Forced labor = Slave labor

It's sad to think that forced labor is a thing of the past, left behind with the defeat of Hitler and Tojo and the dissolution of empires such as British, French, Belgian and Italian but forced labor is still with us and it's pretty much widespread through out China, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and other parts of the developing world. Saudi Arabia is a country which is guilty of trafficking in slavery and yet the US does not seem to mind. What a shame. The UN is impotent too as sanctions are very limited in scope.

According to CIA Fact book; current situation: about 600,000 to 800,000 people, mostly women and children, are trafficked annually across national borders, not including millions trafficked within their own countries; at least 80% of the victims are female; 75% of all victims are trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation; roughly two-thirds of the global victims are trafficked intra-regionally within East Asia and the Pacific (260,000 to 280,000 people) and Europe and Eurasia (170,000 to 210,000 people)
Tier 2 Watch List: Argentina, Armenia, Belarus, Burundi, Cambodia, Central African Republic, Chad, China, Cyprus, Djibouti, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Fiji, The Gambia, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, India, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Libya, Macao, Mauritania, Mexico, Moldova, Mozambique, Papua New Guinea, Russia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates
Tier 3: Algeria, Bahrain, Burma, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Kuwait, Malaysia, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Uzbekistan, Venezuela.

The following article in Newsweek explains:

INTERNATIONAL

Bottom of the Barrel

Millions of Asian workers producing goods sold here are trapped in servitude.

Photos: Mark Ralston / AFP-Getty Images (left); Tengku Bahar / AFP-Getty Images

Some of the world's leading computer makers don't want you to know about Local Technic Industry. It's a typical Malaysian company, one of many small makers of the cast-aluminum bodies for hard-disk drives used in just about every name-brand machine on the market. But that's precisely the problem: it's a typical Malaysian company.

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