2008 - another year in chains

JANUARY

As wages go, 4 cents a pound for plucking tea leaves might not seem like much to fight about. But the thugs who raided a tea plantation recently had a message for the few dozen workers they drove off with bows and arrows. They said we had been too successful in our work," said Jacqueline Bonareri, 39, whose craggy fingers were testament to a decade picking tea. "They wanted our jobs."

FEBRUARY

Mr. Sayyid spun into depression and lost nearly 40 pounds. For months, he sat at home and focused on one thing: reading the Koran. Now, at 28, with a diploma in tourism, he is living with his mother and working as a driver for less than $100 a month. With each of life’s disappointments and indignities, Mr. Sayyid has drawn religion closer.

MARCH

A retired nurse who dedicated four decades to the NHS claims it has abandoned her after she was refused funding to save her eyesight.

APRIL

Lured Into Bondage
A growing back channel of global trade tricks millions into forced labor.

MAY

Three years on, his dream seems as elusive as a desert mirage. For sure, Singh, now 27, has built houses since he arrived in the Gulf — mansions on Palm Jumeirah, a man-made island shaped like a gargantuan palm tree that is set in the pale waters off the coast of Dubai. But the contrast between the sumptuous world Singh is helping to create and his own hardships could scarcely be more jolting. He has yet to lay the first brick on his house in India. In February he finally paid off his debts to the labor recruiter in Rajasthan, including 42% interest on the loan. Sitting in a labor camp in the sprawling workers' district of Sonapur outside Dubai, Singh says he now spends most of his monthly income of about $190 feeding himself, rather than his wife and two small children back home. Six days a week he wakes at 4 a.m. to travel to the building site, where he begins his 11-hour day at 6.30 a.m. At sunset he sinks exhausted onto his bunk bed in the room he shares with seven other men — miles from the neon lights that bathe Dubai's night sky in a metallic sheen. "We are building villas which cost 18 million dirhams [$ 4.9 million]," says Singh. "We should at least get something from this. But we are getting nothing."

JUNE

Cuba is to abolish its system of equal pay for all and allow workers and managers to earn performance bonuses, a senior official has announced. Vice-Minister for Labour Carlos Mateu said the current system - in place since the communist revolution in 1959 - was no longer "convenient". He said wage differentiation should improve production and services.

JULY

Iyathigewewa is a classic company town. But the youth don't head off to work in the local mine or factory — they go to war. With no other job prospects in this impoverished, remote northern village about 27 miles south of the front lines, roughly half the men of fighting age have enlisted in the army, navy, police or other security branches.

AUGUST

Despite all that, 72 smaller South Korean companies have already built factories here, looking to tap the North’s supply of low-cost, Korean-speaking labor. So far, only one foreign company has come.

SEPTEMBER

"It's a nightmare working with the homeless. Period. We built a social business on the most unreliable workforce on the face of God's earth."

OCTOBER

“They press down on us from all sides,” said Farhod, a father of eight, as he looked out on his neatly planted rows of millionaire, shakira and maistros watermelons. Cotton is king in Tajikistan, at least as far as the government is concerned. In fact, say agricultural experts, the regal metaphor is apt: the system is close to feudal. Farmers are shackled to the land — “like slaves,” one European official says — and forced to grow cotton through a complex system of debts and obligations.

NOVEMBER

FOR the last two years, the Army has presented itself to potential recruits as the way to become “Army strong.” Beginning on Tuesday,Veterans Day, the Army will seek to make its pitch stronger by making the campaign more relevant to the desired audience of Americans ages 17 to 24.

DECEMBER

As long as 14-year-old girls are being jolted with electric shocks to make them smile before sex tourists in Cambodia, the abolitionist cause for slavery has not been completed....Shocks fit well into the brothel business model because they cause agonizing pain and terrify the girls without damaging their looks or undermining their market value.