Agricultural Labor Trafficking | State | willistonherald.com

The population of the Bakken has grown significantly since 2010, and with it, concerns about labor trafficking.

“We have a very diverse and vulnerable population,” Hellandsaas said. “We used to have kids in school from every state in the nation except Alaska. This is why the summit is so important to learn more about human trafficking.”

The Agricultural Worker Project (AWP) is a specialized unit with Southern Minnesota Legal Services (SMRLS). They provide legal representation, outreach education, to low-income agricultural workers. SMRLS cover the entire state of Minnesota and North Dakota. SMRLS focus is on employment related matters regarding wage, discrimination, retaliation, and unpaid overtime. Minnesota and North Dakota do not provide unpaid overtime for their agricultural workers. Minnesota and North Dakota provide unemployment insurance benefits and food stamps.

Elise Riveness, Manager and Outreach Coordinator for the Agricultural Worker Project works to design a labor trafficking outreach program and respond to labor trafficking.

Lead Attorney, Griselt Andrade with the Agricultural Worker Project was at one time a migrant worker herself working in the sugar beet fields of the Red River Valley. Andrade saw the opportunity to use her legal education to improve the lives of farmworkers in Minnesota and North Dakota. She's passionate about helping farmworkers and their families have access to justice, and works zealously to ensure they maintain freedom of hunger, homelessness, sickness, abuse and discrimination.

“AWP works with individual laborers who go out to do traditional fieldwork: weeding, rock picking, harvesting, operating machinery, as well as individuals working at nurseries, greenhouses and forestry workers and individuals who work with live animals in the form of raising and caring for them such as livestock,” Andrade said.

“One change is now we can assist year round workers in such areas as the dairy industry which is a year round profession,” Andrade said. “We do not represent meat packers. AWP does represent cannery workers. We have a lot of vegetable county packing facilities.”

AWP is funded by the Legal Services Corporation federally, with strict guidelines on what is allowed. The Legal Services Corporation does an agricultural worker estimate occasionally. In 2021 there were more than 20,300 agricultural workers in North Dakota. Of those, 12,000 were eligible for services through AWP. In Minnesota there are more than 54,000 agricultural workers and 46,000 were eligible for services.

Labor trafficking's federal definition is the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.

While labor trafficking indicators are often considered as red flags for the crime of labor trafficking, just as in sex trafficking, a case can only be sustained by law enforcement if it can be proved that the trafficker used “force, fraud, or coercion” against the victims to exploit them.

The concepts of “force, fraud and coercion” are applied in detecting and determining cases of labor trafficking during labor trafficking screening/assessments, investigation and prosecution.

Responding to human trafficking as labor trafficking, specifically the cultural worker project, requires meeting established and defined labor trafficking identifiers.

Labor exploitation can be broad, such as working long hours, 20 hour days, with very few breaks and very limited time off, but is not necessarily considered human trafficking. The worker may still have the freedom to move around, or quit their job, and there are no laws that an employer cannot require these work conditions.

Labor violations are defined as not receiving a minimum wage, working without pay, having illegal deductions taken from daily, weekly or monthly pay when you have not authorized them, and physical abuse.

Smuggling can be voluntary or involuntary movement of individuals across state or country borders. How the individuals were smuggled is key in determining whether it's labor trafficking. If a smuggled individual is moved to a work area once they arrive and are then required by the smuggler to repay the smuggler fee through work, they are essentially having to work for free. This is called debt bondage, and meets the legal definition for labor trafficking.

Many labor exploitations are not listed under the definition of labor trafficking making them hard to identify and prosecute, but once a laborer is denied paid wages, that is a red flag for legal violations. From there, human trafficking can then generally be established as a crime.