Thomas Frank: Modern Slavery Comes to Kansas

Workers who were exploited abroad tend to be exploited here.

Prairie Village, Kan.

Back in grade school our teachers would take us to the statehouse in Topeka, Kan., and maneuver us in front of John Steuart Curry's terrifying mural of John Brown, trying to make abolitionism seem fresh and vivid. But we were children of the 1970s and knew that slavery was a brutish subject from long ago. This was the modern world. If we thought about such things at all, we understood that the concerns of our time were matters like inflation and the Problem of Conformity.

Over the intervening years, however, bonded labor has made a comeback, spotted by journalists in places like Saipan. And now it has apparently come all the way home, from the exotic periphery to the beige office building you pass every day in your air-conditioned sedan.

On May 27, a federal grand jury indictment was unsealed accusing a group of 12 people, mainly Uzbekistanis along with a company called Giant Labor Solutions, of running a labor trafficking ring in Kansas City, Mo., and its suburbs. If the indictment is to be believed, the scam involved the same sort of debt-bondage tricks that have pushed workers elsewhere into servitude for years.