Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy

By Kevin Bales

University of California Press





	It is a thing of the past. An ugly, chilling historic reminder of
the savage inhumanity of racism in its most extreme manifestation. From
the biblical era to the time of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, a story of
suffering, dispossession, and resistance: slavery. 
	The ever-present legacy of the African slave trade aside, some
might say that we've come a long way. Slavery has been abolished in every
country on earth, and attention in the realm of human rights has logically
turned to documenting and protesting incidence of discrimination, torture
and abuse, the proliferation of sweatshops, and the declining rights of
laborers worldwide. 
	But Kevin Bales, an American-born sociologist and economist now at
the University of Surrey in London, sounds a new alarm with his new
work, Disposable People. Slavery is here, he says, a by-product of
a ruthless global economy, an explosion in population growth, and the
corruption of governments who turn a blind eye--or even give their tacit
consent--to such practices. 
	There are at least 27 million slaves living on
the planet today, according to Bales, worked regularly to the point of
exhaustion, starvation and death. Humiliated and violated as enslaved
child prostitutes in Thailand, subjected to isolation and deprivation by
trickster middlemen in the charcoal-making batterias of Brazil, and born
into lifelong bonded labor in India, the specific circumstances
surrounding the enslavement of these men, women and children vary from one
country to the next. But if there is one common experience that Bales has
recognized in the process of interviewing the new slaves of the global
economy, it is the suffering of their bodies and souls.
	A vivid and fast-paced book, Bales sets the stage for five case
studies of slavery with a compelling introduction to the issues. It is of
crucial importance, Bales believes, to understand the ways in which the
"new slavery" is so different from the slavery of yesteryear. Without
lessening the horror or severity of the American and European enslavement
of Africans from the 1650s to 1850s, Bales points out the insidious nature
of modern slavery: The abundant availability of disposable people in the
wake of economic upheaval, rapid industrialization and sociopolitical
destabilization. 
	African slaves had been costly and often lifelong financial
investments to their plantation-owning masters and had yielded relatively
low profits, explains Bales, but the slaves of today cost their masters
next to nothing, yielding enormously high profits. With slavery banned
throughout the world, modern slaveholders can actually avoid the
"responsibilities" of slave ownership. Instead, they can easily obtain,
discard, torture and even kill their slaves at will, with no concern for
economic or legal consequences: "While slaves in the American South were
often horribly treated," writes Bales, "there was nevertheless a strong
incentive to keep them alive for many years. Slaves were like valuable
livestock: the plantation owner needed to make back his investment. There
was also pressure to breed them and produce more slaves, since it was
usually cheaper to raise new slaves oneself ... Today no slaveholder wants
to spend money supporting useless infants ... and there is no reason to
protect slaves from disease or injury--medicine costs money, and it's
cheaper to let them die."
	The surplus of dispossessed farmers and laborers from which to
draw the slave labor pool, explains Bales, is added to by the availability
of child labor. In Thailand, that availability is even made possible
through parental consent. Left behind for two decades while the southern
part of the country pursued a breakneck pace toward modernization,
agriculturally-focused northern Thais saw the prices of their food, land
and tools increase even as their returns on rice and other products were
held down by government policies. Feeling pressure to participate in the
consumerist frenzy taking place around them but lacking the income to do
so, many poor families have opted to sell their daughters into debt
bondage (for an appealing sum of money) to well-dressed brokers who arrive
to procure fresh, new bodies. 
	A debt agreement signed (with the understanding that a daughter
can only return once she has repaid the money through her labor), the
broker transports the girl to a southern brothel where she is beaten,
raped, and put to work servicing 10 to 15 men a day: "The immediate and
forceful application of terror is the first step in successful
enslavement. Within hours of being brought to the brothel, the girls are
in pain and shock ... For the youngest girls, with little understanding of
what is happening to them, the trauma is overwhelming." 	
	Theoretically, says Bales, the estimated 35,000 enslaved
girls--who make up a fraction of the thriving Thai sex industry--can
'work' their way out of their debt bondage. But, as Bales witnesses, the
debt accumulates while the girls are held in captivity (paying for rent,
food and medicines are among the charges incurred), and so most girls are
not released from their brothels until they cease being
profitable--usually when they are sick or dying from AIDS. 
	Utilizing an unusual research methodology, Bales draws on his
background in sociology to examine the lives of enslaved men and women,
and simultaneously sets out with an economist's eye to understand the
financial aspects of modern-day slavery by approaching slaveholders--or
their middlemen--to gather details about the way the 'business' of slavery
is run. In Thailand, Bales uses information from the appropriately-named
Always Prospering brothel to tally a sheet of monthly expenditures and
income. The monthly profit for this small, working-class brothel? $88,000.
The incentive to do this kind of business, Bales recognizes, is
overwhelming ... as long as the value of human life is held in low regard.
"Thailand is a country sick with an addiction to slavery," expounds Bales.
"From village to city and back, the profits of slavery flow."
	To his credit, Bales is careful not to overgeneralize when
addressing prostitution in Thailand. It is true, he says, that many women
opt for the sex industry and set the terms of their work lives with some
amount of free agency. These people are not enslaved, argues Bales, and
neither are those working in exploitative, low-paying sweatshops, even as
horrible as those environments are. 
	In Thailand as in most other countries where slavery exists, Bales
stresses that modern enslavement is rarely dependent on notions of ethnic,
class or religious supremacy. "In the past ... the otherness of the
slaves made it easier to employ the violence and cruelty necessary for
total control ... Today the morality of money overrides other concerns.
Most slaveholders feel no need to explain or defend their chosen method of
labor recruitment and management. Slavery is a very profitable business,
and a good bottom line is justification enough."
	Mauritania, just south of Morocco, is one of the exceptions.
Dominated economically by the minority Arab Moors, ethnically stratified
Mauritanian society allows an entire group of people (the Black Moors or
"Haratines") who share the same religion as their Moslem owners to be
enslaved. Mauritanian slavery, writes Bales, "both treats the slaves more
humanely and leaves them more helpless, a slavery that is less a political
reality than a permanent part of the culture ... The lack of overt
violence has also allowed many outside observers, like the French and
American governments, to deny that this slavery even exists."
	Valuing its strategic importance as a buffer against Algeria and
Libya, Western nations including the U.S. have preferred to ignore the
obvious. On paper, Mauritania outlawed slavery in 1980, and the country is
regularly held up as a model of African democracy. 
	Appealing to the sensibilities of his readers, Bales asks us to
recognize that the complicity of our governments in ignoring slavery in
countries like Mauritania is but one way that Western nations and their
citizens participate in the continuance of slavery. The use of imported
domestic slaves, in particular, has been a documented phenomenon in cities
including Paris, London, New York and Los Angeles. 
	But Bales asserts that even those of us who have no such direct
contact with modern slavery still reap its benefits. Bargain prices abound
on the goods we buy and use, and too few Westerners stop to ask why that
might be so. "Slaves in Pakistan may have made the shoes you are wearing
and the carpet you stand on, " Bales writes. "Slaves in the Caribbean may
have put sugar in your kitchen and toys in the hands of your children ...
Your investment portfolio and your mutual fund pension own stock in
companies using labor in the developing world. Slaves keep your costs low
and returns on your investments high."
	Making these points without treading too heavily into
guilt-inducing rhetoric, Bales challenges his readers to understand that
solutions are both immediately accessible and immensely complex, ranging
from the successes of the Rugmark anti-child-slavery campaign to the
long-term challenge of rehabilitating those battling the lifelong
emotional scars of enslavement. 
	Bales doesn't hesitate to use Disposable People to make an
overt, immediate call for action. It is an approach to the findings of his
fieldwork that purist academicians may well frown upon, but when the issue
is the still largely unrecognized phenomenon of present-day slavery, it
seems we should be thanking Bales for issuing this kind of wake-up call.
	"If there is one fundamental violation of our humanity we cannot allow, it
is slavery," Bales concludes. "What good is our economic and political
power, if we can't use it to free slaves? If we can't choose to stop
slavery, how can we say that we are free?"