ANDRE BAGOO Sunday, August 30 2009

WITH ALL OF the dramatic developments going on in the Uff Commission of Inquiry, one key issue that demands attention has been overlooked.

The inquiry was mandated by President George Maxwell Richards, on the advice of Cabinet, to look into “the performance of local and foreign contractors” at work on public sector projects. That would include the work done by the many Chinese firms currently in the country.

It is no secret that such firms employ hundreds of Chinese workers who have been shipped into this country under questionable circumstances. In fact, there are serious reports that many Chinese firms, currently at work on some of the glittering glass and steel structures that are changing Port-of-Spain’s skyline, are in fact practising nothing less than human trafficking.

Sadly, the plight of Chinese workers and the reports of the trafficking of these workers to our twin island Republic has occupied approximately zero percent of the proceedings thus far in the Uff inquiry; an inquiry that has been dogged, from day one, by a serious lack of resources relative to its exhaustive mandate.

It is understandable that the Uff commission has had to focus on other issues, some of them alarming and others more frivolous, but on tomorrow’s anniversary of our Independence Day let us not forget those men–and some women–who live in cut-out metal containers on Charlotte Street and elsewhere as they work on the shiny National Academy for the Performing Arts.

It is reported that the Chinese workers not only live in cramped conditions, but they are lured to our country and then not paid their full salary when they arrive here.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime defines human trafficking as the “recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.”

That definition would capture the hundreds of Chinese workers brought here who–according to reports from some Chinese nationals–are told that this country is a beautiful place and that they will be “taken care of” and then when they arrive are not paid their full salaries, but instead subsistence allowances. Additionally, some are made to work overtime without pay.

The workers are also told that they will get full payment at the end of their contracts, ostensibly to avoid absorption into the host society and to prevent them from dissipating their monies prematurely. Was that a reason, perhaps, why 22-year-old Chinese national Xiao Suc Hao jumped to his death at the Port-of-Spain Waterfront?

It takes no stretch of the imagination to make a comparison of all this to the history of the arrival of slaves–and then indentured workers — to these islands centuries ago. And while we may celebrate our “Independence” — which in the views of many has been a disastrous exercise in the savage machinations of a perpetual racial politics–to what extent are we now committing the same mistakes of our pre-Independence past? To say that we are moving to first world status and simultaneously turn a blind eye to what is happening to the Chinese workers here is to commit a perversion so malefic that generations will look back on our time with shame.

Email: abagoo@newsday.co.tt