How Do We Break The Supply Chain?

Imagine, says Northeastern assistant professor Shawn Bhimani, the plight of a migrant worker who cannot find work.

“Come work for me,” a prospective employer says to the worker. “I’ll pay you $14 an hour.”

So begins an ugly cycle of exploitation. The worker is transported to a farm, where her actual salary is reduced to, say, $8 per hour. Then she learns that most or all of her salary is being seized by the employer to pay for her airfare as well as her rent. And she worries about complaining to law enforcement because her employer has confiscated her passport.

This is one of the many scenarios that three Northeastern professors will be researching as part of an investigation of human trafficking in U.S. agriculture. They intend to map and evaluate the human supply chains to determine the key areas of vulnerability, with the goal of engineering ways to disrupt those trafficking systems, over the course of a three-year study. They hope to create models of disruption that can be applied to other sectors of human trafficking, which is estimated to victimize more than 24 million people worldwide.

“There is a fallacy that trafficking is happening in some foreign place,” says Bhimani, a visiting assistant professor in the D’Amore-McKim School of Business. “It’s happening in our local areas, across our country, across the world. And we are all connected to it.”

Studies of human trafficking tend to focus on its products and services—including food, clothes, and sex. But the Northeastern researchers are taking a different approach by focusing on the human supply chain and those who are victimized by it.

“We’re kind of flipping it and looking at the other side,” says Kayse Maass, an assistant professor in the College of Engineering. “We’re saying, how did the human beings get from the point of wherever they’re originating to the point of exploitation? And how do we break the supply chain?”

Their research, funded by a $574,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate human trafficking in American agriculture.

To read the full story by Ian Thomsen on News@Northeastern: Click Here

Category: International Law