Slavery is a business reality, and it’s up to companies to stop it

Toronto Globe And Mail ^ | Oct. 29 2014, 1:59 PM EDT | (Reuters)

[Olog-hai]

There are more slaves now than at any point in history, and companies need to look closely at their supply chains to ensure their products or services aren’t coming from operations that force people to work with no pay, a U.S. writer and private-equity executive said during a recent financial and risk summit in Toronto hosted by media and information firm Thomson Reuters. […]

People often think of slavery as a thing of the past, but today there are an estimated 27 million slaves worldwide—most of them toiling for nothing more than a meager daily meal, (Benjamin) Skinner said. He plotted on a map where most of these slaves can be found today: India, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka. […]

But slavery isn’t restricted to countries on other continents, Skinner said. It’s also a problem in North America, especially among people in marginalized communities who may not speak English or French and who don’t have the proper documents to live and work in the United States or Canada.

Slave labor is a business reality, he said, and it often becomes part of a company’s supply chains either because it has failed to do the proper due diligence on its vendors, or worse, because it has willfully turned a blind eye to the problem. …

[bert]

——China will resume its rightful place as third world backwater-—

Now that is a real knee slapper. China is undergoing a process of transition into the modern world. That is a long process that is not going to be linear.

The same process is underway in the middle east and the super conservative islamic wackos are resisting the transition. There is no such resistance in China.China Girls in Daisey Mae’s will not go back. Hong Kong youth are pointing the way and will ultimately prevail

[antidisestablishment]

In truth, in the US, the minimum wage laws were passed to keep blacks from competing against whites. The Davis-Bacon Act was expressly designed for this, as were most other minimum wage proposals. And, regardless of motive, the economic effect is the same: job losses and lesser economic mobility for less skilled workers.

The entire “wage slave” argument conflates two distinct issues, true slavery and economic freedom. While it is a convenient meme, any solution to one would not affect the other. True slavery is a societal decision, driven by ideology and prejudice and is a moral issue that won’t be helped by economic controls. Inadequate wages reflect a labor surplus or a skills deficit which will not be changed by moral arguments that do not address the underlying economic realities.

[Brooklyn Attitude]

I sense a new prong in the leftist attack on business, claiming it engages in and supports slavery.

[PieterCasparzen]

One can speak of slaves in a figurative or literal sense. But to mix the two destroys the moral equivalence when dealing with the latter.

Destroys the moral equivalence ? I don't understand your meaning.

[generally]

My definition of slavery: When the fruits of one person’s labor are taken by another without a mutual agreement regarding compensation.

By this definition, taxpayers are slaves to the government and to all those who receive welfare. Reparations have been paid 100 times over.

[PrincessB]

When I get the shopping at Walmart is socially unjust crowd, I remind them that Walmart will hire anybody and some people need to prove that they can show up and on time for six consecutive months. The ones that take advantage of the time there probably don’t stay at minimum wage for long.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

I disagree. The US regularly arrests people for slavery and slavery related charges here, where it is quite illegal. The vast majority are used as domestic servants and prostitutes, they are beaten as punishment, and far too often they are murdered by their employers.

Many were brought here illegally, or those who arrived legally have had their passports taken away, and are threatened with any number of punishments if they are found out. Most do not speak English.

The Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST) is a Los Angeles-based anti-human trafficking organization. It was founded in 1998 as a response to the landmark El Monte sweatshop case of 1995, in which 72 Thai immigrants were forced to work in slave-like conditions for 18-hours a day, while locked-up in the Los Angeles suburb of El Monte.

CAST defines human trafficking as “a modern-day form of slavery,” in which victims are subjected to force, fraud or coercion for the purpose of forced labor or sexual exploitation. Victims of trafficking can work in domestic service, factories, farms, restaurants, construction sites, hotel housekeeping, servile marriage, forced prostitution, child prostitution and child pornography.

Human Trafficking ranks second, after drug smuggling, and tying with arms dealing, in organized crime activities, and is the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the 21st century.

As many as 50,000 men, women and children are trafficked into the U.S. every year. The U.S. is one of the top three destination points for trafficked victims, along with Japan and Australia.

Even some large multinational corporations attempt to profit indirectly from slavery, purchasing goods and services which they know, or should have known, were produced by slaves.

[PieterCasparzen]

With all due respect, you “food for thought” was all based on a false equivalency.

False equivalency ? Am I equating subsistence-paying jobs with slavery ?

I'm not equating, I clearly highlighted the difference of technical-legal versus practical:

"These situations may not technically be slavery in the legality sense of the term, but for all practical purposes, the person is working and in bondage."

I won't support wage regulations but at the same time I won't support the elites' and their big businesses efforts to justify their destruction of the US labor market.

The business heirs of the slave traders of yesteryear are still looking for dirt cheap labor where they can hold most people down economically, have them work for the elites their whole life and wind up with nothing in the end. The elites want to suck every last penny out of them.

Back in the day, they just had legalized slavery, today, they have "free-market" in name only, a much more sophisticated scheme that basically does the same thing: have millions of suckers working for diddly squat, whether it's IT people coming here from India or manufacturing work being done in China and the traders bringing the work product here to sell in America.

[Sherman Logan]

Wiki: Slavery is a legal or economic system under which people are treated as property.

I have no problem with calling the conditions under which they are held “slave-like.”

But they are not slaves, since slavery is by definition first and foremost a legal/economic/social system.

They are victims of criminals, not slaves.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

Okay, using that definition, would you say that real slavery exists in Saudi Arabia?

Saudi Arabia officially abolished slavery in 1962.

Governmental decrees have only a minor, mostly passive role in slavery. All that is needed to have slavery is a slaver and a slave. Calling slavery a “legal/economic/social system” is disingenuous.

Slaves do not care if their owner is able to legally enslave them, nor that their servitude is part of that nation’s economic police, nor that the slaver’s friends approve of what he is doing. They are still slaves.

[antidisestablishment]

More food for thought. I had a professor of linguistics in college who was originally from Africa. He was brilliant and gave the liberal college administration no end of grief. They hired him assuming that he would fit into the anti-colonial crowd, but were aghast when he turned out to be an outspoken, articulate, conservative Christian.

He came into our class one morning and was furious. After calming down, he said he had just watched a “documentary” on the treatment of poor African youth on coconut plantations. It presented the companies in the exact same vein—exploiting illiterate young workers for vile corporate profit.

He then stand emphatically that he had worked on this very plantation and those “horrid wages” paid for his college. He asserted further that this was the only legitimate employment in the entire country—the indigenous “businesses” were fronts to extort foreign aid and did less to help the people than the “evil” capitalists.

Yes, there is human trafficking, but often our own cultural bias blinds us to the fact that economic progress is not linear or fair. Almost every middle class family in this country rose from similar circumstances. The hunger to overcome that exploitation is what drove those who succeeded.

I am not excusing those who traffic in persons—I think it should be a capital offense. However, western expectations and ideals often cause more harm than good in developing areas. Sending aid that dwarfs a country’s GDP only results in misery for all and extend the reign of despots. Inflating the local economy by paying a western level wage only results in denying local people employment.

Punishing those in western countries is a whole other topic.

[JimRed]

It’s also a problem in North America, especially among people in marginalized communities who may not speak English or French and who don’t have the proper documents to live and work in the United States or Canada.

The going rate for "day labor" around here is fifteen bucks an hour. Hardly a "slave" wage.

[Pelham]

“72 Thai immigrants were forced to work in slave-like conditions for 18-hours a day, while locked-up in the Los Angeles suburb of El Monte.”

I remember that incident. The El Monte apartment building they were being housed in was fenced off like a prison.

We sure seem to have more than our share of these crimes in SoCal, just one more aspect of The Wealth of Diversity and mass third world immigration.

In the El Monte case it was Thai nationals but I know of Saudis, Chinese and Indians in the news for smaller scale versions of the same thing. They’re used to servants and factory workers who are paid virtually nothing and they smuggle people in to replicate that situation here.

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/70-Immigrants-Found-In-Raid-on-Sweatshop-Thai-3026921.php

[tbw2]

We could end the HB-1 visa program which indentures the imported workers to the employer, often paying them a dollar or two an hour.
Shut down the border to stop the inflow of illegal immigrants who are beholden to coyotes for thousands of dollars and girls smuggled in for the sex trade.

[Sherman Logan]

We could end the HB-1 visa program which indentures the imported workers to the employer, often paying them a dollar or two an hour.

I don't think so. According to the Department of Labor, the employer is obligated to "Pay the nonimmigrant workers at least the local prevailing wage or the employer's actual wage, whichever is higher; pay for non-productive time in certain circumstances; and offer benefits on the same basis as for U.S. workers"

Not to say that the rules don't get broken, but those are the rules.

[khelus]

Re:We could end the HB-1 visa program which indentures the imported workers to the employer, often paying them a dollar or two an hour.

I don't think so. According to the Department of Labor, the employer is obligated to "Pay the nonimmigrant workers at least the local prevailing wage or the employer's actual wage, whichever is higher; pay for non-productive time in certain circumstances; and offer benefits on the same basis as for U.S. workers"

Not to say that the rules don't get broken, but those are the rules.

Those may be the 'rules' but they are neither honored nor enforced. To believe they are usually enforced is very naive in our current environment.

When corporate is determined to use neo-slave labor and the government looks the other way, there are many ways to 'skin a cat', just as their are many ways for 'guest workers' to avoid most or all US taxes on their salaries.

[RipSawyer]

There is a factory half an hour’s drive from where I sit that has operated for more than a hundred years and is highly respected but I have been told by someone who spent a career there that in the beginning the employees were paid in company script rather than legal tender and that script was only accepted at the company owned stores. He said that in the early days people would load all their belongings on a horse drawn wagon and leave at two in the morning to get out of town because they kept running up a higher debt to the company and there was no way to ever pay it, only to keep going further in debt.

[B4Ranch]

How about some more details? Name of the company, town, location ? Is there any written history on this place?

[PieterCasparzen]

He asserted further that this was the only legitimate employment in the entire country—the indigenous “businesses” were fronts to extort foreign aid and did less to help the people than the “evil” capitalists.

You have aptly described the best possible scenario for local populations that new world order will provide them in nwo's "global trade" and business operations.

Pretend for a few minutes that you are on the board of directors of the international firm that owns the cocunut plantation; you own a few hundred million worth of stock in various companies and serve on numerous big company boards. And (shhhh) you have great connections in the upper echelons of American society, including government and finance and various tax-exempt foundations.

Now when you look at the African nation, you have a nice profitable coconut operation going, the US taxpayer is paying to keep the societal leaders (government, university, police, healthcare, business, etc.) working with the US government and US major corporations like the coconut board you sit on. You even can point out to US conservatives exactly the scenario you described - the locals are happy with the coconut plantation. All is well.

Now imagine a bunch of independent American small businessmen and a few missionaries come over to that African nation to "help out". They have no connection to the US government or your corporate interests. They start with the locals on a simple level, producing simple products, consumed locally, that the locals can master. They provide on-the-job education and training to the locals, having them make food, clothing, shelter, transportation products and services. They buy some articles from the locals and import them into America, and of course they export from America to the locals various things that the locals can't produce yet. But their goal is to get the local economy self-sufficient and not dependent on exports for cash. Instead, the locals own the local businesses, the locals are the employees of the local businesses and the locals are the customers of the local businesses. Soon the local economy starts growing, and it has a lot of growth potential because it's at a relatively simple level and there are tons of products they still have yet to be able to produce locally.

Local wages will have gone up dramatically.

Oops, plantation board of directors simply can't have this - it could get out of control.

After a while, the top local business men, now trained as lawyers and financiers, are actually setting up their own local business laws and regulations, and putting together their own investment companies. The original group of small business Americans carries on a trade with them and serves as advisors, but does not use any trickery to inhibit local businesses even if they compete with them. The American small business advisors explain the trickery of foreign aid to the locals, and the trickery of having a few corrupt government officials placed at the top of the government and political system results in Western domination of the nation and subverts their own national interests. They lay it all out, so the local businessmen, now very prosperous in a local economy prosperous in its own right, can see just how a few corrupt local elites can cause their nation to be a perpetual corrupt charity case of misery.

Obviously, the situation would become one where

a) the local nation would be prosperous enough that they would not need outside grants or loans

b) the economic productivity and prosperity of most of the citizens of the nation would dramatically increase

c) the coconut company would have to pay much higher wages than they did under the old system

d) the coconut company working in tandem with the US government would have a more difficult time controlling the nation as education and awareness in the public "gets out of control".

Of course the dear professor was grateful for the coconut work and obviously fondly remembers the simple but honorable work on the plantation.

In economics, the difference in value of the hypothetical plan working out and the way things are now is called opportunity cost.

Even by highly educated people, opportunity cost is difficult to see. It's a great way, therefore, to trick whole populations who simply do not know what they're missing out on.

Is the tricking of whole populations out of prosperity, keeping them in poverty, while offering them simple, honest labor for a relatively good wage... when one could easily set them free by really giving them real opportunity and then dealing with them without the tricks but in a legitimate trading relationship... is the trickery just smart business ? What they don't know won't hurt them ? Considering that letting the nation develop into a "developed" country would allow for much more volume of trade and therefore much more profit potential... one has to wonder why the elite traders/financiers would want to keep third world countries in the state of corrupt dependency. This wondering is because they are actually giving up dramatically increased trading profits in order to preserve the current political-economic order, where the London-NYC nexus of financial interests has comfortable control of the elites of those countries as well as the rest of the world, even to the point of actually dividing the nations of the world into competitive groups that see each other as potential enemies, even though the financiers are the power behind the throne of all of them, since they supply the financing and have their own people well-placed in all espionage agencies, diplomatic corps and goverment executive authority.

Good engineers know that not everyone has the potential to become a good engineer; top craftsmen of the skilled labor force know that not everyone has their capabilities. The top few countries in manufacturing and design have populations that have plenty of these great natural skills, while in countries at the bottom of the heap in these capabilities one finds a dramatic scarcity of those natural skills. Nothing wrong with that, because they have other skills and interests; to each their own.

So why do the elites have this great fear of actually letting "developing" countries develop ? After all, they've been in this "developing" status for centuries, and in the past half century, hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars have been spent in all sorts of corrupt programs to "help them develop". Of course, the primary effort by the West in all these places has been the cultivating of espionage connections, the creation of "terror" groups, the installation of puppet governments, the promotion of revolutions to "replace" governments. All with the pretty facade - provided by the elites' tax-exempt, well-endowed foundations - of "the benefit of all mankind." The first step towards ending this global joke is to admit that it is happening.

[RipSawyer]

I didn’t name it because I was writing of things that were fairly common in Southern mill towns a hundred or so years ago. This company happens to be still operating and nothing like that has gone on recently as far as I know.

This hit song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Joo90ZWrUkU was based on that kind of thing, the lyrics refer to coal mining but the textile mills of the old days as well as other industries operated in a similar fashion. There are some interesting comments concerning the practice. It was not slavery but in some ways may have been worse because the employers did not have any investment in the workers unlike the old time slave owner who had money tied up so that it was in his interest to have his slave stay in good health. Under the later system millworkers were of no consequence, when one died another was easily found. It was the industrial version of the sharecropping system. “De ducks” ate up everything a person earned and left him in debt for life. Any increase in pay was immediately offset by an equal or greater percentage increase in prices at the company store to which he “owed his soul.”