Modern day slavery

Many people mistakenly think that the days of people enslaving other human beings are a long unfortunate side effect of our uncivilised past. Slavery is not only alive but also very pervasive in our world today. For instance, slavery is practised by terrorist outfits, such as IS, which has been enslaving and trading Yazidi women in Iraq. Modern day slavery, in fact, is a much more rampant phenomenon, which some consider as an essential byproduct of the global political economy itself.

Recently released data on Modern Slavery reveals that over 40 million people are living in slavery, more than ever before in human history. This figure does not include people who are being paid unfair wages or those working in unsafe conditions. While they may not be openly bought and sold in slave markets, millions of men, women and children are bound by debt and coercion to work in varied sectors, including farming, mining, domestic service, other informal sector industries, and the sex industry. Women and young girls are even sold into what is rightly described as ‘marriage slavery’.

People become trapped in debt bondage in varied ways. Consider, for instance, the situation of indebted labourers (known as haris in Pakistan) working on farms owned by large landowners. The brick kiln workers working on the paishgee (advance payments) system and other informal workers who take advances from their employers are also caught in a debt bondage trap.

Indebted labour includes not only exploitation of poor households by local producers, but also allows keeping costs low for supply chains of international companies, allowing them to make massive profits. For example, Reuters has uncovered how slave labour aboard fishing trawlers in Thailand supplies seafood which makes it into pet food sold in major supermarkets around the western world.

Agricultural products made by indebted sharecropping families provide raw materials to export-oriented garment factories, which are suppliers to major fashion labels. Indebted labourers in the informal sector also provide a range of other essential inputs to supply chains of many other major products ranging from electronics to sporting goods. Thus, many of the products the average consumer takes for granted — including mobile phones, computers and cars, as well as clothes, cosmetics and even food — are produced using raw materials extracted by people living in a state of slavery.

It is easy to shift the blame for this unfortunate situation. Developed countries express dismay and feign ignorance about the exploitation of workers in rural areas or in informal sweatshops within developing countries. Producers in developing countries try to blame unfair terms of trade which compel them to rely on informal exploitation of the poor to make their own meagre profits.

Most western industrialised countries do still occupy top positions in a pyramid-like structure. Their colonial and imperial linkages with the so-called ‘developing’ world provide them access to raw materials and cheap labour. On the other hand, developing countries on lower rungs of the global production system prefer spending scant remaining resources on their defence, and on vested interests of their elites, rather than on the marginalised poor. Authoritarian regimes across the developing world, along with their elites, work quite well with corporate interests in the developed world to deliver economic growth, even though this growth repeatedly fails to sufficiently trickle down.

Thus, in a world which enables obscene amounts of wealth to accrue in the hands of the few, multitudes of people continue being ruthlessly exploited. While the hierarchical nature of the existing global production does manifest itself in different forms, it is the desperately poor who invariably become its worst victims. 

Published in The Express Tribune, June 21^st, 2019.

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