Disposable People: The New Slavery In The Global Economy I

A serious challenge for anyone writing about the ongoing enslavement of millions of human beings is how to express the action for emancipation message without falling into the obvious traps of off-putting the reader with the twin vices of excessive moralizing and representing the problem as an unrelenting tragedy.

Kevin Bales, director of Free The Slaves, managed to overcome that challenge and write a richly informative and compelling book about the “new slavery”, “Disposable People: New Slavery In The Global Economy. Describing his personal experiences in journeys to witness and study why slavery thrives in India, Brazil, Thailand, Mauritania and elsewhere around the world, Bales also offers astute economic, social and political commentary that elucidates the unique characteristics supporting the evolution or emergence of slavery in each locality, while not failing to note the common traits inherent in most forms of the new slavery.

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The new slavery focuses on big profits and cheap lives; where “people become completely disposable tools for making money.” A key aspect of the new slavery is the changing nature of ownership. While slavery is feasibly illegal everywhere in the world, nowadays “people buy slaves and don’t ask for a receipt or ownership papers; but they do gain control- and they use violence to maintain this control.” Unrestrained greed evolves in the global economy; “indeed, for the slaveholders, not having legal ownership is an improvement because they get total control without any responsibility for what they own.”

Bales is careful to use conservative estimates and descriptions throughout the book, halving the guesstimates of some activists and positing that there about 27 million slaves in the world now, mostly in South Asia under the guise of bonded labor. Its spread throughout the world, from sweatshop workers in California to enslaved domestic workers in Hong Kong. The final products resulting from the practice can be found in most homes and dwellings worldwide as he notes, “large international corporations, acting through subsidiaries in the developing world, take advantage of slave labor to improve their bottom line and increase the dividends to their shareholders.”

Race has little to do with slavery nowadays, instead, the “criteria of enslavement today do not concern color, tribe or religion; they focus on weakness, gullibility and deprivation.” The two factors Bales believes are critical to the shift from old slavery to the “exploitive greed of the new” is the “dramatic increase in world population following WW2″, which has collapsed already overburdened social, health and education systems in much of the developing world, leading to fewer and fewer opportunities for people to succeed in local or globalized economies and skyrocketing unemployment that causes the growing population to signify a massive supply “of potential slaves and drove down their price.”

Bales describes the grim outcome as “without work and with increasing fear as resources diminish, people become desperate and life becomes cheap.” The other critical factor is the “rapid social and economic changes” that have unfolded hand in hand with modernization. Populations and societies in flux offer a prime pool of cheap resources to be exploited.

Other highlights from Bales’ examination of how and why slavery is thriving:

Corrupt governance, especially in the guise of the local police who are often in cahoots with slaveholders, guarantees a low-risk environment within which slavery thrives.

Accepted labor conventions and laws are used to “legitimate and conceal slavery. Much modern slavery is hidden behind a mask of fraudulent labor contracts…” which serve two key purposes for slaveholders; entrapment and concealment.

“The new disposability of (slaves) has dramatically increased the amount of profit to be made from a slave, decreased the length of time a person would normally be enslaved, and made the question of legal ownership less important.” In essence, slaves are used until they are no longer useful (whether because the job is done or the environs maximized, i..e. making charcoal in Brazil, planting seasonal fields in Nepal), no longer usable (sex slaves in Thailand with AIDS, famished and dying charcoal workers in Brazil) or no longer profitable (sick slaves of almost any kind anywhere).

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