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Exploitation of Filipino domestic workers ‘widespread’ in the US, new report shows
- The highest number of labour trafficking cases reported to the National Human Trafficking Hotline in the US involved domestic workers
- Most of the victims who sought help were from the Philippines, with domestic workers from India and Indonesia also on the top 10 most vulnerable in America
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When Anna, from the Philippines, left her teaching career to earn a better wage as a nanny in the United States, she believed the opportunity would help change her life for the better.
But after being hired by a family of four in New York City, she quickly found her experience to be very different from what she had imagined.
Working 16-hour days, Anna performed endless chores: cleaning, laundry, preparing family meals and tending to the children’s needs. She spent what few hours she had to rest on a small mattress on the floor, placed between the children’s beds.
Anna is among thousands of domestic workers in the US, many of whom facing “widespread vulnerabilities and rampant exploitation”, according to a report jointly released by the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Polaris, an NGO which helps victims and survivors of human trafficking.
Most of the domestic workers trafficked by their employers were from the Philippines, with workers from India and Indonesia also among the top 10 most vulnerable in the US, the Polaris-operated National Human Trafficking Hotline learned.
The study, titled Human Trafficking at Home, found that of all labour trafficking cases – around 8,000 – reported from December 2007 to December 2017 to the national hotline, nearly a quarter, or 1,211 individual cases, involved domestic work.
About half of these workers who sought help were trafficked by their own employers.
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