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Modern Slavery
posted Wednesday, 6 August 2003
SLAVERY TODAY
A very important issue and we should all take responsibility in my opinion, since we all buy the products made by slaves. How do we know which products at the supermarket have been produced by slaves and which haven't? You, in all likelihood, own items that were produced by slaves: chocolate, hand-woven carpets, cotton products, coffee, tea, tobacco, sugar, sneakers, footballs, gold, diamonds, fireworks, timber and stone products, tantalum (a mineral used in laptops, pagers, and cell phones) and more. Products in all of these industries have been found made with slave labour, and then sold in the global market. More items that you consume every day are tainted by slavery in less direct ways. All of us who are lucky enough to be housed, clothed, and fed every day benefit from prices kept low by slave labour. Global companies we invest in, or whose stocks we purchase provide higher returns because they buy from suppliers that pay workers very little - if at all. As participants in the world's largest economies (as most of the readers of this blog are), with the drive for constantly lower prices, we consumers contribute to the global economic pressure for slave labour. We are all complicit.
The truth is that slavery still exists in virutally every country of this world, according to human rights organisations, scholars and journalists. In fact, legal slavery did end. Slavery is illegal in every country of the world. Nontheless there are more slaves today than ever before: 27 million, twice as many as the number of Africans enslaved during the four centuries of transatlantic slave trade, according to a calculation that slavery expert Kevin Bales calls conservative. Bales, a sociologist at Roehampton University in London, estimates that 50,000 people are still forced to work as slaves in the U.S. of A. today.
Sure, today's slavery is different. Simply put, slavery is one person forcing another to work without pay, using the threat of violence or psychological manipulation. Ownership no longer defines slavery, but power and dominance over an individual does.
When slaves could be legally owned, when buying slaves required a substancial financial investment, there was an incentive for owners to take care of their "property", to provide for their slaves' housing, food, health, and other needs. In contrast, when today's slaves are no longer economically useful, they are cast aside, worked or starved to death, sometimes even killed.
So why are there so many slaves now?
First, the world's population has nearly tripled in fifty years, most dramatically in developing counties, creating a huge pool of people who are desperately poor, vulnerable, and easily preyed on. But do bear in mind that this is not a matter of quantity, but distribution of food and essential goods.
At the same time, globalisation has transformed national and local economies. Corporations turn to unregulated suppliers in developing countries, and keep-up pressure for lower costs. In some cases, suppliers use forced, unpaid labour.
The most common form of slavery today is debt bondage. The number of bonded labourers in India, Pakistan, and Nepal is estimated in the millions. Bonded labourers have told human rights workers they are paying off loans as small as US$10 to US$50. But the interest is always more than they can pay, and the debts are passed on through the generations.
Forced labour exists in many countries, including 'industrialised countries'. Wartime slavery is a problem especially in countries like Sudan, where government-backed militias and raiders have been kidnapping and enslaving village children and women since at least the mid-1980's according to UN reports. Of course all this is no problem, as long as the government follows policies dictated by Western countries.
The fastest-growing form of slavery, especially in the 'West', is called 'contract slavery', in which the poor, weak, young, and vulnerable are tricked with promises of legitimate work. These people are usually foreign-born and found working on farms, live-in domestics, or prostitutes. Slavery has also been found in small businesses that typically rely on low-wage temporary labour, such as restaurants, and small manufacturers.
Damn it, the corps. should be forced to label their products properly, stating their records: under which conditions the workers produced the product, how much the workers actually get from the profit and how the environment has been destroyed during production. This labeling should be a law and a consumer right!
Whether we like it or not, as consumers we are part of a complex global network, and we are obligated to take responsibility for things that are connected to us, even when far away. We have the choice: do we want to support slavery in our name, or don't we?
Modern Day Slavery Fact Sheet
The 1927 Slavery Convention outlawed slavery worldwide. Article 2 states that the members will take the necessary steps "to bring about, progressively and as soon as possible, the complete abolition of slavery in all its forms." Slavery is defined as forced labor without pay under the threat of violence.
- Though the legal argument against slavery has been won, slavery persists and even thrives in some parts of the world. By a conservative estimate, 27 million people are enslaved today worldwide -- more than at any time in history.
- The classic form of chattel slavery- in which slaveholders maintain ownership no longer through legalities but through the use of violence - persists to this day in a few countries. In Sudan, a radical ruling regime has revived a racially-based slave trade, arming militia forces to raid civilian villages for slaves. In Mauritania, slave raids 800 years ago began a system of chattel slavery that continues to this day, with Arab-Berber masters holding as many as one million black Africans as inheritable property.
The most common form of slavery is debt bondage, in which a human being becomes collateral against a loan. With a massive population boom in regions of staggering poverty, some families have nothing to pledge for a loan but their own labor. With inflated interest rates, debts are often inherited, ensnaring generations. 15 to 20 million slaves are in debt bondage in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan.
- Another common form of slavery is forced labor, where individuals are lured by the promise of a good job and instead find themselves enslaved. Migrant workers are particularly vulnerable, and small organized-crime rings fuel a booming international trade in human beings. Trafficking often flows from developing nations to the West. For instance, CIA estimates that 50,000 women and children are trafficked into the US each year as slaves.
- A form of slavery most common in South Asia is sex slavery, where girls forced into prostitution by their own husbands, fathers, and brothers earn money for the men in the family to pay back local-money lenders. Others are lured by offers of good jobs and then beaten and forced to work in brothels.
- Slave labor produces goods we use every day. Examples include: sugar from the Dominican Republic, chocolate from the Ivory Coast, paper clips from China, carpets from Nepal, and cigarettes from India.
- Slavery occurs in every continent in the world except Antarctica. A few selected hotspots include:
ALBANIA: Teenage girls are tricked into sex slavery and trafficked by organized crime rings
BRAZIL: Lured into the rainforest, families burn trees into charcoal at gunpoint
BURMA: The ruling military junta enslaves its own people to build infrastructure projects, some benefiting US corporations.
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC: Haitians are rounded up at random, taken across the border, and
forced to cut cane in sugar plantations
GHANA: Families repent for sins by giving daughters as slaves to fetish priests
INDIA: Children trapped in debt bondage roll beedi cigarettes 14 hours a day
IVORY COAST: Child slaves forced to work on cocoa plantations
MAURITANIA: Arab-Berbers buy and sell black Africans as inheritable property
PAKISTAN: Children with nimble fingers are forced to weave carpets in looms
SUDAN: Arab militias from the North take Southern Sudanese women and children in slave raids.
THAILAND: Women and children become sex slaves for tourists
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES: Bangladeshi boys are transported and exploited as jockeys for
camel racing
UNITED STATES: The CIA estimates that 50,000 people are trafficked as sex slaves, domestics,
garment, and agricultural slaves
Source: Iabolish.com
~peace~
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