Debt bondage in human trafficking: US agriculture and Thailand fisheries primed for labour exploitation

There is a need for a transnational framework that would redefine labour trafficking in terms of debt bondage and challenge the privileges of legal contracts at the expense of migrant workers’ human and labour rights. We argue that anti-trafficking legislation in the US and Thailand is expansive in definition, but its application is too restrictive to deliver justice to the victims. The debt-labour industry easily becomes a form of transnational labour trafficking. We examine Thailand as an origin and destination country for labour trafficking through two cases involving the US and Thailand though a Marxist and liberal analysis that considers critical race theory. The limitations in which these cases could not achieve full justice represent the challenges for transnational labour rights for noncitizen migrant workers. We examine the Global Horizons agricultural labour case, 2002–2012, and Thailand’s fishing sector, which led to its Tier 3 ranking in the 2014 Trafficking in Persons Report. This report was used in international campaigns to pressurise corporate industries and retailers to change their code of conduct, necessitating considerations of the effectiveness of supply chain responsibility.