Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

Note: I still haven’t decided whether I want to make this blog more public, so let me think on it before you link. I was thinking, Amber and Anthony, that you’d want to link. This continues the series on trafficking started yesterday… and yeah, it’s related. :) I was walking home from work last night with K. He finally got officially hired. YAY! I’d meant to ask y’all if anyone knew how to help him. See, we were all hired as contract-to-hire. For various reasons, I’ve since learned since I posted my last ditty about the co-worker who lied and really tendered her resignation, even though she told me that they were letting her go. Deal was, they offered three people, including her and my buddy V, less than they thought they deserved. I learned this from my boss. Now, the company, because they’re being assy, thinks that, by offering people less than a decent salary, are leaving it up to the employee. But the fact is, that’s a common tactic — a way of avoiding any lawsuits.

Anyway, k was offered a position at just a little less than my salary (which, yeah, sometimes I want to faint at the thought that it’s such a great salary — which is, I’ve subsequently learned, something peculiar to this company: they’re not rooted in tech and thus actually value long-term experience. E.g., they look at me as someone with 10+ years experience and, thus, an asset. This is unusual, from what friends in tech-based industries tell me.) So, he was thrilled to death. The guy kills me though. I was helping him learn how to buy a car and telling him about what he’d have to pay. He always freaks out at the thought of paying $6000 for a used small car. Me:”Dewdie, you’re making good money. You spend $200 on rent! You’ve got enough to buy a freakin’ used car!” (He lives in a co-housing arrangement because he doesn’t know how to cook. And apparently doesn’t want to learn.)

So, he and I filled out all the paperwork. Things came to a huge halt a couple of months ago when we learned that K, in order to get to the states, signed a contract with a recruiting company that specializes in bringing folks from India here. He had to sign up for 18 months — though apparently no guarantee of a job — and they’d sponsor his visa and work with local recruiters to get him gigs. Therefore, he couldn’t actually be hired as an employee unless he, the potential employer, or the local recruiting company bought the contract out at $8k per month left in his contract. More, of course, than his gross salary for sure.

This pissed me off because, to me, that’s a kind of indentured servitude. Apparently, from what a lawyer friend tells me, it can’t be enforced very easily. But they do it anyway because, to fight it, the worker has to spend all kinds of money to do so, which would hardly make it worthwhile. Anyway, they all finally cut a deal, but not before my company’s attorney got really assy. She accused k of being a liar because he didn’t disclose that he was in a binding contract with his original recruiting agency.

This hurt k’s feelings something awful. He was depressed all day and the next day, I helped him word a letter to my webdev director. Then, *I* got freakin’ pissed and went to see Webdev director and told him that, on no uncertain terms, would k have deliberately tried to conceal the information. It would have been a stupid move. I helped him fill out that application, and it occurred neither one of us that he was beholden to this other recruiting company. I’ve never heard of such an assinine practice. I didn’t know the details, and he just plain didn’t understand that his original recruiter are, to my mind, slime bags engaged in a form of indentured servitude. The *only* thing they do is sponsor the visa. They don’t pay for his passage or give him a place to say or jack shit. My company is too cheap to be bothered buying out a contract, but the local recruiting agency wants to keep my company as a client. And considering that, to my estimation they have made, just on *this* project alone over $100,000, they can afford it. In other words, they paid us an hourly wage and charged my company twice that and pocketed the difference. So, the local recruiting company worked out a deal with the Indian recruiting company to buy out the contract.

Basically, my company told the local recruiter that they, too, had erred in not explaining that k was beholden to yet another recruiter which would complicate the hiring process. So, Yeeha!, k has a job with benefits.

So, we’re walking down the main street to my home, and he’s asking me about how he won’t have insurance for two months during the waiting period. I’m telling him about COBRA and that, when we get home, I’ll look it up and see if he’s eligible. I think he can also talk to the HR dept at work. Not looking where I was going, I tripped over bricks that form curb around a tree planted in the sidewalk, land on my knee and tear it up a bit. I spent last night icing it and trying to keep it elevated. Whee.

So, speaking of trafficking in labor, I sat around and read Kempadoo’s Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered which is hard to concentrate on because it is so clinical and arid. It is especially so as I go back and forth between this social sciencey text and Gloria Anzaldua and Ana Louise Keating’s this bridge we call home, which is filled with essays, poems, art, email exchanges, and very few academic papers. The academic papers with their footnotes I don’t mind. But what these essays remind me of is the kind of articles you find in yearly publications in a subdiscipline in sociology or anthropology: Social Perspectives on Work, 2004. Published every year, same kind of typical overview of the lit fashion, blah blah blah. Hard to explain if you don’t know what I mean.

The stuff is interesting, it’s just that I have a bias against this approach because, my past experience with it, is that it bores me. It’s the aesthetics of the page — the typography — is what it is. There’s a certain form of academic typography that I just can’t handle. Which most people probably won’t get, but the environment within which I read *and* write, makes a difference. Writing in a word processor v. email v. a blog are three different things and my response to those environments are different. Even the difference between a blog admin panel and the little boxes within which you type comments makes a difference for me.

So, I’m reading Josephine Ho’s “From Anti-trafficking to Social Discipline” which is about the rise of anti-trafficking sentiments in Taiwan and the strange bedfellows that were made in the effort to address the problem of child prostitution. But it wasn’t just strange bedfellows — e.g., part of the government’s efforts in this regard were that they were motivated by a colonialist discourse of treating places like Taiwain, Thailand, etc. were seen as “backward” because of child prostitution. So, they were motivated not to be so “backward,” particularly as the country democratized and became more tightly integrated into the global economy.

What keeps coming up in these essays is something I’ve raised before, but which got little response in the sex worker wars. I know about it because it’s hard not to know about surrounded by people in the Navy and stories about the Navy: A lot of young girls are trafficked by their own parents. “Swarthy strangers” are not usually hanging around in the hill country of, say, Napal, offering girls drugged pepsis — the quote taken from John Frederick’s “The Myth of Nepal-to-India Sex Trafficking: Its Creation, Its Maintenance, and Its Influence on Anti-trafficking Interventions.” And if “swarthy strangers” are involved, it’s generally not without the complicity of local folks since, as Frederick says, it’s common sense to recognize that, in small villages, “swarthy strangers” are hardly likely to be allowed to hang around unnoticed, uncommented on, free to do their evil work.

Which complicates things so much, as Frederick takes pains to point out. What is so attractive about the narrative of an impersonal Patriarchy that abducts girls with drugged pepsis, brutalizes them into submission to sex at all, and then, once they’ve got the message, sets them to work servicing 30 johns a night? Frederick asks that question because this myth, while based on stories sensationalized in the press, is often not based on research that can, possibly, provide a more accurate picture of what’s going on. In Nepal and Taiwan, the people most implicated in trafficking are parents — that’s if you want to consider that the girls didn’t come up with the idea all by their lonesome.

Which, yeah, is complicated. The myth Frederick outlines is attractive because it constantly constructs the girl as victim in need of rescue. Strangers and foreigners impose the problem on an innocent society and the girl always resists sex until she is beaten into it. It’s true, these things happen and have happened, but in the case of Taiwan, Ho says that this isn’t quite so. So, what if it’s the case that families are the ones sending their daughters from the rural countryside to the city to turn tricks? Oppression is probably still going on, but it’s more complicated and the victimization story a little more difficult to portray — unless you’re Twisty Faster who would just call them all hayseeds and leave it at that as an explanation.

But it gets even more complicated in Ho’s story of the rise of the movement against trafficking in Taiwan. Not only does it turn out that the more difficult aspect of getting indictments and convictions is because the girls won’t testify against their parents, as the country undergoes rapid social and economic change, 30% of jr high school girls had sex and 70% became sex workers willingly. She’s basing this on several studies footnoted in the back of the article. She goes on to say that, to conform to the story of victimization in light of new statistics, the rescue industry prefers to cast the issue as one of economic victimization.

One of the consequences of this evidence coming to the fore — that even girls in sex work in Taiwan are exercising a modicum of agency (which radfems typically deny) — is that they simply changed the laws. Whereas before consent mattered, in this instance girls were constructed as incapable of giving such consent and, thus, it no longer mattered. Sex with anyone underage was simply wrong, no matter what the young girl said about it.

More on all that later.