`Loss of Dignity'

The products of slave labor enter the U.S. economy because corporations don't ask their suppliers enough questions and haven't worked to root out slavery, says Seungjin Whang, co-director of the Stanford Graduate School of Business's Global Supply Chain Management Forum in Stanford, California.

``The major companies should be jointly responsible for labor practices with their suppliers and their suppliers' suppliers,'' Whang says.

Bales of Free the Slaves says all corporations have a responsibility to find the source of products they buy and sell. ``Companies have an absolute obligation to understand what's in their supply chain and review it from a moral and a human standpoint,'' says Bales, a sociology professor at Roehampton University in London.

``Slavery is theft of life,'' he says. ``It's just about the most profound loss of human dignity that you can have, short of murder.''

In the Brazilian Amazon, dos Reis watches police and labor inspectors talk to workers at the Transcameta camp. He leans against a shack, exhausted. ``I'm still not the man I used to be,'' dos Reis says, his bloodshot eyes watering from another day in the smoke and heat. ``And I don't know if I ever will be.''

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