As globalization accelerates, the fuel powering worldwide industry is increasingly a workforce of migrant and exploited labor. The laborers who construct foreign public works projects, provide food and laundry services to military contractors, secure embassies and other sensitive locations, and ensure that homes and workplaces abroad are clean and safe often come from the developing world, seeking to support their families back in a country that offers few jobs.
Tragically, too often these vulnerable workers fall victim to greedy and corrupt labor brokers and employers. Many foreign workers employed by U.S. contractors abroad are unlawfully denied financial benefits when they are injured or killed on the job. Other foreign workers are trafficked by brokers in a horrifying form of indentured servitude.
Handley Farah & Anderson works to halt these global injustices. Our lawyers represent foreign laborers around the world who have been denied benefits by U.S. contractors or trafficked by corrupt brokers. In dozens of cases, our lawyers have succeeding in exposing and stopping these abusive labor practices and in recovering millions of dollars for the victimized workers and their families. Handley Farah & Anderson often works closely with nonprofit organizations and public interest lawyers around the world to locate exploited foreign workers that need our help.
Denial of Death and Disability Benefits
A federal law—the Defense Base Act—requires U.S. government contractors and their subcontractors to provide financial compensation to foreign employees who are injured or killed on the job (regardless of whether the subcontractor is a U.S.-based company). Preying on the fact that many migrant workers from the developing world are unaware of their rights and remedies, employers will often choose to merely ship injured or killed employees back to their home countries without providing the compensation that those employees or their families are entitled. Handley Farah & Anderson represents those foreign workers, or their mourning families, to secure the critical financial benefits promised to them by the Defense Base Act. Our attorneys have secured millions of dollars in compensation for foreign workers and their families who were deprived of death or disability benefits by U.S. contractors and subcontractors.
Human Trafficking
Migrant workers from the developing world are often promised jobs in safe locales outside their home countries that provide wages far in excess of what they could earn at home. These workers typically pay labor brokers large sums of money for the mere opportunity to take these overseas jobs, going heavily into debt to pay the brokers’ fees. After the workers leave their home countries, the brokers and employers often treat the workers like cattle, seizing their passports and forcing them to work in unsafe places (often war zones). Payments rarely match what was promised, and efforts to leave are either logistically impossible or economically infeasible because of the heavy debts owed to the brokers. The workers are thus forced to work in virtual indentured servitude until they have earned enough money to secure their passage back to their home countries. Many are not so lucky, suffering physical and mental injuries, and sometimes death. Handley Farah & Anderson represents workers victimized by this modern form of slavery and has expertise in U.S. and international laws designed to protect against these abuses.