Sweatshop Slavery in Jersey

Sex slavery usually gets the headlines and is serious - to be sure - but most modern slavery involves labor slaves to supply many of us with what we thought were legitimate low cost goods and services at places like Wal-Mart who spends way too much in trying to appear family friendly of late since we and they have practically underwritten much of the outsourcing of what used to be jobs in the US. Rant done, its - grin - safe again.

clipped from www.nj.com From hair salons to court, to face forced-labor charges The West African nation of Togo is a small and mountainous sliver of land where villagers scratch livings from cassava fields and phosphate mines. It was there, amid mud-thatched houses and dusty marketplaces, that a successful textile merchant named Akouavi Kpade Afolabi allegedly recruited about 20 girls between the ages of 10 and 19 and promised them better lives in New Jersey. Once the girls arrived, she forced them to work 14-hour days without pay in hair-braiding salons in Newark and East Orange, binding them into submission through beatings and threats of voodoo curses, authorities say.