Publisher's Synopsis
An urgent exposition of the pervasive human trafficking that lies just beneath the surface of the US economy-from the stories of its survivors. The years of the COVID-19 pandemic have brought to light the exploitation of workers. In this moment of heightened visibility, Unbroken Chains demands that readers examine the hidden sector of American trafficked labor and understand its prevalence across our economy. Drawing from nearly two decades of research on US and international human trafficking, Melissa Ditmore sets forth the harrowing stories of human trafficking survivors and grounds their accounts in the long history of US indentured servitude, looking to its iterations in chattel slavery, Chinese contract labor, and prison labor. In this groundbreaking investigation of American trafficking, Ditmore unveils the unnerving reality that forced labor permeates many industries beyond sex work: in almost every aspect of consumption, those who create our everyday necessities are working without pay. Unbroken Chains tells these workers' stories: they are clubhouse entertainment for drug-selling gangs and door-to-door magazine salespeople in the American South. A trafficked person may have harvested your produce, sewn your clothes, or cleaned your apartment lobby. Ditmore offers readers an illuminating window into the world of forced labor that exists within our own and a road map for participating in its destruction. Unbroken Chains will include twenty images of archival trafficking documents, including letters to Eleanor Roosevelt from the families of people in compulsory prison labor in the 1940s, letters from men in forced plantation labor after the Civil War, and Colonial-era indenture contracts.
