Slave labour in the twenty-first century

Citation

Jones, G. (2014), "Slave labour in the twenty-first century", Journal of Global Responsibility, Vol. 5 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/JGR-07-2014-0025

Slave labour in the twenty-first century

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Global Responsibility, Volume 5, Issue 2

The 2 December is the United Nations designated International Day for the Abolition of Slavery. The day was chosen to mark the day in 1949 when the United Nations General Assembly adopted its Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others. This convention is significant as a global rejection of slavery, which had been occurring through individual country legislation. (The most recent country to outlaw slavery – Mauritania – only did so in 2007).

If the typical Western citizen thinks about slavery at all, he/she perhaps sees it as a historic barbarity, which ended over 200 years ago with the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade or perhaps 150 years ago with the end of the civil war in the USA. However, the US State Department published a report in June 2014 that shows that the world is still riddled with slavery, with no country remaining untouched, no matter how advanced its laws. It identifies 44,000 individual cases and estimates that the total number of trafficked persons in 2014 is in the region of 20 million. The International Labour Organization puts the number at 21 million. It is worth noting that trafficking does not mean the process of transportation. Definitions of trafficked persons include anyone working in a state of slavery.

The United Nations identifies a number of contemporary forms of slavery. Labour forced by coercive means is the more traditional form. However, slavery also arises from indebtedness. This might occur, for example, where a person needs a medical operation and that operation is paid for by another in exchange for a written or verbal contract to provide services. These services or the period for their provision are often not defined. Such indentured bondage is rife in southern Asia, including the subcontinent. Often it works intergenerationally, with children bonded by debts inherited from their parents.

Often such arrangements are arrived at by deception. For example, where a person is promised a job in another country and their plane fare and accommodation is paid for as a notional loan, but when they arrive they find that their passports are confiscated and they are told that they will be made to pay back the costs in some other way at a rate of pay so low as to make the arrangement a bonded servitude. In this way women are often trapped into prostitution. Slavery is imported from the developing world to, and accommodated by, the developed world. The International Labour Organization estimates that 4.5 million of the world’s slaves are sex slaves.

Not included in these figures are forced marriages. The line between a forced marriage and an arranged marriage is difficult to define, but clearly where there is a lack of consent by one party, the arrangement constitutes human trafficking.

Contemporary forms of slavery also include the worst forms of child labour, where young children are denied education in favour of working either within the family business or for other employers. According to UNICEF, one child in six in the world today works in this way.

Slavery also includes the forced recruitment of children for use in armed conflict. Governments that use child soldiers include Burma, the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. In 2013, a Special Court in Sierra Leone upheld the conviction of former Liberian President Charles Taylor for a range of war crimes including the use of child soldiers. Of course, there are also a large number of private militias that press children into service.

Political imprisonment could also be held to constitute a form of slavery. For example, it has been estimated that there are approximately 200,000 political prisoners in North Korea undergoing life terms with hard labour.

These accounts of slavery do not include what has been termed “wage slavery”, whereby rates of pay and alternative options are so poor as to keep the wage earner in a virtual serfdom, living at the level of subsistence. To include these cases would push the global figures into a different stratosphere altogether.

How can slavery exist in the twenty-first century and how can it be so pervasive? This issue should prick our sense of global responsibility. We should be researching it and writing about it. On the face of it, there is an apparent relationship between appreciation of human rights and the incidence of slavery. The Walk Free Foundation publishes a slavery index, which ranks countries with regard to the incidence of slavery. The briefest of observations is enough to notice the most dramatic cases are also the cases where an awareness of human rights is least developed. It would also be useful for researchers to compare this index with the annual national rankings for corruption published by Transparency International to examine whether apparent corruption is a factor.

The relative level of a community’s economic development is also likely to be a factor. The Palermo Convention (United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2000) includes a section on human trafficking and describes slavery in terms, which include an abuse of a position of vulnerability. This raises the question of how individuals and organizations can act to reduce that vulnerability.

Slavery cannot exist if we destroy the business model that is required to support it. Where people have the opportunities to extract their economic welfare with dignity and the education to know and understand their rights, they are likely to be much less vulnerable to manipulation.

Except in the most extreme cases of actual incarceration, slaves inevitably must move within a community of free individuals who can act as agents of detection and education. Globally responsible individuals, who are aware, can detect and reach out to them, alerting them to their options and alerting officialdom to their plight.

Slave masters need to accommodate their victims somewhere. This means that the owners of that accommodation have a special window onto their activities. Hotels and other forms of accommodation providers can take aside their tenants and make discrete inquiries. Transport providers can refuse to provide their infrastructure. Moreover, every consumer can try to look down the supply chain and workout for themselves whether their lifestyle is supported by, and in turn supports, slavery.

Grant Jones, Editor-in-chief