If you are interested in this issue, please take the time to read thru
this document as I have no further information to offer.
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David Sangurima, Program Officer sangu@harvard.edu
LASPAU: Academic and Professional Programs for the Americas
Harvard University * 25 Mount Auburn St. Cambridge, MA 02138-6095 USA
Tel: 617-495-0530 * Fax: 617-495-8990 * Peacenet: sangu@igc.apc.org
*** http://www.harvard.edu/LASPAU ***
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 15:48:04 -0400
From: Lawyer3443@aol.com
Subject: Re: Library of Congress Uses Forced Labor
> I'd like to have your permission to post your
> attached reply to an academic mailing list of Latin American
> specialists (LASNET)."
Yes, that's fine.
I'd be very interested to hear about your experiences and any suggestions
you have. The notion of using the Internet--a medium born of America's
military activities--to challenge social inequities arising from the same
military-industrial complex holds an irony that I like very much. More
importantly, I think, it offers the potential for people like myself who
would not or could not "go public" with information to do so.
> I did repost your initial announcement from <misc.activism.progressive>
> to LASNET and have received several inquiries soliciting evidence of
> "labor camps". I would encourage you to try to document these allegations
> and to distribute them to appropriate fora on the Internet."
As mentioned before, this is all new to me. The purpose of my post was to
share first-hand information from credible sources about a situation that I
find untenable and that I think the public should know about. That
information, I would be the first to agree, is not exhaustive, nor is it
complete. While I would imagine one could track down the companies to whom
the Library of Congress' contracts were awarded, I don't have that
information on hand, so I can't speak to the precise conditions where third
world people are working for the Library. And I would be skeptical about
information obtained from the American contractors who employ the "third
world" labor. The only exact way to document the conditions at the facilities
where this is occuring, I would think, would be to visit them. This is
obviously not something I have done, nor can I in the near future. (While not
"documentary evidence," one can assume with some degree of certainty what
conditions might be like at a facility in China, for example, where low-wage
contract work is occurring.) Certainly the fact that the Library--according
to what I was told directly by a person in a position of authority over the
Digital Library project at the LOC--they are using American prison labor
means that they are using forced labor.
In raising the facts as they were presented to me, I was hoping to enlist the
assistance of others more experienced than myself, to communicate the
disturbing information told to me, and to encourage people who were bothered
by it to contact the project supervisor at the Library. I did not intend to
present a "60 Minutes" style report, complete with documents and "smoking
guns." I would agree that more information needs to be gathered, and I hope
that my speaking up encourages others to gather information and to find out
what they can.
I'm also interested in proceeding further, but I'm not sure how to do that. I
have no clue how to track down, for example, the names of companies that were
awarded contracts for this project. If I were to obtain that information,
then what? If conditions were abominable at the facilities where third-world
labor is employed, I wouldn't guess the American companies would be
forthcoming about it. So, the question of how to document these things in a
precise way is one that I don't know the answer to.
Thanks.
3443