Here’s a quick video of me [K.G.] as I was taking off from SFO to start the LaborVoices pilot. (HD video for this pilot was my excuse for getting the new iPhone. The audio was was not a selling point.)

Things have been going well, so far. I just wrapped up a week in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, and am now meeting folks in Mumbai, Maharashtra, to scout for more activities, post-pilot. Next week, I head to Bangalore, where we’ll start the pilot in earnest. Wish us luck!

Oh, and should we do more of these?

By the way, LaborVoices was incorporated as of 6 July 2010.

Here’s to selling out!

Okay, we get it already. (by gordasm)

There’s a mention of “crowd-sourcing to stop human trafficking” in this article, which just screams of LaborVoices.

Fun fact: I [K.G.] worked with Jared Cohen briefly on the Internet Freedom circuit during my stint at State. I’ll have to ping him about LaborVoices on my next swing through D.C.

I just had a great meeting with World of Good, based in Berkeley. They’ve been thinking and experimenting along parallel lines to LaborVoices, especially with work in Peru and scouting in India. I’m excited to finally find a potential partner working in this space. It’s even better, since they’re a non-profit; that strangely opens up ways for us to collaborate instead of competing.

caravanle:

“Second only to demands for higher wages are workers’ insistence that employers treat them humanely. […] One supervisor in a Ha Noi factory owned by Canon, Inc., after turning down two workers’ request to take time off for personal reasons, made sure the women did not leave by tying their legs to their work stations.”

—

“Workers’ Protests in Contemporary Vietnam,” by Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet

The opportunity has arisen for LaborVoices to do some work in Vietnam. So, during the July-September pilot, I may be making a quick trip there to scope things out. Of course, working in Vietnam means working very closely with the Vietnamese government. I expect one of our biggest challenges (beyond getting permission to operate) will be making it crystal clear to workers how much monitoring and filtering the government will likely be putting on the system. At the end of the day, I’m not sure how LaborVoices-Vietnam will be able to interface with the broader LaborVoices system. Of paramount importance is ensuring that participating workers know what they’re getting into, and to avoid endangering them any further. Any ideas on how to work in Vietnam, or how to firewall or harmonize between heavily-surveilled and -censored systems and secure, non-censored ones?

Any other ideas on next countries LaborVoices should target, after the India pilot? Partners we should work with?

These mobile-organizing examples keep cropping up. Some friends at the Solidarity Center were just mentioning that Filipino labor organizers are using very similar techniques. It makes sense; folks have developed mobile technology for human rights purposes, and their strengths so far have been in blasts—pushing information out to activists, fielding reports of human rights violations, complete with location information.

LaborVoices will be an interesting complement to these approaches, since we’re focusing on using the same mobile technologies to build stable, searchable, accurate, and timely reputations of employers and labor recruiters. If today’s SMS organizing is like a chat room, then the LaborVoices system is more like a wiki. If we do it right, it might even be the Wikipedia of migrant labor, made by workers, for workers.

In China, a Labor Movement Aided by Modern Technology - NYTimes.com

I worked closely with the State Department office that produced this report, and they are very careful about their findings. So, we should take this report very seriously.

There are a couple of ways to tackle human trafficking that boil down to 1) enforcement and 2) education.

Enforcement—prosecuting those responsible for trafficking, disrupting trafficking networks—is typically handled on the government side, which is where the State Department and other concerned governments put much of their pressure. The point here is that governments should bear the responsibility to protect victims of trafficking (instead of prosecuting them for prostitution, illegal immigration, etc.) and prosecute the traffickers, the exploiters.

Education—preventing victims from being tricked or coerced into trafficking—is typically handled by NGOs, unions, and community organizations, funded by foundations and governments. The U.S. government funds these efforts overseas, including in India (State and USAID), as well as here in the US (DHS, Dept. of Labor).

One of the explicit goals of LaborVoices is to fight human trafficking, primarily through education, and secondarily feeding information into enforcement. That said, the first beneficiaries from LaborVoices will likely not be trafficking victims, but rather victims of more mild labor abuses, such as missed wages, or poor working conditions. Trafficking victims will likely be less comfortable speaking out at first, until we have a broad network of support.

Another explicit goal of LaborVoices is to broaden its reach to cover the entire world, including the US. To that end, we’ve been reaching out to Latino labor groups to engage them in LaborVoices, but have not had too much success, as yet. I could use help connecting with these groups, but this may have to wait until after the LaborVoices pilot wraps up in October.

wonderlandwire:

The lawyer for a woman claiming she was raped by a KBR worker says that as many as 20 of the company’s female employees allege they were sexually assaulted while working for the company.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that the bottom-of-the-pyramid workers aren’t the only ones that need protection. I wonder how many of the 20 women allegedly abused by KBR wouldn’t have been, had the first few been able to safely warn them and other workers away from the company? How quickly might regulators, and even KBR itself, have addressed the problem if there were clear, unambiguous and public reports on these abuses from the beginning?

This is what LaborVoices is for—helping workers protect each other, worldwide.

I’m often asked how LaborVoices intends to compile Yelp-like reputations for employers. The short answer is that we’re gathering that information from current workers, themselves. The eventual goal is a search-able, multilingual database of worker opinions on employers, placement agents, and others. To get there, we’re taking several smaller steps.

The pilot phase of LaborVoices will be completely voice-based, in local languages (Hindi, Kannada, Gujarati, etc.) in a Q & A format. Potential migrants ask questions by leaving voicemail-like queries, and current workers at the destination answer those questions. This creates a kind of voicemail forum, where every time someone answers your thread, you get a missed-call that lets you know to check for new answers.

Later stages will begin by cleaning up and harmonizing the data, itself. This process will involve first tagging the queries and interchanges (Delhi vs. Bangalore, construction vs. transportation industries), then translation and transcription into an English-language backbone database.

Then the magic happens. The real coup will happen in the last stage, where worker opinions are rolled-up into reputation information for sectors and location (Delhi construction workers think X about their employers) and then broken down by smaller regions and individual employers. Eventually, we want workers to be able to safely identify their employers upfront; this part may need to be delayed until the number of workers involved is big enough to ensure anonymity.

Are there better ways to approach this? We’re all ears.

diyorgasms:

“And you, young engineer, you who dream of improving the lot of the workers by the application of science to industry - what a sad disappointment, what terrible disillusions await you! You devote the useful energy of your mind to working out the scheme of a railway which, running along the brink of precipices and burrowing into the very heart of mountains of granite, will bind together two countries which nature has separated. But once at work, you see whole regiments of workers decimated by privations and sickness in this dark tunnel - you see others of them returning home carrying with them, maybe, a few pence, and the undoubted seeds of consumption; you see human corpses - the results of a groveling greed - as landmarks along each yard of your road; and, when the railroad is finished, you see, lastly, that it becomes the highway for the artillery of an invading army…”

—

Kropotkin - An Appeal to the Young