Human rights narratives make visible events of rights violations. Elizabeth Povinelli discusses eventfulness through the examination of Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” the story of a child in a broom closet in Omelas, where happiness depends on keeping the child, whom everyone knows about, suffering in the closet. In her analysis of the child in the broom closet, Povinelli points to how one may contend with the suffering. It is not through the eventful, catastrophic, or sublime but rather the “ordinary, chronic, acute, and cruddy” (511). To contend with the tethered subjectivities migrants are bound to surrounding victimhood, legality, and citizenship in an antitrafficking narrative, one must look to how uneventfulness, the or-dinary, and the chronic are normalized in human rights narratives through the imagining of the trafficking experience, the rights violation, as eventful.
EEOC v. Global Horizons, Inc. is a case that is marked by (un)eventfulness in the settler context of Hawaii.
In 2011, charges were brought against Global Horizons regarding the trafficking of migrant workers in their farms. Global Horizons, a labor con-tracting company, supplied approximately five hundred workers for com-panies such as Mac Farms, Kauai Coffee, Kelena Farms, and Captain Cook Coffee. The laborers were brought to the United States as guest workers.
Companies like Global Horizons depend on U.S. guest worker programs, which recruit international laborers to work in the United States on a tem-porary basis. The heritage of the guest workers, or contract laborers, may be traced to the coolie laborer in the postslavery era. Contract laborers, inden-tured laborers such as the coolie, who worked on U.S. plantations were legal workers who were in essence what Lisa Yun refers to as “mobile slaves”—
workers who were contracted but whose contract could be sold to other em-ployers (133). A later version of guest worker was the bracero. Braceros were Mexican workers who were recruited to fulfill labor shortages in the U.S.
agricultural industry during World War II (Cohen; Griffith). The imported laborers came soon after the establishment of the Fair Labor Standard Act (FLSA; 1937), which created minimum wage standards and protected
over-time pay. The FLSA created exempt categories regarding who would receive overtime pay in which agricultural workers were left out, reinforcing the normalization of the historical mistreatment of guest workers in a quasi-slave system.
Allegations of human trafficking were brought against two top officials of Global Horizons: the chief executive, Mordechai Orian, and the compa-ny’s director of international relations, Pranee Tubchumpol. In 2012, the courts dismissed the criminal charges. After years of investigation, the charges were suddenly dropped (Zimmerman). The difficulties of investigat-ing and prosecutinvestigat-ing a human traffickinvestigat-ing case in the criminal context are due to the length of time required to investigate a case (ranging up to three years), coordination among multiple law enforcement entities (local law enforce-ment, Defense Security Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security Investigations, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and misreporting (Bales and Lize; Nichols and Heil). During the ten years after the implementation of the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act (2000), less than three hundred cases were prosecuted, in spite of the estimates at the time that 17,500 people were trafficked in the United States alone (U.S. De-partment of Justice Civil Rights Division). Case dismissal—a trafficking case that never becomes visible as a trafficking conviction—is the norm. But it is through the scripts of the spectacle of suffering that victimhood is narrated as eventful (Chouliaraki). The case of the EEOC started off as a quasi-event of human trafficking—an event that was and never was human trafficking.
Two years later, the EEOC filed charges of civil rights violations against Global Horizons, and the everyday work abuses, hostile work environment, and racist discrimination in the workplace took the stage as eventful (even if, one could say, such is the norm in low-wage labor). The condition of vic-timhood was centralized not through the trafficking but rather through claims of a hostile work environment, disparate treatment, and a pattern and practice of retaliation. In 2014, U.S. District Judge Leslie E. Kobayashi ap-proved settlements between the EEOC and four Hawaii farms totaling $2.4 million for about five hundred Thai farmworker victims of national origin discrimination and retaliation.1 The settlement included monetary relief, op-tions for jobs and benefits, housing, other reimbursements of expenses, and sweeping injunctive relief remedies—a $1.2 million settlement from Del Monte Fresh Produce.2 Judge Kobayashi found that “Thai workers were often paid less, made to work less desirable and more demeaning jobs and denied breaks, yet worked longer hours than non-Thai farm workers. Food, housing and living conditions were also deplorable for the Thai workers” (EEOC v.
Global Horizons, “Federal Judge”).
The case spoke to the ongoing racist ideologies shaping transnational economies and labor recruitment. In the summary judgment, one can see how everyday racist ideologies shaped what eventually became an eventful
case. The Thai laborers were recruited to work on Hawaii farms. Records show the racist attitudes toward the laborers:
Global Horizons has admitted that Mordechai Orian, its chief execu-tive officer, “specifically sought Thai nationals to fulfill the farm labor contracts believing that Thai workers would be easier to exploit than workers from other national origins and/or races,” and Global Hor-izons “selectively recruited impoverished, uneducated Thai workers who couldn’t speak English, and had no family or contacts in the U.S.
so they couldn’t escape or question Global [Horizons].” [Hostile Work Environment CSOF at 1.] Orian believed that, in general, “Thai people, they are good people, nice people. And they just follow. . . ” [Noh Decl., Exh. 1 at Nos. 64.] Specifically, Orian believed that, as workers in the United States Department of Labor (“Labor Depart-ment”) H–2A guest worker program, the Claimants would “just fol-low.” [ Id. at No. 65.] Orian previously hired workers from Mexico, China, and Nepal, but he had problems with those workers because they often disappeared. Orian stated that he believed that Claimants would not leave. [Id. at Nos. 66–69.] Orian has stated: “That’s why we decide to go with Thailand, because the ration-ratio at that time of people who be absconded [sic] was 3 percent, 2 percent compared to 80 percent, 90 percent, 100 percent from other countries . . . ” [Id. at No. 70 (alteration in original).] He also stated, “you just go to coun-tries. You know it’s going to be easier and they’re going to stay on the job. . . . That’s why Thailand.” (EEOC v. Global Horizons)
“That’s why Thailand” is a reminder that twenty-first-century labor viola-tions in the current modern global economic system are deeply tied to re-cruitment practices that depend on racist and racialized understandings of groups of people. The civil rights claims, hostile work environment, dispa-rate treatment, and patterns and practices of retaliation in the case are all reminders that, while the case was uneventful as human trafficking, it was eventful as a civil rights case. Although Global Horizons was not convicted for trafficking, the civil case that followed the criminal claims points to the racism in labor recruitment in Asia-Pacific.
Haunting the civil rights appeals of the Global Horizons case is the need to contend with settler-colonial realities. The settler-colonial context itself in a human trafficking case is commonly treated as uneventful. Appeals for corrections of rights violations further this; Olophius Perry, district director for the EEOC’s Los Angeles District Office, is quoted as saying, “Foreign workers should be treated as equals when working in the U.S., not as second class citizens. All workers foreign and U.S. are protected under the law and have the right to complain of such employment abuses which poison the
moral fabric of our society” (EEOC, “EEOC Files”). Democratic ideals fur-ther what is considered eventful in U.S. media and what is uneventful in settler-colonial logics—the illegal annexation of Hawaii and the colonial relations that place U.S. law above Samoan law relegate ongoing occupations to the ordinary and the chronic. While the laborers themselves are also re-cruited, a settler-colonial narrative makes invisible why migrant laborers from Asia continue to be exploited in Samoa and Hawaii.