The Des Moines Register from Des Moines, Iowa • Page 14

The Des Moines Register GC OPINION Friday, August 1,2003 Page15A Hometown kid fighting the new face of slavery trial counsel in the Samoan garment-factory case, called "the largest involuntary servitudeslavery prosecution in U.S. history." It was tried in Hawaii, and the factory owner was convicted of conspiring to RekhaBasu enslave the workers, among other things. Many of the Vietnamese victims were relocated to the American mainland. In 1999, DeBaca got the Department of Justice's highest firms, he followed his conscience into public service. He joined the U.S.

Justice Department civil rights division and worked police brutality, hate crimes and militia cases. Today, the 36-year-old is the Involuntary Servitude and Slavery Coordinator and is, according to former Iowa Attorney General Bonnie Campbell, "the expert in the country in trafficking prosecutions." You hear "slavery" and you think of humans in chains herded onto ships from Africa. You think of Southern plantations. You don't think of 21st-century sweatshops or prostitution rings or enslaved migrant workers in states bordering Iowa. But those are some of slavery's modern-day faces, says DeBaca, who stopped by Tuesday while visiting home.

He's helping to redefine the whole concept and its dynamics. On Wednesday, DeBaca was awarded the U.S. Attorney General's distinguished service award for his role as the lead Lou DeBaca is talking about human-trafficking cases he's prosecuted. There was the Florida prostitution ring: "They brought the girls from Mexico. They were between 14 and 22 years old, and they thought they were coming to be child-care workers or landscapers.

They were put in trailers with 10 to 15 clients a day 25 to 30 on weekends." There was the garment-factory owner in American Samoa, a U.S. territory, who imported workers from Vietnam and kept about 250 of them, mostly young women, compliant with threats, beatings, indebtedness and food deprivation. "A girl stood up to him They called her a ring leader. The Samoan workers came in and beat the Vietnamese worker. She lost her eye." Says DeBaca, "WeVe had Russian women forced to join strip clubs in El Paso, Texas.

We've had cases in Kansas and Minneapolis. People were coercing African-American women into street prostitution." marriage. "It's like the domestic-violence process. If the dependency switch has been turned on, the will is overborne by coercive forces." All of these victims share the inability to escape their situations of forced labor and mistreatment. They can be individuals a domestic servant held captive or groups, such as those forced into sex.

International outrage over the trafficking of women helped open the door to looking at other cases of human trafficking, says DeBaca. "It happens to men just as much." Not covered by the slavery and anti-trafficking statute are smuggling cases in which people voluntarily paid someone to sneak them across the border. For DeBaca, the exposure to "the underground economy and the abuses that happen in it," was only a "medium shocker." "People in the Hispanic and Asian communities are not surprised that slavery exists in the U.S.," he says. He's served under both Janet Reno and John Ashcroft, under both Bushes and Clinton. He says there's been a refreshingly bipartisan commitment on human trafficking and slavery, and that Ashcroft has intensified the effort.

But he does think stricter immigration laws have contributed to the problem because they give exploiters a weapon to wield over workers: exposure to immigration authorities. The Victims Protection Act allows undocumented workers and their families to get sanctuary. DeBaca brings a new twist to the story of local boy made good. He's not Roseanne's ex-husband or Demi Moore's actor boyfriend, and much of his work is relatively anonymous. But he's helping set the agenda on global exploitation, setting desperate victims free and bringing some of the worst offenders to justice.

Not bad for someone who planned on "doing cattle work." REKHA BASU can be reached at rbasudmreg.com or (515) 284-8584. DeBaca This was not what DeBaca imagined growing up in Huxley, attending Iowa State (1990 graduate) and planning on a career in international agricultural development was going to do cattle when the farm crisis struck. His father's job as professor of animal science had brought the Mexican-American family to central Iowa where, he says, "we were the Hispanic family for a while." So he went to law school (Michigan, class of 1993), interned with Tom Harkin and was a paralegal for Story County Attorney Mary Richards. While others drifted toward private litigation award for another case. His work helped set the stage for the bipartisan Trafficking Victims Protection Act in 2000, which made it possible to prosecute for more kinds of coercion than just physical force or threats.

A 1980s Supreme Court ruling had narrowed the criteria. Coercion can be psychological, says DeBaca. It can be the threat of being sent home to a country where you no longer have any hope of a tradtional arranged America looks like it needs time off By JOE ROBINSON industry. Some 13 percent of American companies provide no paid leave, up from 5 percent five years ago, according to the Alexandria, Society for Human Resource Man ow do Americans do it?" asked the stunned Australian I met on a remote Fijian agement. Vacations are becoming a quaint remnant of those pre- shore.

He had a twisted-up look of bafflement on his face. I'd seen that expression before on German, Swiss and British travelers. downsized days when so many, of us weren't doing the jobs of He was referring to LOS ANGELES TIMES SYNDICATE the feat of Americans managing to live with I 1 the stingiest vacation allotment in the industrialized world 8.1 days after a year on the job, 10.2 days after three 1 1 -f i three people. The result is unrelieved stress, burnout, absenteeism, rising medical costs, diminished productivity and the loss of time for life and family. While doing a survey for a book on how we can be productive and have a life at the same time, I've heard all about the vanishing vacation.

An aerospace worker from Seattle asked: "What happened to families and the reason we go to work to begin with?" That's a question we've lost sight of. After writing about our vacation deficit disorder, I decided three years ago to start a grass-roots campaign to lobby for a law mandating a minimum of three weeks of paid leave. Since then, thousands of Americans have signed a supporting petition, and many have volunteered poignant tales from the overworked-place, such as the 35-year-old victim of a heart attack whose doctor attributed 100 percent of his ailment to unrelieved job stress, or the 50-year-old engineer who was downsized to a job that offered zero paid to occur, said one study, which is why long weekends aren't vacations. An annual vacation can also cut the risk of heart attack by 30 percent in men and 50 percent in women. When I was on vacation in the medieval city of Evora, Portugal, I visited a bizarre little church whose walls, columns and ceiling are plastered with the femurs, tibias and skulls of hundreds of 16th-century monks and nuns.

The Chapel of Bones was designed by a creative sort to aid in the contemplation of mortality. It provided a very good reality check, particularly the words inscribed over the doorway: "We the bones already in here are just waiting for the arrival of yours." Words to remember the next time someone wants to downsize your downtime into a long weekend. JOE ROBINSON Is the author of "Work to Live: The Guide to Getting a Lite" (Perigee) and founder of the Work to Live Campaign. This was written for the Washington Post. piling on guilt.

The message, overt or implied, is that it would be a burden on the company to take all your vacation days or any. Employees get the hint: One out of five employees say they feel guilty taking their vacation, reports Expedia's survey. Evidence shows that time off is not the enemy of productivity, it's the engine. Rested employees perform better than zombies, as fatigue studies have demonstrated since the 1920s. One study showed that if you work seven 50-hour weeks in a row, you'll get no more done than if you worked seven 40-hour weeks in a row.

Yet we have made work style how long, how torturously more important than how well we do the job. The tab paid by business for job stress is $150 billion a year, according to one study. Yet vacations can cure even the worst form of stress burnout by regathering crashed emotional resources, say researchers. But it takes two weeks for this process leave. In the early '90s, Juliet Schor called attention to skyrocketing work weeks and declining free time in her book, "The Overworked American." Things have gotten worse since then.

We're logging more hours on the job than we have since the 1920s. Almost 40 percent of us work more than 50 hours a week. And just before House members took off on a month-plus vacation, they opted to pile more work onto American employees by approving the White House's rewrite of wage-and-hour regulations, which would turn anyone who holds a "position of responsibility" into a salaried employee required to work unlimited overtime for no extra Pay-Vacations are downsized by the same forces that brought us soaring workweeks: labor cutbacks, a sense of false urgency created by tech tools, fear and, most of all, guilt. Managers use the climate of job insecurity to stall, cancel and abbreviate paid leave, while years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Aussie, who takes every minute of his annual five weeks off (four of them guaranteed by law), couldn't fathom a ration of only one or two weeks of freedom a year.

"I'd have to check myself into the loony bin," he declared. Well, welcome to the cuckoo's nest, mate otherwise known as the United States. Vacations are microscopic, and shrinking. A survey by the Internet travel company Expedia.com has found that Americans will take 10 percent less vacation time this year than last too much work to get away, said respondents. This continues a trend that has seen the average vacation Americans take buzz-sawed to a long weekend, according to the travel Double standard taints terrorism prosecution Hot hot hotter hen is a scientific fact not a scientific fact? When the fact concerns climate change.

Over the past decade, an enormous number of scientists, ranging from those who study wildlife By JONATHAN TURLEY ecently, an internal report of the Justice Department con-El fl firmed long-alleged abuses of Arab-Americans in detention migration to those who measure polar icecaps, have found evidence that Earth's climate is changing. Few now doubt that Earth's temperatures is rising or that greenhouse gases, produced when fossil fuel is burned, are at least partly responsible. Since President Bush's administration has engaged in a strange game in trying to deny that Earth's climate is changing, while simultaneously pretending that even if it changes, it doesn't matter. References to climate change have been excised from Environmental and questioned the basis for their arrests. Attorney General John Ashcroft dismissed the findings and stated that government efforts to detain terrorism including conspiracy "to participate in a violent jihad" and being part of a Kashmir terrorist group.

The government put great weight on the fact that the men participated in paintball games in Virginia. Although the government does have evidence that some of the men had contacts with a Kashmir terrorist group, it has no evidence of any terrorist plot. A federal magistrate granted bail to four of the men, holding that the government's claim that they presented a danger "simply does not hold water." The sweeping charges against these men stand in sharp contrast with the charges against non-Muslim defendants. When it comes to terrorism cases, all citizens are equal but some are more equal than others. JONATHAN TURLEY, a law professor at George Washington University, wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.

his wife, Kristi Lea Persinger, plotted their own terror war. When the police were called to their house in a domestic dispute in 2002, they discovered an arsenal that included 30 bombs, mines, 30 to 40 guns, light-armor rockets, machine guns, sniper rifles and grenades. They found plans to blow up 50 mosques and to "liquidate" Muslims. Goldstein was charged not with terrorism but with civil-rights violations and sentenced to a paltry 122 years for conspiracy to violate civil rights. Persinger was given a mere three years in prison about what you might get for tax evasion.

Is there any question what the charge would be if an Arab-American or Muslim were found with such an arsenal and plans to bomb churches or synagogues or to kill a member of Congress? Consider the arrest of 11 Muslims who face 42 criminal counts, planning a reign of terror on Arab-Americans to give them "a wake-up call" by destroying one of their "filthy mosques." This conspiracy allegedly included a plan to assassinate California Congressman Darrell Issa, who is of Lebanese descent. Recently, Krugel confessed to a plot to blow up a mosque in Culver City, Calif. Krugel was given immunity and is reportedly sharing information on other attacks, including the 1985 bombing death of Arab-American civil-rights leader Alex Odeh. Although Ashcroft has promised to prosecute accused terrorists to the fullest extent of the law and reject deals, Krugel was given a generous plea bargain and immunity and is likely to receive a mere 13-year sentence. The government chose not to charge Krugel as a terrorist but instead charged him with civil-rights violations.

In Florida, Robert Goldstein and Protection Agency reports. Carbon dioxide the main greenhouse gas has been left out of air-pollution legislation. The administration's announcement of yet another vast "climate change" study has to be greeted with skepticism. If the goal is to combine the expertise of the many government departments and scientific bodies that study this issue, that's fine: Climate change is still poorly understood, and the impact of global warming on international weather patterns, ecosystems and water and land use is unclear. But if the goal is to pretend, for another decade or so, that global warming isn't happening, or that the effect of greenhouse gases is still in doubt, then the study will generate more paper (and needlessly kill trees that could mitigate the problem).

Love it or hate it, it is time carbon-emissions control receives serious suspects were applied in the same way to all citizens. However, recent cases seem to confirm a glaring double standard applied to Arab-Americans and Muslims that can be neither denied nor defended. Consider Earl Krugel and Robert Goldstein. Krugel is the former West Coast coordinator of the Jewish Defense League. He was recorded in meetings in October 2001 with alleged co-conspirators treatment.

Bogus mumblings about science "not having proved anything" can no longer be taken seriously. From the Washington Post.