Slavery may seem like a quaint notion in a 21st century world, but that distinction is lost on up to 40,000 Brazilians who find themselves toiling for no real wages and can't leave the distant work camps where they live, CNN reported.
Brazilian government officials and human rights activists call it slave labor, a condition they are aggressively trying to eradicate. A special government task force established in 1995 says it freed 4,634 workers last year in 133 raids on large farms and businesses that rely on workers driven to take these jobs by hunger and the empty promises of labor recruiters.
"Slavery is the tail end of a lot of abuse of poor people and workers in Brazil," said Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based policy center. "Bad treatment reaches over to abusive treatment to treatment that becomes virtual slavery."
