EMAIL SIGN UP!
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
We've Got to Stamp Out Modern Slavery
Workers are powerless against the contractors used by multinationals who relocate to wherever production is cheapest
The re-emergence of slavery on ships off West Africa is profoundly shocking but it is not a surprise. Last week slavery its modern form came to light in cases of forced labour uncovered on trawlers fishing for the European market. In a haunting echo of the 18th century triangular trade, west African workers were found off the coast of Sierra Leone on board boats where they lived and worked in ships' holds with less than a metre of head height, sometimes for 18 hours a day for no pay, packed like sardines to sleep in spaces too small to stand up, with their documents taken from them and no means of escape.
It is no accident that globalisation has seen the reemergence of slavery. The human degradation off West Africa is replicated elsewhere. I first came across modern slavery when investigating the UK chicken supply chain in Thailand in 2002. UK retailers and manufacturers now source much of their cheap commodity chicken from Asian factories. On the subcontracted farms around Bangkok that supply the international poultry processing factories I found illegal Burmese migrants trapped in debt bondage and forced labour. Fifteen Burmese refugees, interviewed for me by the American Centre for International Labour Solidarity, described sleeping in one room on the floor working whatever hours their Thai boss required of them, without pay and without a day off for two months. They had been kept in order by violence and by the threat of deportation if they complained.
In Brazil, investigating the explosion in soya production in the Amazon region for my book Eat Your Heart Out, I heard of the slaves found on farms being cleared in the rainforest. A Dominican priest, Xavier Plassat, who campaigns to free them told me how he had just returned with government swat squads from a farm 60km off the road where 200 workers were being kept in slavery, labouring without pay, deprived of freedom of movement and controlled by debt bondage. They had no clean water and little food and were living 30 to a room. Plassat believed slavery and agribusiness were inextricably linked. Monoculture for export, the large-scale intensive farming dominated by transnational corporations (TNC), and favoured by trade rules and international financial institutions, had created the conditions for slavery by eliminating the traditional small scale farming that provided food for 60% of the Brazilian population. He is not alone. Kevin Bales, the great expert on modern slavery, has shown how driving peasant farmers off the land has created a new supply of dispossessed workers who can be pressed into this condition.
Expansionist agriculture and empires have always depended on slave labour, as Latin authors of the Roman empire complained centuries ago. Today, we live in an era when the dominant powers don't officially "do" empire, so economic control takes a new privatised form in the TNC. Modern slavery has evolved to match. The straightforward ownership of chattel slavery is gone, replaced instead by an outsourced, subcontracted kind of control over people, which can be terminated when they have served their purpose. The transnationals universally abhor any idea of slavery or forced labour and yet it is found in their supply chains. Slaves and exploited migrants, often driven into migration by the squeeze on family agriculture, are what make the economics of today's agribusiness work.
In a globalised world, footloose corporations have relocated to wherever labour and resources are cheapest. And then in order to compete, companies in the developed world have reimported the labour conditions of the least developed countries with the fewest protections back to Europe and the US. So even in rural England I have found examples of debt-bonded South African workers and Anti-Slavery International finds itself taking up the plight of Mexican farm workers suffering extreme exploitation in California.
It was in part revulsion among consumers of the products of slavery in the 19th century that led to the movement to abolish it.
The sugar trade of the 17th and 18th centuries unlocked the power of mass consumption in England. Slaves on the plantations of the Caribbean laboured to produce it, creating wealth that mostly returned to Britain, and for others to accumulate capital. They paid with their lives. But it was also the sugar trade that threw up one of the earliest examples of ethical shopping.
An early 19th century sugar bowl in London's Museum of Docklands is inscribed with the message: "East India Sugar not made by Slaves. By Six Families using East India instead of West India sugar, one less slave is required." Like so much ethical shopping it exposes its own limitations. Abolishing slavery in the 19th century required reform of a whole political and economic system.
How should we respond to news of slavery re-emerging today? Stamping it out needs as big an overhaul of prevailing power structures as previously. And yet, it was on small tokens of concern that a political movement against slavery was originally built. It's time we made our revulsion clear again.
- Posted in
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
18 Comments so far
Show AllTo end slavery you must first end capitalism.
Hoa binh
Global capitalists' strategy for ultimate maximization of profit is to revamp global demographics to 2 million billionaires and 7 million slaves...no middle class anywhere in the world.
The global capitalists are well on their way to reaching this goal, there are more slaves on earth today than there have ever been.
Perhaps Felicity Lawrence should venture further into the world before uttering ignorant banalities like "The straightforward ownership of chattel slavery is gone"
Perhaps she should go to the Sudan and tell the real chattel slaves there they are free? Perhaps she should find out what would happen to her if she tried to take one of those pieces of property from the owner?
And she has just discovered that when workers enter a country illegally, they can be exploited and held in virtual slavery or in countries that are less developed, the government itself is involved in what essentially is the old "chain gang" labor force?
When you advocate lawlessness, why be surprised when thats what you get?
Woah! Slow your roll. Lawrence qualified the term with "straightforward". This means frank and open. All she said was that open admission to using owning slaves was gone. The practice has a new format - it's called by different names, it's concealed in some way or has a different name, but it still exists. That's what that means.
Time - she probably has been ware of the exploitation of illegal workers or the practice of chattel slavery for some time, as everyone else has, but has not written about it till this week.
You've misconstrued completely and are mistaken in your conclusion that, in this article, she is "advocating lawlessness". She wouldn't be writing this piece unless she was unhappy about modern slavery and was trying to raise awareness.
Most of us here are already aware of it, so I would criticize the article with a resounding "So what else is new?"
Once you have enslaved the mind, the rest is easy.
Proven tools to accomplish this are a crucifix and a flag.
Those who's bodies only have been enslaved will eventually rise up against their oppresers.
"Those who's bodies only have been enslaved will eventually rise up against their oppressors."
In the meantime the oppressors are good at getting the enslaved to blame and rise up against each other.
My wife carried a sign around at the march yesterday that said, "Tarrify China" which led to several discussions and challenges with others on the march. Mostly good discussions but when I mentioned the Fauxcom manufacturing site for IPADS and the pictures of the nets stretched outside its buildings to catch suicidal workers I got mostly blank stares. Funny, I thought the picture was famous, but then I read newspapers. Even as progressives we do not want to know or care very much about the conditions of those who make the goods which we consider necessary for our modern lifestyle. "Why pick on China?" an Asian woman asked. If you drive them out of China they will just go somewhere else. A face that causually accepted that somewhere, in some place somebody will have to suffer and be exploited so that we in the Westcan have cheap consumer goods. A reporter from Ireland took a picture of the sign and we talked. He of course did know about Fauxcom. "I've been inside these electronics assembly plants." I said, " and most of the work in them is done robotically. I can't believe that labor costs make that much of a difference in the price of the device." He agreed. "Then why do we go to China to manufacture"" "More than just labor costs-- its the obsessive need for complete corporate control." he answered. "Corporations like to be able to set up a plant and operate it any way they like without having to absorb any of the environmental or social costs, without having to pay taxes or negotiate any of these issues with anyone in the government or the people they represent." There is the true corporate core of it. Corporations are souless, treat its labor, the environment, even the customers as controllable commodities. If the IPAD is a hit what's wrong with working people 37 hours straight till exhaustion sets in and suicide seems a release. If the IPAD is a flop isn't it nice to just walk away and let someone else carry the social cost of the unemployment and environmental degradation. And of course its nice to be able to pay whatever you want to the workers, it fattens up the corporate profit line a bit at the margins. A lesson we should have learned a thousand times over-- the corporate world will behave no better than the government which has jurisdiction over them allows. Save your breath trying to implore the corporate world to do the decent humane thing, Corporate leaders are without shame. They were trained to behave that way in US business schools. It's the MBA badge of honor to be heartless.
The corporate world and its leadership behaves as it does precisely because it is charged with a singular fiduciary responsibilty by "the government which has (primary) jurisdiction", the latter having been bought and paid for by that corporate world with full judicial support. It's a vicious circle that will never be broken by mere appeals to its own components.
Like any other inherent systemic problem, the system that creates and sustains it cannot possibly supply its solution. Unfortunately, most people are not (yet) ready to draw the obvious conclusion, let alone act on it as required. Whether they ever will be in time to make any substantive difference prior to a totally catastrophic outcome is an open question. Seems very doubtful.
just an addendum--my impression from visiting the corporate apple site. What does this corporation actually do? It doesn't manufacture. It doesn't distribute. It does minimal R&D. It brands and markets and promotes. It dwells in the abstractions of its products. Apple is just as oblivious to the conditions under which its products are manufactured as the rest of us. Willfully oblivious. A problem with living up there in the internet clouds among the ideas about how their product might be used is that actual people manner very little to them. The same is true of so many corporations. Yes, they want people to buy their products but you know, dealing with people is so messy.
As Marley sang, enslaved by "ECONOMICAL SLAVERY".
When I covered the inaugural meeting of a new entity called the 'World Trade Organization' some years back, a younger reporter & I were walking away from the venue after the main conference.
She said, 'So these people are talking about keeping some places poor so that rich countries can always find good cheap labor _ can we write that?' We did, in those plain words, in the 1st graf. In a VERY mainstream paper. No one paid attention.
This new kind of slavery is even more profitable than the old type. Slaveowners had to house, feed and clothe their slaves because they were a capital investment. Todays slaves are treated like beasts of burden.
Thank you all for your comments. More and more I just barely skim the articles and just hit up the comments. The mainstream fills a mud puddle.... but very often here, we find serenity in the deep end. I am enthralled by the Gate Crashers, Truth Tellers, and Torch Carriers.
I will not eat the Lotus from the Potus and The Scotus.
The Plebian Thespians bore me to say the least.
and i will not drink the kool aid.
We need to fight jimjonesefication, and we need to fight to prevent corporate transmitted diseases in ALL their forms.
I will not get on board the red white and blue short bus.
Lysander Spooner was a darling of the abolition movement in the US before the Civil War happened. He refused to support the Civil War, however, as it refused to address the problem of wage slavery.
"I can hire one half of the working-class to kill the other half."
--Jay Gould, Gilded Age railroad tycoon and land speculator
The real news just gets more depressing every damn day lately. Millions of Amurkan fools on the far-right (mostly white supremacist anyway) will secretly rejoice at news of the revival of slavery. A renewed form of Jim Crow is rapidly spreading in the U.S. and it will be coupled to the escalating attack on middle-class minorities in public sector jobs.
Unrestrained Capitalism is a race to the bottom.