What is an International Labor Violation?

Defendants argue that they have done nothing wrong and that they offer relatively good jobs in a poor, dangerous, and war-torn country…. On the motion to dismiss the ATS claims, defendants’ central argument is that the Complaint does not actually allege violations of international law standards that are sufficiently specific, universal, and obligatory to support relief under the ATS…. The adult plaintiffs in this case rely on several international agreements to show that their working conditions violate international law…. Yet the very concept of forced labour, as set out in the ILO standards on the subject, is still not well understood. In many quarters the term continues to be associated mainly with the forced labour practices of totalitarian regimes: the flagrant abuses of Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union or Pol Pot’s Cambodia. At the other end of the spectrum, such terms as “modern slavery”, “slavery-like practices” and “forced labour” can be used rather loosely to refer to poor or insalubrious working conditions, including very low wages….

The adult plaintiffs in this case allege that they are “kept on the Plantation by poverty, fear, and ignorance of the outside world, living in a cycle of poverty and raising their children to be the next generation of Firestone Plantation Workers.” The adult plaintiffs allege that they seek the simple justice of the freedom [to] choose whether to work, the opportunity to work free of coercion, the security of a proper employment relationship, the benefit of wages that do not leave them in malnourished poverty, and the meager benefits provided under the law of Liberia, including rest days and holidays. Most of all, they seek the cessation of conditions that formed the premise of the Firestone Plantation, and that have left them in the same situation as their own fathers, watching their own children join them as tappers with no future other than the misery they have experienced their entire lives. Anyone can appreciate these most basic human aspirations, even from the comfortable distance between Liberia and Indiana. The relief plaintiffs seek, however, and the changes that would resolve their complaints, show that the conditions about which they complain are not “forced labor” as that term is used in any specific, universal, and obligatory norm of international law….

Plaintiffs allege instead that they are being kept on the job by the effects of “poverty, fear, and ignorance.” As powerful as these forces may be, they are qualitatively different from armed troops keeping kidnapped and deported workers in labor camps. Higher wages, rest days and holidays, and the security of a proper employment relationship, better housing, education, and medical care are all understandable desires. But better wages and working conditions are not the remedy for the forced labor condemned by international law. The remedy for truly forced labor should be termination of the employment and the freedom to go elsewhere….

The court does not mean to diminish the plaintiffs’ desires or their fears of the future they face if they lose their jobs or leave the Plantation. But the fact that the plaintiffs face worse prospects elsewhere in Liberia cannot be equated with an employer’s use of force or coercion to keep workers on the job….

The court assumes that the plaintiffs do not have better choices available to them as a practical matter. But the absence of those better choices is not the legal responsibility of these defendants. Under the standards of international law, Firestone is not responsible for Liberia’s poverty, its history of civil war, or the dangers its people face.

Firestone has argued, national child labor laws and international conventions on child labor are often written to allow even very young children to help out on family farms. Those special accommodations for family farms have no application here. Plaintiffs do not challenge labor practices on subsistence farms. They challenge the practices of a huge multinational corporate family that hires the children’s parents and then (allegedly) encourages the parents to require their young children to do much of the work. Plaintiffs allege that defendants have set the daily production quotas so high that use of child labor is both necessary and inevitable, and that defendants take advantage of the parents in this situation…. The allegations that defendants are encouraging and even requiring parents to require their children as young as six, seven, or ten years old to do this heavy and hazardous work may state a claim for relief under the ATS.