Modern Slavery


Book Description

Siddharth Kara is a tireless chronicler of the human cost of slavery around the world. He has documented the dark realities of modern slavery in order to reveal the degrading and dehumanizing systems that strip people of their dignity for the sake of profit—and to link the suffering of the enslaved to the day-to-day lives of consumers in the West. In Modern Slavery, Kara draws on his many years of expertise to demonstrate the astonishing scope of slavery and offer a concrete path toward its abolition. From labor trafficking in the U.S. agricultural sector to sex trafficking in Nigeria to debt bondage in the Southeast Asian construction sector to forced labor in the Thai seafood industry, Kara depicts the myriad faces and forms of slavery, providing a comprehensive grounding in the realities of modern-day servitude. Drawing on sixteen years of field research in more than fifty countries around the globe—including revelatory interviews with both the enslaved and their oppressors—Kara sets out the key manifestations of modern slavery and how it is embedded in global supply chains. Slavery offers immense profits at minimal risk through the exploitation of vulnerable subclasses whose brutalization is tacitly accepted by the current global economic order. Kara has developed a business and economic analysis of slavery based on metrics and data that attest to the enormous scale and functioning of these systems of exploitation. Beyond this data-driven approach, Modern Slavery unflinchingly portrays the torments endured by the powerless. This searing exposé documents one of humanity’s greatest wrongs and lays out the framework for a comprehensive plan to eradicate it.




Bonded Labor


Book Description

Focusing on the pervasive, deeply entrenched, and wholly unjust system of bonded labor, Kara delves into this ancient and ever-evolving mode of slavery, which ensnares roughly six out of every ten slaves in the world. He provides a thorough economic, historical, and legal overview of bonded labor, describes the violent enslavement of millions, and follows supply chains directly to Western consumers.




Disposable People


Book Description

Slavery is illegal throughout the world, yet more than twenty-seven million people are still trapped in one of history's oldest social institutions. Kevin Bales's disturbing story of slavery today reaches from brick kilns in Pakistan and brothels in Thailand to the offices of multinational corporations. His investigation of conditions in Mauritania, Brazil, Thailand, Pakistan, and India reveals the tragic emergence of a "new slavery," one intricately linked to the global economy. The new slaves are not a long-term investment as was true with older forms of slavery, explains Bales. Instead, they are cheap, require little care, and are disposable. Three interrelated factors have helped create the new slavery. The enormous population explosion over the past three decades has flooded the world's labor markets with millions of impoverished, desperate people. The revolution of economic globalization and modernized agriculture has dispossessed poor farmers, making them and their families ready targets for enslavement. And rapid economic change in developing countries has bred corruption and violence, destroying social rules that might once have protected the most vulnerable individuals. Bales's vivid case studies present actual slaves, slaveholders, and public officials in well-drawn historical, geographical, and cultural contexts. He observes the complex economic relationships of modern slavery and is aware that liberation is a bitter victory for a child prostitute or a bondaged miner if the result is starvation. Bales offers suggestions for combating the new slavery and provides examples of very positive results from organizations such as Anti-Slavery International, the Pastoral Land Commission in Brazil, and the Human Rights Commission in Pakistan. He also calls for researchers to follow the flow of raw materials and products from slave to marketplace in order to effectively target campaigns of "naming and shaming" corporations linked to slavery. Disposable People is the first book to point the way to abolishing slavery in today's global economy. All of the author's royalties from this book go to fund anti-slavery projects around the world.




Child Slavery Now


Book Description

Most slave trades were abolished during the 19th century, yet there remain millions of people in slavery today, including approximately 210 million children - trafficked, in debt bondage, as well as other forms of forced labor. Set to be the definitive text on the subject, this groundbreaking book - drawing on global experiences - shows how children remain locked in slavery, the ways in which they are exploited, and how they can be emancipated. Child Slavery Now includes international contributors who remind us that we all - as consumers - are implicated in modern childhood slavery, and we need both to understand its causes and act to stop it.




What Slaveholders Think


Book Description

Drawing on fifteen years of work in the antislavery movement, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick examines the systematic oppression of men, women, and children in rural India and asks: How do contemporary slaveholders rationalize the subjugation of other human beings, and how do they respond when their power is threatened? More than a billion dollars have been spent on antislavery efforts, yet the practice persists. Why? Unpacking what slaveholders think about emancipation is critical for scholars and policy makers who want to understand the broader context, especially as seen by the powerful. Insight into those moments when the powerful either double down or back off provides a sobering counterbalance to scholarship on popular struggle. Through frank and unprecedented conversations with slaveholders, Choi-Fitzpatrick reveals the condescending and paternalistic thought processes that blind them. While they understand they are exploiting workers' vulnerabilities, slaveholders also feel they are doing workers a favor, often taking pride in this relationship. And when the victims share this perspective, their emancipation is harder to secure, driving some in the antislavery movement to ask why slaves fear freedom. The answer, Choi-Fitzpatrick convincingly argues, lies in the power relationship. Whether slaveholders recoil at their past behavior or plot a return to power, Choi-Fitzpatrick zeroes in on the relational dynamics of their self-assessment, unpacking what happens next. Incorporating the experiences of such pivotal actors into antislavery research is an immensely important step toward crafting effective antislavery policies and intervention. It also contributes to scholarship on social change, social movements, and the realization of human rights.




Understanding Global Slavery


Book Description

Slavery continues as a blight on the human world, with an estimated 27 million people around the world in bondage. Kevin Bales undertakes a discussion of the causes of enslavement & the socio-economic factors that sustain slavery in the 21st century.




A Global Alliance Against Forced Labour


Book Description

This report is an account of contemporary forced labour to date. It provides the first global and regional estimates by an international organization of forced labour in the world today, including the number of people affected and how many of them are victims of trafficking, as well as of the profits made by the criminals exploiting trafficked workers.Based on these data, the report highlights the gravity of the problem of forced labour. From this data emerges three major categories of forced labour: forced labour imposed by the State for economic, political or other purposes, forced labour linked to poverty and discrimination and forced labour that arises from migration and trafficking of workers across the world, often associated with globalization.The report provides evidence that the abolition of forced labour represents a challenge for virtually every country in the world industrialized, transition and developing countries alike. It assesses experience at the national level in taking up this challenge, with particular emphasis on the importance of sound laws and policies and their rigorous enforcement, as well as effective prevention strategies. The report also reviews the actions against forced labour taken over the past four years by the ILO and its tripartite partners governments, employers and workers. It calls for a new global alliance to relegate forced labour to history.




The Modern Slavery Agenda


Book Description

Modern slavery, in the form of labour exploitation, domestic servitude, sexual trafficking, child labour and cannabis farming, is still growing in the UK and industrialised countries, despite the introduction of laws to try to stem it. This hugely topical book, by a team of high-profile activists and expert writers, is the first to critically assess the legislation, using evidence from across the field, and to offer strategies for improvement in policy and practice. It argues that, contrary to its claims to be ‘world-leading’, the Modern Slavery Act is inconsistent, inadequate and punitive; and that the UK government, through its labour market and immigration policies, is actually creating the conditions for slavery to be promoted.




Bonded Labour in Pakistan


Book Description

Part of the Oxford in Pakistan Readings in Sociology and Social Anthropology series Bonded labour in Pakistan brings together, for the first time, a collection of essays addressing bonded labour across different agricultural and industrial sectors in Pakistan. With contributions from prominent experts on labour issues and human rights activism, field researchers and ethnographers, and a leading legal scholar, the collection is a multi-disciplinary engagement with bonded labour in Pakistan as it has evolved over the last two decades.