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Contemporary slavery
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Contemporary, or modern, slavery refers to the institutions of slavery that continue to exist in the present day. Estimates of the number of slaves today range from 12 million to 29 million.
Modern slavery is a multi-billion dollar industry with estimates of up to $35 billion generated annually. The United Nations estimates that roughly 27 to 30 million individuals are currently caught in the slave trade industry. The Global Slavery Index 2013 states that 10 nations account for 76 per cent of the world’s enslaved. India has the most slaves of any country at 14 million; over 1% of the population. China has the second-largest number with 2.9 million slaves, followed by Pakistan with 2.1 million, Nigeria with 701,000, Ethiopia with 651,000, Russia with 516,000, Thailand with 473,000, Congo with 462,000, Myanmar with 384,000, and Bangladesh with 343,000.
Mauritania was the last nation to officially abolish slavery, doing so in 2007; yet 4.3% of the population still remains enslaved. Despite being illegal in every nation; slavery is still prevalent in many forms today.
Professor Deirdre Coleman, of the University of Melbourne said,
Slavery is something that’s with us always. We need to keep it in view and think about it when we buy our clothes, to question where they are sourced. Governments and CEOs need to think more carefully about what they are doing and what they are inadvertently supporting.
Causes
Slaves can be an attractive investment because the slave-owner only needs to pay for sustenance and enforcement. This is sometimes lower than the wage-cost of free labourers, as free workers earn more than sustenance; in these cases slaves have positive price. When the cost of sustenance and enforcement exceeds the wage rate, slave-owning would no longer be profitable, and owners would simply release their slaves. Slaves are thus a more attractive investment in high-wage environments, and environments where enforcement is cheap, and less attractive in environments where the wage-rate is low and enforcement is expensive.
Free workers also earn compensating differentials, whereby they are paid more for doing unpleasant work. Neither sustenance nor enforcement costs rise with the unpleasantness of the work, however, so slaves' costs do not rise by the same amount. As such, slaves are more attractive for unpleasant work, and less for pleasant work. Because the unpleasantness of the work is not internalised, being born by the slave rather than the owner, it is a negative externality and leads to over-use of slaves in these situations.
Modern slavery can be quite profitable and corrupt governments will tacitly allow it, despite it being outlawed by international treaties such as Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery and local laws. Total annual revenues of traffickers were estimated in 2004 to range from US $5 billion to US $9 billion, though profits are substantially lower. American slaves in 1809 were sold for around $40,000 (in today's money). Today, a slave can be bought for $90. The conscription of child soldiers by some governments is often viewed as a form of government-endorsed slavery.
Modern slavery is often seen as a by-product of poverty. Countries that lack education, economic freedoms and the rule of law, and which have poor societal structure can create an environment that fosters the acceptance and propagation of slavery.
Types of modern or contemporary, slavery
Slavery by descent
See also: Slavery in contemporary Africa
This is the form most often associated with the word "slavery". It stems historically from either conquest, where a conquered person is enslaved, as in the Roman Empire, or from slave raiding, as in the Atlantic slave trade. The enslaved become their own social class, or caste, one that may suffer discrimination long after they've been freed. This form of slavery is prevalent in the Sahel, particularly in Mauritania, where governments may deny that it exists.
Bonded labor
Main article: Debt bondage
See also: Debt bondage in India and debt bondage in Pakistan
Millions of people today work as bonded laborers. The cycle begins when people take extreme loans under the condition that they work off the debt. The "loan" is designed so that it can never be paid off, and is often passed down for generations. This form of slavery is prevalent in South Asia.
Forced migrant labor
People may be enticed to migrate with the promise of work, only to have their documents seized and to be forced to work under the threat of violence to them or their families. Illegal immigrants may also be taken advantage of; without legal residency, they often have no recourse to the law. Along with sex slavery, this is the form of slavery most often encountered in wealthy countries such as the United States, in Western Europe, and in the Middle East.
Prison labor
Main article: Penal labour
Countries such as China and North Korea use prison inmates as slave labor, and this labor may be a reason for their imprisonment. In the United States, all physically able federal inmates are subject to forced labor, and paid as low as $0.23 per hour.
Sex slavery
Main article: Sexual slavery
Along with migrant slavery, forced prostitution is the form of slavery most often encountered in wealthy countries such as the United States, in Western Europe, and in the Middle East. It is the primary form of slavery in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, particularly in Moldova and Laos. Many child sex slaves are trafficked from these areas to the West and Middle East.
Early/forced marriage
Main article: Bride-buying
Mainly driven by the culture in certain regions, early or forced marriage is a form of slavery that affects millions of women and girls all over the world. When families cannot support their children, the daughters are often married off to the males of wealthier, more powerful families. These men are often significantly older than the girls. The females are forced into lives whose main purpose is to serve their husbands. This oftentimes fosters an environment for physical, verbal and sexual abuse.
Child labor
See also: Child labour and restavec
Children comprise the majority of slaves today. Most are domestic workers or work in cocoa, cotton or fishing industries. Many are trafficked and sexually exploited. In war-torn countries, children have been kidnapped and sold to political parties to be used as child soldiers. Forced child labor is the dominant form of slavery in Haiti.
Trafficking
Main article: Human trafficking
According to United States Department of State data, an "estimated 600,000 to 820,000 men, women, and children [are] trafficked across international borders each year, approximately 70 percent are women and girls and up to 50 percent are minors. The data also illustrates that the majority of transnational victims are trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation." However, "the alarming enslavement of people for purposes of labor exploitation, often in their own countries, is a form of human trafficking that can be hard to track from afar." It is estimated that 50,000 people are trafficked every year in the United States.
Wage labor
Main articles: Labour economics § Wage slavery, Wage labour and Criticism of capitalism
The labor market, as institutionalised under the often criticised capitalist economic system, has been criticised as a modern extension of slavery, especially by both mainstream socialists and anarcho-syndicalists, who utilise the term wage slavery as a pejorative for wage labour. Socialists draw parallels between the trade of labour as a commodity and slavery. Cicero is also known to have suggested such parallels.
For Marxists, labour-as-commodity, which is how they regard wage labour, provides an absolutely fundamental point of attack against capitalism. "It can be persuasively argued," noted one concerned philosopher, "that the conception of the worker's labour as a commodity confirms Marx's stigmatization of the wage system of private capitalism as 'wage-slavery;' that is, as an instrument of the capitalist's for reducing the worker's condition to that of a slave, if not below it."
As per anthropologist David Graeber, the earliest wage labour contracts we know about were in fact contracts for the rental of chattel slaves (usually the owner would receive a share of the money, and the slave, another, with which to maintain his or her living expenses.) Such arrangements, according to Graeber, were quite common in New World slavery as well, whether in the United States or Brazil. C. L. R. James argued that most of the techniques of human organisation employed on factory workers during the industrial revolution were first developed on slave plantations.
Some criticise wage slavery on strictly contractual grounds, e.g. David Ellerman and Carole Pateman, arguing that the employment contract is a legal fiction in that it treats human beings juridically as mere tools or inputs by abdicating responsibility and self-determination, which the critics argue are inalienable. As Ellerman points out, "[t]he employee is legally transformed from being a co-responsible partner to being only an input supplier sharing no legal responsibility for either the input liabilities [costs] or the produced outputs [revenue, profits] of the employer's business." Such contracts are inherently invalid "since the person remain[s] a de facto fully capacitated adult person with only the contractual role of a non-person" as it is impossible to physically transfer self-determination. As Pateman argues:
It should, however, be noted that the trade of labor for wages is fundamentally different from slavery in that the trade occurs by consent of both parties, the employee being able to refuse to take employment or, having taken employment, to quit. It is also different in that it grants the employer no authority to starve, torture, physically punish, or sell the employee or members of the employee's family, but only to refuse to continue the trade by firing the employee.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_slavery
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