Forced Labor

When a Civil War substitute broker told business associates that "Men is cheep here to Day," he exposed an unsettling contradiction at the heart of the Union's war effort. Despite Northerners' devotion to the principles of free labor, the war produced rampant speculation and coercive labor arrangements that many Americans labeled fraudulent.

Trafficked in America investigates how teenagers from Central America were smuggled into the U.S. by traffickers who promised them jobs and a better life - only to force them to live and work in virtual slavery to pay off their debt. This documentary shines new light on a labor trafficking case in which Guatemalan teens were forced by a third-party contractor to work against their will at Trillium Farms in Ohio, a major egg producer. The investigative team exposes a criminal network that exploited undocumented minors, the companies who profited from their forced labor, and how U.S. government policies and practices helped to deliver some teens directly to their traffickers.

Siddharth Kara is a tireless chronicler of the human cost of slavery around the world. He has documented the realities of human trafficking and forced labor in order to reveal the degrading and dehumanizing system that strips people of their dignity for the sake of profit—and to link the suffering of the enslaved to the day-to-day lives of consumers in the West.

Between 1942 and 1945, the U.S. government wrongfully imprisoned thousands of Japanese American citizens and profited from their labor. Japanese American Incarceration recasts the forced removal and incarceration of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II as a history of prison labor and exploitation.