Modern Slavery in the Global Economy

By Colman McCarthy

A Cameroonian teenaged girl enjoyed a moment of justice recently when a federal jury in Greenbelt, Md., found a man and woman guilty of enslaving her. A two week trial revealed that for three years the 18-year-old was forced by the couple to work long hours without pay as a housekeeper and nanny.

Modern slaveholders in the United States are of a different stripe from the cotton plantation masters whipping the Nat Turners to lift that bale and tote that hay. Often they are professional couples canny about fraudulent labor contracts or acquiring bogus passports to bring in the prospective chattel to clean the toilets and scrub the floors.

The young woman from Cameroon is one of an estimated 27 million slaves found in nearly every 21st century nation. With slave owner profits reliably estimated at an annual $13 billion, they represent a workforce as crucial to the current global economy as did the black field hands to the enrichment of the antebellum South.

The country’s most knowledgeable authority on international slavery is Kevin Bales. An Oklahoma-born Quaker pacifist who taught in British universities for most of the 1980s and 90s, Bales directs Free the Slaves, the Washington-based U.S. branch of the London advocacy group, Anti-Slavery International. In 1999 Bales wrote “Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy” (University of California Press).

“Slavery grows best in extreme poverty,” he writes. In addition to agriculture, “slaves are used in brickmaking, mining or quarrying, prostitution, gem working and jewelry making, cloth and carpet making, and domestic service; they clear forests, make charcoal and work in shops….But the value of slaves lies not so much in the particular products they make as in their sweat, in the volume of work squeezed out of them.”

The highest concentration is in Asia, northern and western Africa, and parts of South America.

I invited Bales to speak to one of my high school classes recently. His assistant came also—Abbey Steel, one of my former college students now on a Fulbright fellowship in Colombia. None of us in the class—myself included—had anything more than a vague awareness of the facts of modern slavery. Much of what little I knew came from the columns of Nat Hentoff, one of the few American writers consistently covering the issue.

Bales told of traveling the world—Thailand, Brazil, India, Pakistan, Mauritania, among other sites—to learn for himself the facts of slavery. What he brought back home was equally startling: the linkage between Americans and the world’s slave labor. The chocolate we eat, he told the students, the sugar on our cereal, the shirts on our backs, the shoes on our feet, the carpets on our floors, the jeweled rings on our fingers, the investment yields from stocks in international companies using slave labor: all could well have had origins in the misery of people violently held against their will.

As a modern abolitionist, Bales has seen some progress. He praised the major chocolate companies—Hershey’s, M&M Mars, Nestles—for recently agreeing to take responsibility for labor practices on the world’s cocoa farms, More than 40 percent of U.S. chocolate has come from Ivory Coast where enslaved children harvested cocoa beans. The 2000 State Department report on human rights estimated that 15,000 child slaves work on Ivory Coast’s cocoa, cotton and coffee farms.

As with most cause-minded advocates, Bales is one-half problem-describer and one-half solution-finder. On the latter, he writes: “to solve the puzzle of how slavery is linked to our lives, we need to draw on good researchers, good economists, and good business people: researchers to follow the flow of raw materials and products from the hands of slaves to their ultimate consumer, economists to explore the nature of slave-based businesses and work out viable alternatives, and experienced business people to help the businesses all along the product chain find the best way to end their participation in slavery. And all that research and information would be useless without educators and communicators to help consumers make careful and conscious buying decisions that support the rehabilitation of slaves. I believe that when people know that their purchasing and investing can actually help free slaves, they will do the right thing.”

In the U.S. , where slavery is mistakenly perceived as a horror that Honest Abe Lincoln ended way back when, a federal appeals court in January upheld the conviction of a Maryland man who held an illiterate Brazilian women in his home for 14 years. This was in Montgomery County, one of the nation’s wealthiest. The unpaid duties of the slave, who had to carry pails of water for bathing in a tin tub next to her windowless basement room, included cleaning the house, raking leaves, shoveling snow, dog-walking and washing the family’s three cars.

Restitution has been ordered by the court. The slave owner was sentenced to 61/2 years in prison.

Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington DC. His next book is “I’d Rather Teach Peace” (Orbis, April).