Slave Labor Victim Speaks Out

[geovalin]

Keo Rotha was sitting in his small brick house in a quiet village in Pursat province, surrounded by coconut trees and a bamboo fence, looking at his old phone while waiting for a call to tell him the results of the court case he and six other human trafficking victims had filed in the United States and Thailand against four big companies. In 2011, the 41-year-old father of three, whose wife works as a Khmer teacher at a secondary school, decided to apply for a passport and find work in Thailand in an attempt to give his wife and children a better life.

He contacted the Manpower recruitment agency in Cambodia, which sent him to Thailand through the checkpoint at Poipet along with 80 other Cambodians looking for work. After crossing the border, a bus took them to Songkhla province in Thailand’s south, near the Malaysian border, to the Phatthana Seafood Company. “In my mind, I thought that there would be a well-paying job so I could help my family and improve their lives, but after working for only a few days, I realized it was hopeless because I was forced to work with no break for a whole week and forced to work overtime,” he said.

Mr. Rotha had never been away from his hometown before and in southern Thailand, he was taken to live in an empty rented house which cost 800 baht per month. His employers moved him from house to house every one or two months, giving no reasons for the moves. “Once we started work, we worked in a shrimp factory, and after we started to work the company took our passports,” he recalled. “I had no days off and worked overtime every day, but was only paid 6,000 baht per month, much less than the 10,000 baht I had been promised.”

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