From Classic Slavery to Modern Exploitation

From Classic Slavery to Modern Exploitation Presented by: Mr. Kara Date: 22 February 2021 Slavery - From the Beginning - A practice that dates back thousands of years to prehistoric hunting societies - Involves owning and exploiting a person like property - Slaves historically considered inherently inferior to those who owned them - Lines between owner and owned are immutable and strictly enforced by law, culture, and religion - Slaves cannot exit the condition unless granted by owner...or they perish - First definition of slavery in international law: - League of Nations Slavery Convention, 1926: • Slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised. Old World Slavery: Atlantic Slave-Trade - Ran from 1500 to 1866 - 12+M Africans taken from Africa and sold into slavery - Two-thirds of slaves sold to sugar plantations in the West Indies - Economic considerations governed each step of the trade - At its peak, England ran more than half the trade - Abolished 1833 in England, 1865 in USA - Harmful legacies persist to this day What is Modern Slavery? - You cannot legally own people today, so what is "modern slavery" - There are legal definitions in statutes and the like, but in essence - "Modern Slavery" refers to an array of severely exploitative labor practices that amount to treating people like property - • Forced labor (ILO Convention No. 29) • Human trafficking (Palermo Protocol) • Debt bondage What about prison labor? Forced marriage? The worst forms of child labor? Modern Slavery: The Scale - Somewhere between 30 to 45 million slaves in the world today - Generate profits for their immediate exploiters in excess of $150 billion per year...upthe-chain value attributed to downstream slavery worth much more - Per slave profits range from • A few hundred dollars per year for an agricultural slave in South Asia to $150,000+ per year for a sex trafficking victim in the West Modern Slavery: A ‘Wide Range of Exploitation - Commercial sex - Manufacturing electronics, toys, sporting goods - Apparel and textiles - including downstream inputs like cotton - Plantations - tea, coffee, palm oil - Mines rare and common earth minerals, metals, precious gems and stones - Agriculture - scores of products and staples - Fishing and aquaculture - shrimp, tuna, and more - Domestic servitude - Almost all feed goods and profits into the global economy Who Are Modern Slaves? - They are poor - 40% of the planet lives on less than a latté a day - Often migrants or displaced people - Suffer economic disenfranchisement and lack of reliable income and/or access to formal credit markets (esp. w/ debt bondage) - Reside in areas of social instability, military conflict, corruption, environmental catastrophe - Bias against female gender and minority ethnicities are powerful forces on the supplyside - These are by and large the same forces that have promoted the supply of potential slaves throughout history Why Modern Slavery? - Civilizations agreed long ago that slavery was not acceptable - Yet slavery and slavery-like practices permeate the global economy - This is because there are still powerful forces of demand for servile labor - The specific forces of demand for any particular industry will vary - However, there are always two forces of demand that are common to any scenario of enslavement, and they are both economic: • 1. Exploiter demand for maximum profit • 2. Consumer demand for lower retail prices Demand Side – Exploiter Demand to Maximize Profit - For almost any business, labor is typically the highest cost component to operating expenses - Throughout history, producers have tried to find ways to minimize labor costs - Slavery is the extreme of this - virtually nil cost of labor - With substantially reduced costs of labor, total operating costs are reduced, allowing the slave owner to maximize profit - Substantially lower labor costs also allow producers to do one other thing - become more competitive by lowering retail prices - This element is the major difference between Old World and modern slavery: the globalization of competition Demand Side – Impact of the Globalized Economy - In a globalized economy, where products are available to us in nearby shops from all over the world, the need to be price competitive is greater than ever - Slavery, and other forms of severe labor exploitation, have evolved from the old world into the globalized world as a primary way in which unscrupulous producers compete to 1) maximize profits and 2) maximize price competitiveness Modern Slavery in Global Supply Chains - The rise of the globalized economy and the free(r) flow of goods, capital, and people has yielded many benefits, however – - It has also led to the rise of various modes of severe labor exploitation in the shadows of the global economy - We generally do not know exactly how much and in what ways these modes of exploitation exist from one commodity to the next - These exploitative scenarios range from low-wage, under regulated labor markets to child labor and outright slavery - Minimizing the costs of inputs and labor allows companies to balance the twin imperatives of boosting profitability and maximizing price competitiveness