July 16, 2008
Man Pleads Guilty to Holding a Slave
From the AP via WTOP, it seems a Montgomery County man has pleaded guilty to holding a Nigerian teenager as a slave for five years. George Udeozor, 52, smuggled a 14-year-old Nigerian girl to the U.S. and used the girl as an unpaid domestic servant and child care provider. Sounds like that new Montgomery County law requiring contracts for domestic workers couldn't have come at a better time.
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Title is a bit misleading.
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What if the contract specifically included "unpaid domestic servant and child care provider" duties, hmmmm?
(kidding- especially since one of the backers of the MoCo bill specifically said "This is about domestic workers; it's not about immigrant workers")
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Ironically, the law passed by the Montgomery County Council would not apply. The legislation defines a domestic worker as:
A slave does not perform service for wages, and therefore would not be covered by the legislation.[ report this ]
I believe it was the Fourteenth Amendment to our Constitution that defines a slave and is suppose to protect unpaid domestic workers.
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"Holding a slave" sounds more like what Thomas Jefferson allegedly did on a regular basis than what is actually happening here.
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What a title. Did you guys just get bought out by Fox News Corp?
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Um, how is the title misleading? She was a young girl forced to provide unpaid labor for a period of years, while being phsyically and sexually abused. How else would you define "slave"?
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Dude, you DC gummint-worshipping nimrods never cease to crack me up. It would be funny, except for the fact that you retards vote.
This guy was already breaking numerous laws: HE WAS KEEPING A SLAVE for crissakes. How the hell would another law delaing with domestic servents would have had somehow prevented this guy from doing what he did?
Wait, maybe he'd do this:
"Well, I see in the paper that now I have to register someone doing domestic work for me in this county...guess I'll have to tell them about the slave I have chained up in the basement...!"
I'm sure the law requiring you to tell the County about the domestic servents you employ is regressive in its own right, and will be one more hurdle for folks who want to work and people who want to employ them from doing something productive. The supposition that it would have prevented this crime is so far past moronic that I can't even stand to make fun of the assertion anymore.
Thanks,
Burt
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I used to teach ESL to adult immigrants. Many of the women I taught were domestics, nannies, maids, servants, babysitters, whatever you want to call them. A lot were from South America, such as Colombia, Bolivia and Peru and Chile. They always preferred to work for American families, since we paid American wages, while the foreign national employers often paid what people would earn back home. I'm glad the practice described in the article has finally been outlawed. Though none of my students were ever totally unpaid, I know there was exploitation going on.