational place where decisions are made to make that part of the discussion. So next week I'm going to New York, I'm meeting with 100 large US companies and their supply chains and raise that issue. Do you really want in four years for citizenry, third party NGO groups to come to you and say you're a slave trade labor in your supply chain you have slaves. Nobody wants that. And so that's why they invited me, because they want to get in front of this issue rather than behind it. And so fortunately, I think that's where we can cut a lot of it. But you're talking about driving prices down and that's the next step up. If someone's working for 50 cents an hour, how much better are they off than those who are getting nothing. And that's a real justice issue. And that's what I would want to.

Know is how closely do you work with companies that are using sweatshops for driving down the prices like Nike.

Yeah, well, you know, it's really a, you know, when I was in investment in banking, I had a technology company and I remember this guy from Taiwan came to my company at an early stage, the one I was with at that time. And he said, hey, you know what? I've got a way of making your company so competitive that the other folks who will be in your space can't compete with you. Any entrepreneur is interested in that kind of offer. I said, really? What is that? He goes, I've got a sweatshop. He didn't say I got a low cost labor center. You know, he was, I've got a sweatshop in Shanghai and I've got all these software engineers cranking out this code. Now one question is the quality of this code, of course. But the second is the fact that, you know, he was just not to him it was just a part. Isn't a great opportunity for you. So you know, as an executive of a company, I said, well, I'm not going to go there. I don't care if that's what it makes to be competitive. But how do you build that sensibility or consciousness or conscience into Companies say we just do not go there. Increasingly environmentally, and I don't take this in terms of coming out. We are the world, we are its children. Hold hands. But increasingly companies are conscious about the fact of what's the environmental impact of what we're doing and how is this going to bite us if we don't do this. One of the large companies that invited me to New York next week, they have had many lawsuits based on hazardous products in their products. And they said we got so eaten alive by that. We want to stay in front of this slave issue because we think it's going to be a huge one. In two years everyone's going to know that 27 million people are in slavery. Moby's going to tell people. The phrase is going to tell people. Darryl Hannah and Evangeline Lilly, they're joining our campaign. Everybody's going to know. And what I want to do is attack the demand side as much as the supply side so that it's too costly to ignore it. And that's where you have to get to in a campaign, is that it's too costly just to say, well who cares? No one's going to Prosecute us. You got to make the cost. Today there's no cost, there's very high profitability. We got to drive the cost of ignoring it up and drive down the profitability and then we can have a real impact on this.

Yeah, I'm just wondering about like the client responsibility side of it. Are authorities more likely to like prosecute it against an individual that goes to one of these establishments rather than the establishment itself?

Yeah, and that's another part of the demand side is that the people are criminalized. Number one. First are the young girls. They are the first criminalized in current police activity. Second might be the owner of that establishment, the trafficker. Third and last might be the john or the client. And that's another thing we want to reverse is make the first person criminalized actually as a trafficker. But second is the john. And third, provide protection for those young girls who for whatever set of reasons, I mean, what 15 or 16 year old girl wants some big, big lug of a guy on top of her 20 times a night? I mean we should common sense there, you know, but, you know, whatever drove them to that. They need more help and protection than they need criminalization.

I was also wondering just about if, you know, the consequences for say the client versus the girl versus the establishment. Are they, you know, treated differently as far as when they're punished like the. I imagine the girl probably gets, you know, screwed the worst because she has.

Nowhere to go, she uses to term. Yes. Well, what happens is that in most cases that they are been criminalized and deported and there has been a new visa that's come into place called a T visa, trafficking visa that now gives protection if a girl or young boy can prove that they have been trafficked, that they get, they aren't put on the road to residency, which is great. So that law now is in place. When we went to the da, part of our quid pro quo before we provided the evidence was that if you intervene, we want to make sure that all the young girls are given protection, legal, medical, and they are given the opportunity to get a T visa. We want the trafficker to be arrested. In terms of. I love the idea of putting on a billboard the picture of the clients, the johns and I actually now they, what they have to do is they usually pay a small fine and they have to go through a workshop like this when they learn about, you know, and I've been asked to go and talk about. Do you really realize who these girls are? You know, I don't know if they care that much. But they do care about their neighbors and their community. Seeing them as driving the demand in this.

I have a question for you. From some of the reading that I've done on this subject, I found that the US Military is driving the demand in some areas for sex trafficking. In your research, have you seen that and like what is being done to educate like servicemen and women about this?

Yeah, no, definitely the United States Army, United nations armies that go, they drive it as well. And so part of it is I've been hearing from a lot of the services, the military services, saying they want workshops, be able to identify, look at, you know, this is what happens when you go and drive the demand. This is what the impact of your activity is and to hold them accountable. That's part of it. Both for the military services and then the business travelers who drive, demand that to have a company say we are going to hold you accountable for your activity when you're on. You know, somehow there has to be accountability built into this. And, and you're absolutely right. It's, it's the inability to connect my ex, my, my, my, my purchasing, what I, how I live my life, my lifestyle to how it's driving these kinds of global demands. But you know, we have to say I am not for sale. You are not for sale. No one should be for sale. It has to be that simple. We have time for one more question. Do you have a feeling for how much of that 27 million figure is things like child soldiers in various parts of the world? Yeah, I went to Africa, went to Uganda and tracked the child soldiers. They would make up probably a smaller percentage of that, but a significant percentage maybe in the world today, 2 million. In Uganda alone, there was 50,000 children that had been abducted and brought into one army called the Lord's Resistance Army. And boy, I tell you, I spent a lot of time with the kids who came out of the Lord's Resistance army, somehow escaped or were rescued. And it's just, it's hell for these 1112 year old girls. What I always imagine you see like a young kid with an AK47. You think, oh, how terrible. They're being trained to shoot that and be a soldier. They're really not soldiers per se. I mean they do some fighting. What they really are trained to do is rape and pillage villages. They're trained to kill civilians. And the girls until they reach puberty will be trained as well as marauders. And then once they reach puberty, they become the concubines, the sex slaves of the senior commanders. So this is. You know, it's not the child. Child soldiers are even a misnomer because I always had this image until I met these kids. What a child soldier is, is someone who is trained. Trained to be a looter and a raper. It's staggering. And how do you then work with these kids? That's a complex part. And so I was with some people doing phenomenal work in Uganda, so to help restore some kind of livelihood and. And put them on a road in a different direction. Lots of work to do in the world today. But, hey, what I like to say is that we've got the tools, We've got the education. I know, Ricky, we need to close this up. I just want to say, when I was 22 years old, I went to Latin America. This is why I have confidence we can do something about this. I went to Latin America, to El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras. And there was all kinds of human rights violations. There was death squads from dictators running around. And so to make a long story short, I began to get myself and my friends, don't get to know me. I'll call you and ask you to do something ludicrous to go and live with people who got death threats. Four Americans have been religious. Women have been down in El Salvador. They got massacred. And so the US Government cut off aid to El Salvador for a period of time to the government. They didn't want to kill Americans, so we went and lived with them. So someone got a death threat, we go live with them with our passport. Well, they eventually found out what we were doing, and so what they began to do is to block us from coming in the country. So we had to create a front group. We created an economic development agency and was a cover for our human rights work. So I started calling my friends up, who I went to college with. I said, look, I need an agronomist in El Salvador. My friend Jim, who is now running a forklift in yogurt factory, said, I don't know anything about agronomy. Just because I'm putting pallets up with yogurt, I don't know how they got there. He said, it doesn't matter. I just need an agronomist. Drop him in. An agronomist. I need a nutritionist. I need health care worker. All these people. The social worker was now the health care worker. After 10 years, we became a damn good development agency. Gave Jim a book called Two Ears of Corn. He read it and he figured out how to be an agronomist so my point is, I could pull any one of you out of the crowd today, take you, drop you in Sri Lanka and give you a title, you would figure it out. So we have got unbelievable capability because of our education, our resources, our networks. We just need to work together to address some of the biggest problems that we can actually face and end. And one of those is modern slavery. Thanks a lot for time.