Article: For guest workers, a trail of abuse

Steven Greenhouse
International Herald Tribune
02-28-2007
To a rice farmer from Thailand making $500 a year, the recruiter's pitch was hard to resist three years of farm work in North Carolina that would pay him 32 times more than he earned back home.The pitch was so persuasive that the farmer, Worawut Khansamrit, put his farm up as collateral to pay the recruiter $11,000 to become a guest worker''The amount of money they promised was very attractive,'' said Khansamrit, a slight, soft-spoken 40-year-old with a 15-year-old daughter he wants to send to college.But after he arrived in North Carolina with 30 other Thai workers, there was only about a month's work for each of them. He was then ...

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