Secessio plebis, a form of protest in ancient Rome where the plebeians would leave the city, causing the economy to collapse
The proletarii constituted a social class of Roman citizens who owned little or no property. The name presumably originated with the census,
which Roman authorities conducted every five years to produce a
register of citizens and their property, which determined their military
duties and voting privileges. Those who owned 11,000 assēs (coins) or fewer fell below the lowest category for military service, and their children—prōlēs (offspring)—were listed instead of property; hence the name proletarius (producer of offspring). Roman citizen-soldiers paid for their own horses and arms, and fought without payment for the commonwealth, but the only military contribution of a proletarius
was his children, the future Roman citizens who could colonize
conquered territories. Officially, propertyless citizens were called capite censi
because they were "persons registered not as to their property...but
simply as to their existence as living individuals, primarily as heads (caput) of a family."
Although explicitly included by name in the Comitia Centuriata (Centuriate Assembly), proletarii were the lowest class, largely deprived of voting rights. Not only did proletarii
have less voting "weight" in the various elections, but since voting
ran hierarchically starting with the highest social ranks, a majority
could be reached early and their votes never even taken. Late Roman
historians such as Livy vaguely described the Comitia Centuriata as a popular assembly of early Rome composed of centuriae, voting units representing classes of citizens according to wealth. This assembly, which usually met on the Campus Martius to discuss public policy, designated the military duties of Roman citizens. One of the reconstructions of the Comitia Centuriata features 18 centuriae of cavalry, and 170 centuriae of infantry divided into five classes by wealth, plus 5 centuriae of support personnel called adsidui, one of which represented the proletarii.
In battle, the cavalry brought their horses and arms, the top infantry
class full arms and armour, the next two classes less, the fourth class
only spears, the fifth slings, while the assisting adsidui held no weapons. If unanimous, the cavalry and top infantry class were enough to decide an issue. A deeper reconstruction incorporating social backgrounds found that
the senators, the knights, and the first class held 88 out of 193 centuriae, the two lowest propertied classes held only 30 centuriae, but the proletarii held only 1. Musicians, by way of comparison, had more voting power despite far fewer citizens, with 2 centuriae. "[F]or the voting to reach the proletarii a very profound split in the elite and the higher classes was required."
Modern use
Classic liberal view
Jean-François Millet – The man with the hoe
In the early 19th century, many Western European liberal scholars—who
dealt with social sciences and economics—pointed out the socio-economic
similarities of the modern rapidly growing industrial worker class and
the classic proletarians. One of the earliest analogies can be found in
the 1807 paper of French philosopher and political scientist Hugues Felicité Robert de Lamennais. Later it was translated to English with the title "Modern Slavery".
Swiss liberal economist and historian Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi
was the first to apply the proletariat term to the working class
created under capitalism, and whose writings were frequently cited by Karl Marx. Marx most likely encountered the term while studying the works of Sismondi.
Marxist theory
Adolph Menzel – Iron rolling mill (1872–1875)
Marx, who studied Roman law at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, used the term proletariat in his socio-political theory (Marxism) to describe a progressive working class untainted by private property and capable of revolutionary action to topple capitalism and abolish social classes, leading society to ever higher levels of prosperity and justice. With reference to such expectations, Andreas Dorschel, alluding to Sigmund Freud's
notion of "super-ego" ("Über-Ich"), calls Marx's proletariat a
"super-we" ("Über-Wir") installed above any actual workers' movement.
Marx himself defined the proletariat as the social class having no significant ownership of the means of production
(factories, machines, land, mines, buildings, vehicles) and whose only
means of subsistence is to sell their labour power for a wage or salary. Borders between the proletariat and adjacent social classes have been
defined only vaguely in Marxist theory. In the socially superior, less
progressive direction are the lower petty bourgeoisie,
such as small shopkeepers, who rely primarily on self-employment at an
income comparable to an ordinary wage. Intermediate positions are
possible, where wage-labor for an employer combines with
self-employment. In another direction, the lumpenproletariat or "rag-proletariat", which Marx considers a retrograde class, live in the informal economy
outside of legal employment: the poorest outcasts of society such as
beggars, tricksters, entertainers, buskers, criminals and prostitutes. Socialist
parties have often argued over whether they should organize and
represent all the lower classes, or only the wage-earning proletariat.
A 1911 Industrial Worker publication advocating industrial unionism based on a critique of capitalism. The proletariat "work for all" and "feed all".
According to Marxism, capitalism is based on the exploitation of the proletariat
by the bourgeoisie: the workers, who own no means of production, must
use the property of others to produce goods and services and to earn
their living. Workers cannot rent the means of production (e.g. a
factory or department store) to produce on their own account; rather,
capitalists hire workers, and the goods or services produced become the
property of the capitalist, who sells them at the market.
Part of the net selling price pays the workers' wages (variable
costs); a second part renews the means of production (constant costs,
capital investment); while the third part is consumed by the capitalist
class, split between the capitalist's personal profit and fees to other
owners (rents, taxes, interest on loans, etc.). The struggle over the
first part (wage rates) puts the proletariat and bourgeoisie into irreconcilable conflict, as market competition pushes wages inexorably to the minimum necessary
for the workers to survive and continue working. The second part,
called capitalized surplus value, is used to renew or increase the means
of production (capital), either in quantity or quality. The second and third parts are known as surplus value, the difference between the wealth the proletariat produce and the wealth they consume.
Marxists argue that new wealth is created through labor applied to natural resources. The commodities that proletarians produce and capitalists sell are valued not for their usefulness, but for the amount of labour
embodied in them: for example, air is essential but requires no labor
to produce, and is therefore free; while a diamond is much less useful,
but requires hundreds of hours of mining and cutting, and is therefore
expensive. The same goes for the workers' labor power: it is valued not
for the amount of wealth it produces, but for the amount of labor
necessary to keep the workers fed, housed, sufficiently trained, and
able to raise children as new workers. On the other hand, capitalists
earn their wealth not as a function of their personal labor, which may
even be null, but by the juridical relation of their property to the
means of production (e.g. owning a factory or farmland).
Marx argues that history is made by man and not destiny. The
instruments of production and the working class that use the tools in
order to produce are referred to as the moving forces of society. Over
time, this developed into the levels of social class where the owners of
resources joined to squeeze productivity out of the individuals who
depended on their labor power. Marx argues that these relations between
the exploiters and exploited results in different modes of production
and the successive stages in history. These modes of production in which
mankind gains power over nature is distinguished into five different
systems: the Primitive Community, Slave State, Feudal State, Capitalist
System, and finally the Socialist Society. The transition between these
systems were all due to an increase in civil unrest among those who felt
oppressed by a higher social class.
The contention with feudalism began once the merchants and guild
artisans grew in numbers and power. Once they organized themselves, they
began opposing the fees imposed on them by the nobles and clergy. This
development led to new ideas and eventually established the Bourgeoisie
class which Marx opposes. Commerce began to change the form of
production and markets began to shift in order to support larger
production and profits. This change led to a series of revolutions by
the bourgeois which resulted in capitalism. Marx argues that this same
model can and should be applied to the fight for the proletariat.
Forming unions similar to how the merchants and artisans did will
establish enough power to enact change. Ultimately, Marx's theory of the
proletarian's struggle would eventually lead to the fall of capitalism
and the emergence of a new mode of production, socialism.
Marx argued that the proletariat would inevitably displace the capitalist system with the dictatorship of the proletariat,
abolishing the social relationships underpinning the class system and
then developing into a communist society in which "the free development
of each is the condition for the free development of all".
During the Chinese Communist Revolution, the concept of the proletariat emphasized having a proletarian class consciousness, rather than having proletarian social attributes (such as being an industrial worker).
In this way of defining the proletariat, a proletarian class
consciousness could be developed through a subjective standpoint with
political education supplied by the Chinese Communist Party.
This conception of the proletariat allowed for a Marxist theoretical
framing under which the revolution could address the relative weakness
of industrial working classes in China.Exactly what constituted a proper proletarian class consciousness was subject to intellectual and political debate.
Some have argued that this assessment has become outdated with the advent of
mass education, mass communication and globalization. According to this
argument, the working-class culture
of capitalist countries tend to experience "prole drift" (proletarian
drift), in which everything inexorably becomes commonplace and
commodified. Examples include best-seller lists, films, music made to
appeal to the masses, and shopping malls.
Through a rereading of the Grundrisse, the philosopher Bernard Stiegler expands the concept of proletariat. According to him,
The proletariat is defined by Engels and Marx in The Communist Manifesto
not by impoverishment, but by the loss of knowledge (of which
impoverishment is a consequence), and which, they write, will ultimately
affect "all strata of the population".
Simondon
offers a new perspective on the question of proletarianization: he
frames it as a process of de-individuation that results in a loss of
knowledge through its externalization into machines and devices."
affects
all tasks: domestic, educational, recreational, as well as those
carried out by research, design, production, and logistics units, etc.
More broadly, these skills might include cooking, educating, residing in a place, living together, counting or measuring, etc.
Examples
Stiegler considers the renowned economist Alan Greenspan, who served as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve during the subprime crisis, to be a proletarian. Indeed, Greenspan admitted during the congressional hearing that he did
not understand the complex financial products he had popularized and,
furthermore, that no one understood them.
Chatbots, such as ChatGPT, are a proletarianizing technology because users delegate their ability to think.
Deproletarianization
The process of proletarianization can be reversed through what Stiegler
calls "deproletarianization", that is, the reappropriation of knowledge. He cites the example of collaborative practices, such as those found in the open-source software community, fab labs, and Wikipedia, which he places at the center of his theory of the contributory economy. All of these practices contribute to the recreation of the commons (including digital commons). For Stiegler, contributors invest themselves
because they want to expand their knowledge and skills. Such a thirst for knowledge is a desire to become deproletarianized.
Deproletarianization goes through a "de-automation". However, Stiegler emphasizes that this does not have to be done in opposition to machines. He cites the example of Wikipedia contributors - of whom he is one - who are assisted by bots for tedious and repetitive tasks.
Wage slavery is a term used to criticize exploitation of labor by business. The situation of wage slavery can be loosely defined as a person's dependence on wages (or a salary) for their livelihood, especially when wages are low, treatment and conditions are poor, there is little competition for labor, and there are few chances for upward mobility.
The term is often used by critics of wage-based employment to criticize the exploitation of labor and social stratification,
with the former seen primarily as unequal bargaining power between
labor and capital, particularly when workers are paid comparatively low
wages, such as in sweatshops, and the latter is described as a lack of workers' self-management, fulfilling job choices, and leisure in an economy. The criticism of social stratification covers a wider range of employment choices bound by the pressures of a hierarchical society to perform otherwise unfulfilling work that deprives humans of their "species character" not only under threat of extreme poverty and starvation, but also of social stigma and statusdiminution. Historically, many socialist organizations and activists have espoused workers' self-management or worker cooperatives as possible alternatives to wage labor.
Similarities between wage labor and slavery were noted as early as Cicero in Ancient Rome, such as in De Officiis. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx elaborated the comparison between wage labor and slavery, and engaged in critique of work while Luddites emphasized the dehumanization
brought about by machines. The introduction of wage labor in
18th-century Britain was met with resistance, giving rise to the
principles of syndicalism and anarchism.
Before the American Civil War, Southern defenders of keeping African Americans in chattel slavery invoked the concept of wage slavery to favourably compare the condition of their slaves to workers in the North. The United States abolished most forms of slavery after the Civil War,
but labor union activists found the metaphor useful – according to
historian Lawrence Glickman,
in the 1870s through the 1890s "[r]eferences abounded in the labor
press, and it is hard to find a speech by a labor leader without the
phrase".
History
Emma Goldman denounced wage slavery by saying: "The only difference is that you are hired slaves instead of block slaves".
The view that working for wages is akin to slavery dates back to the ancient world. In ancient Rome, Cicero wrote that "the very wage [wage labourers] receive is a pledge of their slavery".
In 1763, the French journalist Simon Linguet published an influential description of wage slavery:
The
slave was precious to his master because of the money he had cost
him ... They were worth at least as much as they could be sold for in
the market ... It is the impossibility of living by any other means that
compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not
eat and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not
live ... It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the
rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him ... what
effective gain [has] the suppression of slavery brought [him ?] He is
free, you say. Ah! That is his misfortune ... These men ... [have] the
most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. ... They
must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to
be free?
The view that wage work has substantial similarities with chattel slavery
was actively put forward in the late 18th and 19th centuries by
defenders of chattel slavery (most notably in the Southern states of the
United States) and by opponents of capitalism (who were also critics of
chattel slavery). Some defenders of slavery, mainly from the Southern slave states, argued that Northern workers were "free but in name – the slaves of endless toil" and that their slaves were better off.This contention has been partly corroborated by some modern studies
that indicate slaves' material conditions in the 19th century were
"better than what was typically available to free urban laborers at the
time". In this period, Henry David Thoreau
wrote that "[i]t is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to
have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of
yourself."
Abolitionists in the United States criticized the analogy as spurious. They argued that wage workers were "neither wronged nor oppressed". Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans
argued that the condition of wage workers was different from slavery as
long as laborers were likely to develop the opportunity to work for
themselves, achieving self-employment. The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially declared "now I am my own master", upon taking a paying job. However, later in life he concluded to the contrary, saying "experience
demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less
galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this
slavery of wages must go down with the other". Douglass went on to speak about these conditions as arising from the
unequal bargaining power between the ownership/capitalist class and the non-ownership/laborer class within a compulsory monetary market:
No
more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers
could be adopted than the one that substitutes orders upon shopkeepers
for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty,
while it puts the laborer completely at the mercy of the land-owner and
the shopkeeper.
African American wage workers picking cotton on a plantation in the South
Self-employment became less common as the artisan tradition slowly disappeared in the later part of the 19th century. In 1869, The New York Times
described the system of wage labor as "a system of slavery as absolute
if not as degrading as that which lately prevailed at the South". E. P. Thompson
notes that for British workers at the end of the 18th and beginning of
the 19th centuries, the "gap in status between a 'servant,' a hired
wage-laborer subject to the orders and discipline of the master, and an
artisan, who might 'come and go' as he pleased, was wide enough for men
to shed blood rather than allow themselves to be pushed from one side to
the other. And, in the value system of the community, those who
resisted degradation were in the right". A "Member of the Builders' Union" in the 1830s argued that the trade
unions "will not only strike for less work, and more wages, but will
ultimately abolish wages, become their own masters and work for each
other; labor and capital will no longer be separate but will be
indissolubly joined together in the hands of workmen and work-women". This perspective inspired the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union
(UK) of 1834 which had the "two-fold purpose of syndicalist unions –
the protection of the workers under the existing system and the
formation of the nuclei of the future society" when the unions "take
over the whole industry of the country". William Lazonick, summarized:
Research
has shown, that the 'free-born Englishman' of the eighteenth century –
even those who, by force of circumstance, had to submit to agricultural
wage labour – tenaciously resisted entry into the capitalist workshop.
The use of the term "wage slave" by labor organizations may originate from the labor protests of the Lowell mill girls in 1836. The imagery of wage slavery was widely used by labor organizations
during the mid-19th century to object to the lack of workers'
self-management. However, it was gradually replaced by the more neutral
term "wage work" towards the end of the 19th century as labor
organizations shifted their focus to raising wages. Karl Marx described capitalist society as infringing on individual autonomy because it is based on a materialistic and commodified concept of the body and its liberty (i.e. as something that is sold, rented, or alienated in a class society). According to Friedrich Engels:
The
slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily
and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an
existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's
interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire
bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it,
has no secure existence.
Similarities of wage work with slavery
1913 comic comparing sweatshop conditions to slavery
Critics of wage work have drawn several similarities between wage work and slavery:
Since the chattel slave is property, his value to an owner is in
some ways higher than that of a worker who may quit, be fired or
replaced. The chattel slave's owner has made a greater investment in
terms of the money paid for the slave. For this reason, in times of
recession chattel slaves could not be fired like wage laborers. A "wage
slave" could also be harmed at no (or less) cost. American
chattel-slaves in the 19th century had improved their standard of living
from the 18th century and – according to historians Fogel and Engerman – plantation records
show that slaves worked less, were better fed and whipped only
occasionally – their material conditions in the 19th century being
"better than what was typically available to free urban laborers at the
time". This was partially due to slave psychological strategies under an
economic system different from capitalist wage-slavery. According to
Mark Michael Smith of the Economic History Society, "although intrusive
and oppressive, paternalism, the way masters employed it, and the
methods slaves used to manipulate it, rendered slaveholders' attempts to
institute capitalistic work regimens on their plantation ineffective
and so allowed slaves to carve out a degree of autonomy".
Unlike a chattel slave, a wage laborer can (barring unemployment
or lack of job offers) choose between employers, but those employers
usually constitute a minority of owners in the population for which the
wage laborer must work while attempts to implement workers' control
on employers' businesses may be considered an act of theft or
insubordination and thus be met with violence, imprisonment or other
legal and social measures. The wage laborer's starkest choice is to work
for an employer or to face poverty or starvation or to turn to crime.
If a chattel slave refuses to work, a number of punishments are also
available; from beatings to food deprivation – although economically
rational slave-owners practiced positive reinforcement to achieve best results and before losing their investment by killing an expensive slave.
Historically, the range of occupations and status positions held by
chattel slaves has been nearly as broad as that held by free persons,
indicating some similarities between chattel slavery and wage slavery as
well.
Like chattel slavery, wage slavery does not stem from some immutable
"human nature", but represents a "specific response to material and
historical conditions" that "reproduce[s] the inhabitants, the social
relations... the ideas... [and] the social form of daily life".
Similarities became blurred when proponents of wage labor won the American Civil War
of 1861–1865, in which they competed for legitimacy with defenders of
chattel slavery. Each side presented an over-positive assessment of
their own system while denigrating the opponent.
According to American anarcho-syndicalist philosopher Noam Chomsky,
workers themselves noticed the similarities between chattel and wage
slavery. Chomsky noted that the 19th-century Lowell mill girls, without
any reported knowledge of European Marxism or anarchism,
condemned the "degradation and subordination" of the newly emerging
industrial system and the "new spirit of the age: gain wealth,
forgetting all but self", maintaining that "those who work in the mills
should own them". They expressed their concerns in a protest song during their 1836 strike:
Oh! isn't it a pity, such a pretty girl as I
Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?
Oh! I cannot be a slave, I will not be a slave,
For I'm so fond of liberty,
That I cannot be a slave.
Defenses of both wage labor and chattel slavery in the literature
have linked the subjection of man to man with the subjection of man to nature – arguing that hierarchy and a social system's particular relations of production represent human nature and are no more coercive than the reality of life itself. According to this narrative, any well-intentioned attempt to fundamentally change the status quo is naively utopian and will result in more oppressive conditions. Bosses in both of these long-lasting systems argued that their respective systems created a lot of wealth and prosperity.
In some sense, both did create jobs, and their investment entailed
risk. For example, slave-owners risked losing money by buying chattel
slaves who later became ill or died; while bosses risked losing money by
hiring workers (wage slaves) to make products that did not sell well on
the market. Marginally, both chattel and wage slaves may become bosses;
sometimes by working hard. The "rags to riches" story occasionally
comes to pass in capitalism; the "slave to master" story occurred in
places like colonial Brazil, where slaves could buy their own freedom
and become business owners, self-employed, or slave-owners themselves. Thus, critics of the concept of wage slavery do not regard social mobility, or the hard work and risk that it may entail, as a redeeming factor.
Anthropologist David Graeber
has noted that historically the first wage-labor contracts we know
about – whether in ancient Greece or Rome, or in the Malay or Swahili city-states
in the Indian Ocean – were in fact contracts for the rental of chattel
slaves (usually the owner would receive a share of the money and the
slaves another, with which to maintain their living expenses). According
to Graeber, such arrangements were quite common in New World slavery as well, whether in the United States or in Brazil. C. L. R. James (1901–1989) argued that most of the techniques of human organization employed on factory workers during the Industrial Revolution first developed on slave plantations. Subsequent work "traces the innovations of modern management to the slave plantation".
Changes in the use of the term
By the end of the 19th century, both the use of the term "wage slavery" and its meaning declined.
At the end of the 19th century, North American labor rhetoric turned
towards consumerist and economics-based politics, from its previously
radical, producerist
vision. Whereas labor organizations once referred to powerless
disenfranchisement from the rise of industrial capitalism as "wage
slavery", the phrase had fallen out of favor by 1890 as those
organizations adopted pragmatic politics and phrases like "wage work". American producerist labor politics emphasized the control of
production conditions as being the guarantor of self-reliant, personal
freedom. As factories began to bring artisans in-house by 1880, wage
dependence replaced wage freedom as standard for skilled, unskilled, and
unionized workers alike.
As Hallgrimsdottir and Benoit point out:
[I]ncreased
centralization of production ... declining wages ... [an] expanding ...
labor pool ... intensifying competition, and ... [t]he loss of
competence and independence experienced by skilled labor" meant that "a
critique that referred to all [wage] work as slavery and avoided demands
for wage concessions in favor of supporting the creation of the
producerist republic (by diverting strike funds towards funding ...
co-operatives, for example) was far less compelling than one that
identified the specific conditions of slavery as low wages
Some anti-capitalist thinkers claim that the elite maintain wage slavery and a divided working class through their influence over the media and entertainment industry, educational institutions, unjust laws, nationalist and corporate propaganda, pressures and incentives to internalize values serviceable to the power structure, state
violence, fear of unemployment, and a historical legacy of exploitation
and profit accumulation/transfer under prior systems, which shaped the
development of economic theory. Adam Smith
noted that employers often conspire together to keep wages low and have
the upper hand in conflicts between workers and employers:
The
interest of the dealers ... in any particular branch of trade or
manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even
opposite to, that of the public... [They] have generally an interest to
deceive and even to oppress the public ... We rarely hear, it has been
said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of
workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely
combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are
always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform
combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate ...
It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must,
upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and
force the other into a compliance with their terms.
Capitalism
Pinkerton guards escort strikebreakers in Buchtel, Ohio, 1884.Red Army troops attack Kronstadtlibertarian socialist
"wage slavery" critics who had demanded among other things that
"handicraft production be authorized provided it does not utilize wage
labour".
The concept of wage slavery could conceivably be traced back to pre-capitalist figures like Gerrard Winstanley from the radical Christian Diggers movement in England, who wrote in his 1649 pamphlet, The New Law of Righteousness,
that there "shall be no buying or selling, no fairs nor markets, but
the whole earth shall be a common treasury for every man" and "there
shall be none Lord over others, but every one shall be a Lord of
himself".
Aristotle
stated that "the citizens must not live a mechanic or a mercantile life
(for such a life is ignoble and inimical to virtue), nor yet must those
who are to be citizens in the best state be tillers of the soil (for
leisure is needed both for the development of virtue and for active
participation in politics)", often paraphrased as "all paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind". Cicero
wrote in 44 BC that "vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired
workmen whom we pay for mere manual labour, not for artistic skill; for
in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery". Somewhat similar criticisms have also been expressed by some proponents of liberalism, like Silvio Gesell and Thomas Paine; Henry George, who inspired the economic philosophy known as Georgism; and the Distributist school of thought within the Catholic Church.
The waste of workers' efforts and resources on producing useless luxuries;
The waste of goods so that their price may remain high; and
The waste of all those who sit between the producer and consumer,
taking their own shares at each stage without actually contributing to
the production of goods, i.e. the middle man.
Fascism
Fascist economic policies were more hostile to independent trade unions than modern economies in Europe or the United States. Fascism
was more widely accepted in the 1920s and 1930s, and foreign corporate
investment (notably from the United States) in Germany increased after
the fascists took power.
Fascism has been perceived by some notable critics, like Buenaventura Durruti, to be a last resort weapon of the privileged to ensure the maintenance of wage slavery:
No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto their privileges.
According to Noam Chomsky, analysis of the psychological implications of wage slavery goes back to the Enlightenment era. In his 1791 book The Limits of State Action, classical liberal thinker Wilhelm von Humboldt
explained how "whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is
only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his
very nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but
merely with mechanical exactness" and so when the laborer works under
external control, "we may admire what he does, but we despise what he
is". Because they explore human authority and obedience, both the Milgram and Stanford experiments have been found useful in the psychological study of wage-based workplace relations.
Self-identity problems and stress
According to research, modern work provides people with a sense of personal and social identity that is tied to:
The particular work role, even if unfulfilling; and
The social role it entails e.g. family bread-winning, friendship forming and so on.
Thus job loss entails the loss of this identity.
Erich Fromm
argued that if a person perceives himself as being what he owns, then
when that person loses (or even thinks of losing) what he "owns" (e.g.
the good looks or sharp mind that allow him to sell his labor for high
wages) a fear of loss may create anxiety and authoritarian tendencies
because that person's sense of identity is threatened. In contrast, when
a person's sense of self is based on what he experiences in a "state of
being" with a less materialistic regard for what he once had and lost,
or may lose, then less authoritarian tendencies prevail. In his view,
the state of being flourishes under a worker-managed workplace and
economy, whereas self-ownership entails a materialistic notion of self,
created to rationalize the lack of worker control that would allow for a
state of being.
Investigative journalist Robert Kuttner
analyzed the work of public-health scholars Jeffrey Johnson and Ellen
Hall about modern conditions of work and concludes that "to be in a life
situation where one experiences relentless demands by others, over
which one has relatively little control, is to be at risk of poor
health, physically as well as mentally". Under wage labor, "a relatively
small elite demands and gets empowerment, self-actualization, autonomy,
and other work satisfaction that partially compensate for long hours"
while "epidemiological data confirm that lower-paid, lower-status
workers are more likely to experience the most clinically damaging forms
of stress, in part because they have less control over their work".
Wage slavery and the educational system that precedes it "implies
power held by the leader. Without power the leader is inept. The
possession of power inevitably leads to corruption ... in spite of ...
good intentions ... [Leadership means] power of initiative, this sense
of responsibility, the self-respect which comes from expressed manhood,
is taken from the men, and consolidated in the leader. The sum of their
initiative, their responsibility, their self-respect becomes his ...
[and the] order and system he maintains is based upon the suppression of
the men, from being independent thinkers into being 'the men' ... In a
word, he is compelled to become an autocrat and a foe to democracy". For
the "leader", such marginalisation can be beneficial, for a leader
"sees no need for any high level of intelligence in the rank and file,
except to applaud his actions. Indeed such intelligence from his point
of view, by breeding criticism and opposition, is an obstacle and causes
confusion". Wage slavery "implies erosion of the human personality ... [because]
some men submit to the will of others, arousing in these instincts which
predispose them to cruelty and indifference in the face of the
suffering of their fellows".
Psychological control
Higher wages
In 19th-century discussions of labor relations, it was normally
assumed that the threat of starvation forced those without property to
work for wages. Proponents of the view that modern forms of employment
constitute wage slavery, even when workers appear to have a range of
available alternatives, have attributed its perpetuation to a variety of
social factors that maintain the hegemony of the employer class.
In an account of the Lowell mill girls, Harriet Hanson Robinson wrote
that generously high wages were offered to overcome the degrading nature
of the work:
At the time the
Lowell cotton mills were started the caste of the factory girl was the
lowest among the employments of women. ... She was represented as
subjected to influences that must destroy her purity and selfrespect. In
the eyes of her overseer she was but a brute, a slave, to be beaten,
pinched and pushed about. It was to overcome this prejudice that such
high wages had been offered to women that they might be induced to
become millgirls, in spite of the opprobrium that still clung to this
degrading occupation.
In his book Disciplined Minds, Jeff Schmidt
points out that professionals are trusted to run organizations in the
interests of their employers. Because employers cannot be on hand to
manage every decision, professionals are trained to "ensure that each
and every detail of their work favors the right interests–or skewers the
disfavored ones" in the absence of overt control:
The
resulting professional is an obedient thinker, an intellectual property
whom employers can trust to experiment, theorize, innovate and create
safely within the confines of an assigned ideology.
Parecon
(participatory economics) theory posits a social class "between labor
and capital" of higher paid professionals such as "doctors, lawyers,
engineers, managers and others" who monopolize empowering labor and
constitute a class above wage laborers who do mostly "obedient, rote
work".
Lower wages
The terms "employee" or "worker" have often been replaced by
"associate" or "partner". This plays up the allegedly voluntary nature
of the interaction while playing down the subordinate status of the wage
laborer as well as the worker-boss class distinction emphasized by
labor movements. Billboards as well as television, Internet and
newspaper advertisements consistently show low-wage workers with smiles
on their faces, appearing happy.
Job interviews and other data on requirements for lower skilled
workers in developed countries – particularly in the growing service
sector – indicate that the more workers depend on low wages and the less
skilled or desirable their job is, the more employers screen for
workers without better employment options and expect them to feign
unremunerative motivation. Such screening and feigning may not only contribute to the positive
self-image of the employer as someone granting desirable employment, but
also signal wage-dependence by indicating the employee's willingness to
feign, which in turn may discourage the dissatisfaction normally
associated with job-switching or union activity.
At the same time, employers in the service industry have
justified unstable, part-time employment and low wages by playing down
the importance of service jobs for the lives of the wage laborers (e.g.
just temporary before finding something better, student summer jobs and
the like).
In the early 20th century, "scientific methods of strikebreaking" were devised – employing a variety of tactics that emphasized how strikes undermined "harmony" and "Americanism".
The American philosopher John Dewey believed that until "industrial feudalism" is replaced by "industrial democracy", politics will be "the shadow cast on society by big business". Thomas Ferguson has postulated in his investment theory of party competition
that the undemocratic nature of economic institutions under capitalism
causes elections to become occasions when blocs of investors coalesce
and compete to control the state.
Noam Chomsky has argued that political theory tends to blur the 'elite' function of government:
Modern political theory stresses
Madison's belief that "in a just and a free government the rights both
of property and of persons ought to be effectually guarded." But in this
case too it is useful to look at the doctrine more carefully. There are
no rights of property, only rights to property that is, rights of
persons with property,...
In representative democracy, as in, say, the United States or Great
Britain [...] there is a monopoly of power centralized in the state, and
secondly – and critically – [...] the representative democracy is
limited to the political sphere and in no serious way encroaches on the
economic sphere [...] That is, as long as individuals are compelled to
rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as
long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then
there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk
of democracy very limited, if even meaningful.
In this regard, Chomsky has used Bakunin's theories about an "instinct for freedom", the militant history of labor movements, Kropotkin's mutual aid evolutionary principle of survival and Marc Hauser's theories supporting an innate and universal moral faculty, to explain the incompatibility of oppression with certain aspects of human nature.
Influence on environmental degradation
Loyola University philosophy professor John Clark and libertarian socialist philosopher Murray Bookchin
have criticized the system of wage labor for encouraging environmental
destruction, arguing that a self-managed industrial society would better
manage the environment. Like other anarchists, they attribute much of the Industrial Revolution's pollution to the
"hierarchical" and "competitive" economic relations accompanying it.
Employment contracts
Some criticize wage slavery on strictly contractual grounds, e.g. David Ellerman and Carole Pateman, arguing that the employment contract is a legal fiction in that it treats human beings juridically as mere tools or inputs by abdicating responsibility and self-determination,
which the critics argue are inalienable. As Ellerman points out, "[t]he
employee is legally transformed from being a co-responsible partner to
being only an input supplier sharing no legal responsibility for either
the input liabilities [costs] or the produced outputs [revenue, profits]
of the employer's business". Such contracts are inherently invalid "since the person remain[s] a de facto
fully capacitated adult person with only the contractual role of a
non-person" as it is impossible to physically transfer
self-determination. As Pateman argues:
The contractarian argument is
unassailable all the time it is accepted that abilities can 'acquire' an
external relation to an individual, and can be treated as if they were
property. To treat abilities in this manner is also implicitly to accept
that the 'exchange' between employer and worker is like any other
exchange of material property ... The answer to the question of how
property in the person can be contracted out is that no such procedure
is possible. Labour power, capacities or services, cannot be separated
from the person of the worker like pieces of property.
In a modern liberal capitalist society, the employment contract is
enforced while the enslavement contract is not; the former being
considered valid because of its consensual/non-coercive nature and the
latter being considered inherently invalid, consensual or not. The noted
economist Paul Samuelson described this discrepancy:
Since
slavery was abolished, human earning power is forbidden by law to be
capitalized. A man is not even free to sell himself; he must rent
himself at a wage.
Some advocates of right-libertarianism, among them philosopher Robert Nozick,
address this inconsistency in modern societies arguing that a
consistently libertarian society would allow and regard as valid
consensual/non-coercive enslavement contracts, rejecting the notion of
inalienable rights:
The
comparable question about an individual is whether a free system will
allow him to sell himself into slavery. I believe that it would.
Other economists including Murray Rothbard allow for the possibility of debt slavery, asserting that a lifetime labour contract can be broken so long as the slave pays appropriate damages:
[I]f
A has agreed to work for life for B in exchange for 10,000 grams of
gold, he will have to return the proportionate amount of property if he
terminates the arrangement and ceases to work.
Schools of economics
In the philosophy of mainstream, neoclassical economics, wage labor is seen as the voluntary sale of one's own time and efforts,
just like a carpenter would sell a chair, or a farmer would sell wheat.
It is considered neither an antagonistic nor abusive relationship and
carries no particular moral implications.
Austrian economics argues that a person is not "free" unless they can sell their labor because otherwise that person has no self-ownership and will be owned by a "third party" of individuals.
Post-Keynesian economics perceives wage slavery as resulting from inequality of bargaining power
between labor and capital, which exists when the economy does not
"allow labor to organize and form a strong countervailing force".
The two main forms of socialist economics perceive wage slavery differently:
Some abolitionists in the United States regarded the analogy of wage workers as wage slaves to be spurious. They believed that wage workers were "neither wronged nor oppressed". The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass declared "Now I am my own master" when he took a paying job. Later in life, he concluded to the contrary "experience demonstrates
that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and
crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of
wages must go down with the other". However, Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans
"did not challenge the notion that those who spend their entire lives
as wage laborers were comparable to slaves", though they argued that the
condition was different, as long as laborers were likely to develop the
opportunity to work for themselves in the future, achieving self-employment.
Some advocates of laissez-faire capitalism, among them philosopher Robert Nozick,
have said that inalienable rights can be waived if done so voluntarily,
saying "the comparable question about an individual is whether a free
system will allow him to sell himself into slavery. I believe that it
would".
Others such as the anarcho-capitalist economist Walter Block go further and maintain that all rights are in fact alienable, stating voluntary slavery and by extension wage slavery is legitimate.
Contemporary slavery, also known as modern slavery or neo-slavery, is slavery that continues to exist in the 21st century. As of 2022, the International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that there are 50 million people living under the circumstances of modern slavery, consisting of 28 million in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriages. Nonetheless, it is difficult to agree on an estimated number of
enslaved people, as there is no universally agreed definition of modern
slavery; those in slavery are often difficult to identify, and adequate statistics are often not available.
The ILO estimate is based on its definition of modern slavery, which includes human trafficking, sexual exploitation, child labour, forced marriage, and the involuntary recruitment of children for armed conflict. Of the 50 million, it estimates that 17.3 million people are exploited in the private sector,
including in domestic work, construction and agriculture; 6.3 million
face forced sexual exploitation; and 3.9 million are exposed to forced
labour imposed by state authorities.
According to American professor Kevin Bales, co-founder and former president of the non-governmental organization and advocacy groupFree the Slaves,
modern slavery occurs "when a person is under the control of another
person who applies violence and force to maintain that control, and the
goal of that control is exploitation". The impact of slavery is expanded when targeted at vulnerable groups such as children.
According to the Walk Free
Foundation, "Modern slavery includes forced labour, forced or servile
marriage, debt bondage, forced commercial sexual exploitation, human
trafficking, slavery-like practices, and the sale and exploitation of
children." With this definition as the basis of its research, Walk
Free's Global Slavery Index in 2021 estimated that there were about 49.6 million slaves around the world.
As mentioned above, the definitions used by different
organizations have notable variation in approaches and purposes. On one
hand, the U.S. Government definition by the Office to Monitor and Combat
Trafficking in Persons employs a legal definition, focusing more on the
different types of trafficking mechanisms and coercion with the goal of
providing an explanation on how and when each situation should be
treated as a criminal offense. By
contrast, the concept under the non-governmental organization Free the
Slaves, has more of an advocacy approach designed to raise awareness
about the problematic with a persuasive tone, emphasizing more on the
conditions of exploitation and the lack of autonomy, including a wider
range of practices that can fall under this terminology.
Bales warned that, because slavery is officially abolished
everywhere, the practice is illegal, and more hidden from the public and
authorities. This makes it impossible to obtain exact figures from
primary sources. The best that can be done is to estimate based on
secondary sources, such as UN investigations, newspaper articles,
government reports, and figures from NGOs.
Modern slavery persists for many of the same reasons older
variations did: it is an economically beneficial practice for enslavers,
despite the ethical concerns. The problem has been able to escalate in
recent years due to the disposability of slaves and the fact that the cost of slaves has dropped significantly.
Causes
Since traditional slavery such as chattel slavery
has been officially abolished in every country on Earth and is illegal,
enslavement no longer revolves around legal ownership, but around
illegal control. Two fundamental changes are the move away from the
forward purchase of slave labor, and the existence of slaves as an
employment category. While the statistics suggest that the 'market' for
exploitative labor is booming, the notion that humans are purposefully
sold and bought from an existing pool is outdated. While such
transactions do still occur, in contemporary situations people become
trapped in slavery-like conditions in various ways.
Modern slavery is often seen as a by-product of poverty. In countries that lack education and effectively implemented rule of law,
poor societal structure can create an environment that fosters the
acceptance and propagation of slavery. Slavery is most prevalent in
impoverished countries and those with vulnerable minority communities,
though it also exists in developed countries. Tens of thousands toil in
slave-like conditions in industries such as mining, farming, and
factories, producing goods for domestic consumption or export to more
prosperous nations.
In the older form of slavery, slave-owners spent more on getting
slaves. It was more difficult for them to be disposed of. The cost of
keeping them healthy was considered a better investment than getting
another slave to replace them. In modern slavery people are easier to
get at a lower price so replacing them when exploiters run into problems
becomes easier. Slaves are then used in areas where they could easily
be hidden while also creating a profit for the exploiter.
Modern slavery can be quite profitable, and some governing bodies tacitly allow it, despite being outlawed by international treaties such as the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery and local laws. Total annual revenues from human trafficking was estimated in 2014 to be over $150 billion, although profits are substantially lower. American slaves in 1809 were sold for around the equivalent of US$40,000 in 2017 money.In 2017, a slave can be bought for $90–$100.
Bales explains, in the context of modern slavery, "This is an
economic crime ... People do not enslave others to be mean to them; they
do it to make a profit."
Slavery by descent, also called chattel slavery, is the form most often associated with the word "slavery". In chattel slavery, the enslaved person is considered the personal property
(chattel) of someone else, and can usually be bought and sold. It stems
historically either from conquest, where a conquered person is
enslaved, as in the Roman Empire or Ottoman Empire, or from slave trading, as in the Saharan or Atlantic slave trades.
Mauritania has a long history with slavery. Chattel slavery was formally made illegal in the country but the laws against it have gone largely unenforced. It is estimated that around 90,000 people (over 2% of Mauritania's population) are slaves.
Debt bondage can also be passed down to descendants, like chattel slavery.
Those trapped in the system of sexual slavery in the modern world are often effectively chattel, especially when they are forced into prostitution.
Government-forced labor
Government-forced labor, also known as state-sponsored labor,
is defined by the International Labor Organization as situations where
people "are coerced to work through the use of violence or intimidation,
or by more subtle means such as accumulated debt, retention of identity
papers or threats of denunciation to immigration authorities".
In Eritrea, an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 people are in an indefinite military service program which amounts to mass slavery, according to UN investigators. Their report also found sexual slavery and other forced labor.
In North Korea,
the government forces many people to work for the state, both inside
and outside North Korea itself, sometimes for many years. The 2018
Global Slavery Index estimated that 2.8 million people were slaves in
the country. The value of all the labor done by North Koreans for the government is estimated at US$975 million, with dulgyeokdae (youth workers) forced to undertake dangerous construction work, and inminban (women and girl workers) forced to make clothing in sweatshops. The workers are often unpaid. Additionally, North Korea's army of 1.2 million conscripted soldiers is
often made to work on construction projects unrelated to defense,
including building private villas for the elite. The government has had as many as 100,000 workers abroad.
In Uzbekistan, for example, the government coerces students and state workers to harvest cotton, of which the country is a main exporter, every year, forcing them to abandon their other responsibilities in the process. In this example the use of students, including those in primary, secondary, and higher education, means that child labor is also prominent. Uzbekistan's government has worked to reduce the forced labor in recent
years, and in March 2022 a major boycott of Uzbek cotton was lifted,
upon reports that coerced labor had been almost eliminated.
In 1865, the United States ratified the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution,
which banned slavery and involuntary servitude "except as punishment
for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted", providing a legal basis for slavery, now referred to as penal labor, to continue in the country. Historically, this led to the system of convict leasing which still primarily affects African-Americans. The Prison Policy Initiative, an American criminal justice think tank, cites the 2020 US prison population at being 2.3 million individuals, and nearly all able-bodied inmates work in some fashion.
Map of US states where prison labor is permitted in the state constitution as of November 2022
permitted
forbidden
no mention in constitution
In Texas, Georgia, Alabama and Arkansas, prisoners are not paid at all for their work. In other states, prisoners are paid between $0.12 and $1.15 per hour (as of 2013). Federal Prison Industries paid inmates an average of $0.90 per hour in 2017. Inmates who refuse to work may be indefinitely remanded into solitary confinement, or have family visitation revoked. From 2010 to 2015 and again in 2016 and in 2018, some prisoners in the US refused to work,
protesting for better pay, better conditions, and for the end of forced
labor. Strike leaders were punished with indefinite solitary
confinement.
Forced prison labor occurs in both public/government-run prisons and private prisons. CoreCivic and GEO Group constitute half of the market share of private prisons, and they made a combined revenue of $3.5 billion in 2015. The value of all the labor done by inmates in the United States is estimated to be in the billions. In California in 2018, 2,500 incarcerated workers fought wildfires for $1 per hour through the CDCR's Conservation Camp Program, which saved the state as much as $100 million a year.
In China's system of labor prisons (formerly called laogai),
millions of prisoners have been subject to forced, unpaid labor. The
laogai system is estimated to currently house between 500,000 and 2
million prisoners. In parallel with laogai, China operated the smaller re-education through labor system of prisons up until 2013. In addition to both of these, China is also reportedly operating forced labor camps in Xinjiang, imprisoning hundreds of thousands (possibly as many as a million) of Uyghurs, as well as a smaller number of Tibetans and political dissidents.
In the UK, there are three key types of prison labour. First,
prisoners can be made to maintain the jail—for example cleaning,
maintenance, or working in the kitchens. Second, prisoners have the
option to do mundane/repetitive work for external companies; this
includes tasks such as bagging nails and packing boxes. Finally,
prisoners can work in specialist workshops run by third parties, in
which the prisoners can do tasks such as building window-frames, graphic
design and other tasks requiring some form of machinery. A 2013 report suggest prisoners in the UK can earn as little as £10 for a 40-hour week's worth of work.
In Australia, prison labour occurs in at least New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory.
Some prisoners work for private companies. As of 2017, in NSW some are
paid as little as $0.82 per hour, while in the NT some are paid as much
as $16 per hour (compared to $35 per hour for a regular union employee
in the same job).
Bonded labor, also known as debt bondage
and peonage, occurs when people give themselves into slavery as a
security against a loan or when they inherit a debt from a relative. The cycle begins when people take extreme loans under the condition
that they work off the debt. The "loan" is designed so that it can never
be paid off, and is often passed down for generations. People become
trapped in this system working ostensibly towards repayment though they
are often forced to work far past the original amount they owe. They
work under the force of threats and abuse. Sometimes the debts last a
few years, and sometimes the debts are even passed onto future
generations.
Bonded labor is used across a variety of industries in order to produce products for consumption around the world. It is most common in India, Pakistan and Nepal.
In India, the majority of bonded laborers are Dalits (Untouchables) and Adivasis (tribal people). Puspal, a former brick kiln worker in Punjab, India, stated in an
interview to antislavery.org; "We do not stop even if we are ill – what
if our debt is increasing? So we don't dare to stop." In India, when compared to the price of land, paid labor or oxen, the
price of slaves is currently 95% less than it was in the past.
People may be enticed to migrate with the promise of work, only to have their documents seized and be forced to work under the threat of violence to them or their families. Undocumented immigrants may also be taken advantage of, as without
legal residency they often have no legal recourse. Along with sex
slavery, this is the form of slavery most often encountered in wealthy
countries such as the United States, in Western Europe, and in the
Middle East.
In the United Arab Emirates,
some foreign workers are exploited and more or less enslaved. The
majority of the UAE resident population are foreign migrant workers
rather than local Emirati citizens, with there being over 1.7 million migrant workers, making up 90% of the constructive workforce. The country has a kafala
system, which is associated with outdated laws and procedures, which
ties migrant workers to local Emirati sponsors with very little
government oversight. This has often led to forced labor and human
trafficking. As of 2017, the UAE is pushing towards a better labor system as it has recently passed laws to protect the rights of domestic workers.
Allegations of forced migrant labor have been highlighted within the preparations of stadiums for the QatarFIFA2022 World Cup. There have been over 6,500 recorded migrant deaths during the construction of the stadiums. Amnesty International researched into the construction of the stadiums
and found 3,200 migrant workers work on the stadiums everyday, in which
at least 224 of them have reported abusive and exploitative behaviour. Workers reported issues of expensive recruitment fees, poor living
conditions, false salaries, delayed payments of salary, being unable to
leave the stadium or camp, being unable to leave the country or change
jobs, being threatened, and most importantly forced labour.
In October 2019 Qatar abolished Kafala system
and introduced basic minimum wage and wage protection system for
migrant workers. Under these reforms workers can change jobs without
employer's permission and are now paid basic minimum wage regardless of
their nationality. The basic minimum wage is set to 1,000 QAR and
allowances for food and accommodation must be provided by employers
which is 300 QAR and 500 QAR respectively. Moreover, Qatar introduced a
wage protection system to ensure the employers are complying with the
reforms. The wage protection system monitors the workers in the private
sector. This new system has reduced wage abuses and disputes among
migrant labours.
Additionally in the UK two individuals in Kent were found guilty of trafficking six Lithuanian men. They were forced to work back to back 8 hour shifts as chicken
catchers. Further investigations into this highlighted that the farms
these individuals were working at were supplying eggs to large
supermarket chains such as Tesco's, Asda and M&S. Vietnamese teenagers are trafficked to the United Kingdom and forced to work in illegal cannabis farms. When police raid the cannabis farms, trafficked victims are typically sent to prison.
In the United States, various industries have been known to take advantage of forced migrant labor. During the 2010 New York State Fair,
19 migrants who were in the country legally from Mexico were forced to
work in a food truck and essentially enslaved by their employer. The men were paid around ten percent of what they were promised, worked
far longer days than they were contracted to, and would be deported if
they quit their job, as this would be a violation of their visas. A 2021 multi-agency federal investigation dubbed Operation Blooming Onion
revealed that a years-long human trafficking ring forced migrant
workers from Mexico and Central America into "modern day slavery" on
various agricultural sites in southern Georgia.
The indictment alleges that in the fields the migrant workers were
forced at gunpoint to dig for onions with their bare hands for 20 cents
per bucket. They were held in work camps surrounded by electrified
fences and subjected to squalid and crammed living conditions, with no
access to safe food or water.
Reports of migrant abuse and neglect surfaced in Kenya in early September 2022, when pictures of a frail looking young Kenyan worker from Saudi Arabia,
Diana Chepkemoi went viral. Following growing pressure from the public,
the government repatriated Chepkemoi along with a few other domestic
workers facing a similar fate in the Kingdom. Among those rescued was
Joy Simiyu, who went to Saudi Arabia to work as a domestic help, but
within months returned to Kenya with a harrowing but known tale of abuse
by her employer. According to reports, migrant housekeepers complained
of being subjected to physical, mental as well as sexual abuse while
working in the Gulf state.
Along with migrant slavery, forced prostitution is the form of slavery most often encountered in wealthy regions such as the United States,
in Western Europe, and in the Middle East. It is the primary form of
slavery in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, particularly in Moldova
and Laos. Many child sex slaves
are trafficked from these areas to the West and the Middle East. An
estimated 20% of slaves to date are active in the sex industry. Sexual exploitation can also become a form of debt bondage when
enslavers insist that victims work in the sex industry to pay for basic
needs and transportation.
In 2005, the Gulf Times
reported that boys from Nepal had been lured to India and enslaved for
sex. Many of these boys had also been subject to male genital mutilation
(castration).
Many of those who become victims of sex slavery initially do so
willingly under the guise that they will be performing traditional sex
work, only to become trapped for extended periods of time, such as those
involved in Nigeria's human trafficking circuit.
Illustration from the book The Child Slaves of Britain. Child slavery and forced labor continues to be a problem in the 21st century
Early or forced marriage
is a form of slavery that affects millions of women and girls all over
the world. When families cannot support their children, the daughters
are often married off to the males of wealthier, more powerful families.
These men are often significantly older than the girls. The females are
forced into lives whose main purpose is to serve their husbands. This
often fosters an environment for physical, verbal and sexual abuse.
The regions most affected by this problematic are usually those
ruled by patriarchal systems with strict social norms, and countries
with high poverty rates since marriage is seen as an efficient way to
gain financial security for the girls and their families.
Forced marriages also happen in developed nations. In the United
Kingdom there were 3,546 reports to the police of forced marriage over
three years from 2014 to 2016.
In the United States over 200,000 minors were legally married from 2002 to 2017, with the youngest being only 10 years old. Most were married to adults. Currently 48 US states, as well as D.C. and Puerto Rico, allow marriage of minors as long as there is judicial consent, parental consent or if the minor is pregnant. In 2017–2018, several states began passing laws to either restrict child marriage or ban it altogether.
Bride-buying is the act of purchasing a bride as property, in a similar manner to chattel slavery. It can also be related to human trafficking.
Children comprise about 12% of the slaves as of 2022 estimates. Although children can legally engage in certain forms of work, children
can also be found in slavery or slavery-like situations; although child
labor isn't considered slavery, it inevitably hinders their education. Forced begging is a common way that children are forced to participate
in labor without their consent. Most are domestic workers or work in cocoa, cotton or fishing industries. Many are trafficked and sexually exploited. Forced child labor is the dominant form of slavery in Haiti.
In war-torn countries, children have been kidnapped and sold to political parties to use as child soldiers. Child soldiers
are children who may be trafficked from their homes and forced or
coerced by armed forces. The armed forces could be government armed
forces, paramilitary organizations, or rebel groups. While in these
groups the children may be forced to work as cooks, guards, servants or
spies. It is common for both boys and girls to be sexually abused while in these groups.
Situations where young people work in unpaid internships have been likened to modern slavery.
According to Human Rights Watch,
Thailand's billion-dollar fish export industry remains plagued with
human rights maltreatment in spite of government vows to stamp out
servitude in its angling industry. Human Rights Watch conducted interviews with 248 fishermen, it
documented the forced labor of trafficked workers in the Thai fishing
industry.
Trafficking victims are often tricked by brokers' false promises
of "good" factory jobs, then forced onto fishing boats where they are
trapped, bought and sold like livestock, and held against their will for
months or years at a time, forced to work grueling 22-hour days in
dangerous conditions. Those who resist or try to run away are beaten, tortured, and often killed. This is commonplace because of the disposability of unfree laborers.
Despite some improvements, the situation has not changed much since a large-scale survey of almost 500 fishers in 2012, that found
almost one in five "reported working against their will with the penalty
that would prevent them from leaving".
Victims of human trafficking can be made to beg on the streets with the earnings being given back to the traffickers. It has been suggested many children across Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin
America and the Middle East are forced to beg on the streets.
As years pass by, the number of children forced to beg has
exponentially increased. Children are more frequently forced since
people are more likely to pay attention and help kids. Furthermore, in
Bangkok, Thailand, it was discover that children with disabilities earn
much more than healthy children, so often times individuals are
mutilated to generate more money.
There are significant reports of forced fraud in Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Myanmar, or Laos). Currently, forced fraud activities are mainly found in fraud factories
or fraud parks, notably in Southeast Asian countries, which involve
human trafficking. Fraud factory victims are forced to scam internet
users around the world into fraudulently buying cryptocurrencies or
withdrawing cash, via social media and online dating apps. Trafficking
victims' passports are confiscated, and they are threatened with organ
harvesting or forced prostitution if they do not earn enough from
scamming.
Occupations
In addition to sex slavery, modern slaves are often forced to work in certain occupations. Common occupations include:
Small-scale building work, such as laying driveways, and other labor.
Nail salons (cosmetic). Many people are trafficked from Vietnam to the UK for this work.
Fishing, mainly associated with Thailand's sea food industry.
Manufacturing
– Many prisoners in the US are forced to manufacture products as
diverse as mattresses, spectacles, underwear, road signs, licence
plates, and body armour.
Agriculture and forestry – Prisoners in the United States and China are often forced to undertake farming and forestry work. See prison farm.
In North Korea, dulgyeokdae (youth workers) are often forced to work in construction, and inminban (women workers) are forced to work in clothing sweatshops.
Signs that someone may have been forced into slavery include a lack
of identity documents, lack of personal possessions, clothing that is
unsuitable or has seen much wear, poor living conditions, a reluctance
to make eye contact, unwillingness to talk, and unwillingness to seek
help. In the UK, people are encouraged to report suspicions to a
modern-slavery telephone helpline.
The United Nations have defined human trafficking as follows:
The
recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of
persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of
coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or
of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of
payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control
over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall
include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others
or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery
or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.
According to United States Department of State
data, as of 2013, an "estimated 600,000 to 820,000 men, women, and
children [are] trafficked across international borders each year,
approximately 70 percent are women and girls and up to 50 percent are
minors. The data also illustrates that the majority of transnational
victims are trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation." However, "the alarming enslavement of people for purposes of labor
exploitation, often in their own countries, is a form of human
trafficking that can be hard to track from afar". It is estimated that
50,000 people are trafficked every year in the United States.
In recent years, the internet and popular social networking sites
have become tools that traffickers use to find vulnerable people who
they can then exploit. A 2017 Reuters report discusses how a woman is suing Facebook
for negligence as she speculated that executives were aware of a
situation that occurred back in 2012 where she was sexually abused and
trafficked by someone posing as her "friend". Social media and smartphone apps are also used to sell the slaves.
In 2016, a Washington Post article exposed that the Obama administration placed migrant children with human traffickers. It was shown that they failed to perform adequate background checks of
the adults who claimed the children, allowing sponsors to take custody
of multiple unrelated children, and regularly placed children in homes
without visiting the locations. Several Guatemalan teens were found
being held captive by traffickers and forced to work at a local egg farm
in Ohio.
Organizational efforts against slavery
Government actions
In the last two decades, as slavery has become more widely recognized
as a formidable global epidemic, multiple governmental organizations
have begun taking action to address the problem. The US State Department's annual Trafficking In Persons Report
assigns grades to every nation in a tier-system based "not on the size
of the country's problem but on the extent of governments' efforts to
meet the TVPA's minimum standards for the elimination of human
trafficking".
In the United Kingdom, the British government passed the Modern Slavery Act 2015, supported by major reforms in the legal system instituted through the Criminal Finances Act 2017,
effective from September 30, 2017. Under the latter act, there is
transparency in regards to interbank information sharing with law
enforcement agencies to help to crack down on money laundering agencies
related to contemporary slavery. The Act also aims at reducing the
incidence of tax evasion attributed to the modern slave trade conducted
under the domain of the law. Despite this, the government has been refusing asylum and deporting
children trafficked to the UK as slaves. Several British charities have
claimed this puts the deportees at risk of being subject to control by
slavery gangs a second time, and deters child victims from coming
forward with information.
The British government has taken specific steps to ensure that modern slavery risks are identified and managed in government supply chains. The government also initiated a nationwide campaign against modern
slavery: the "Modern slavery is closer than you think" campaign.
The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom
stripped diplomats with a history of domestic worker abuse from
claiming diplomatic immunity, saving them from compensatory claims. The
July 2022 ruling concerned the case of a London-based Saudi diplomat,
Khalid Basfar, who allegedly treated a Filipino staff member hired by
him, to slavery, forcing her to wear a bell throughout the day to be
available at for his "family's beck and call". The employee, Josephine
Wong, was first hired by the Basfar household in November 2015 in Saudi
Arabia and brought to the UK to work for him in August 2016. According
to court's hearing, Wong was confined to the house except to take the
rubbish out. She was allegedly subjected to incessant shouting,
offensive names and given leftover food only. The court was requested to
judge the issue and determine whether Basfar's treatment of Wong was
protected by diplomatic immunity or not, if the case did amount to
modern slavery. The concluded that Ms Wong's was a case of modern
slavery.
There have been a lot of changes in rewards to law and efforts to
mitigate the issue of modern slavery. One of the most recent changes
was made by the European Union. In July 2024, the European Union's
Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) took effect.
This measure obligate companies to shift away from voluntary reporting
to identifying and actually addressing any potential violation and abuse
to human rights within the global chain of a company. This measure will
be enforced by an authority designated by member states, who will be in
charge of supervising the conduct of the companies and set penalties
accordingly.
Private initiatives
In September 2013, the three anti-slavery donors, the Legatum Foundation, Humanity United and the Walk Free Foundation founded the Freedom Fund.
As of December 2019, the Freedom Fund is reported to have impacted
686,468 lives, liberated 27,397 people from modern slavery and helped
56,181 previously out-of-school children to receive either formal or
non-formal education, in Nepal, Ethiopia, India and Thailand. Meanwhile,
in October 2014, the Freedom Fund, Polaris and the Walk Free Foundation
launched the Global Modern Slavery Directory, which was the first
publicly searchable database of over 770 organisations working to end
forced labor and human trafficking. BT also teamed up with anti-modern slavery campaigners free the unseen.
Statistics
Modern slavery is a multibillion-dollar industry with just the forced labor aspect generating US$150 billion each year. The Global Slavery Index (2018) estimated that roughly 40.3 million
individuals are currently caught in modern slavery, with 71% of those
being female, and 1 in 4 being children.As of 2018, the countries with the most slaves were: India (8 million),
China (3.86 million), Pakistan (3.19 million), North Korea (2.64
million), Nigeria (1.39 million), Indonesia (1.22 million), Democratic
Republic of the Congo (1 million), Russia (794,000) and the Philippines
(784,000).
Various jurisdictions now require large commercial organizations
to publish a slavery and human trafficking statement in regard to their
supply chains each financial year (e.g. California, UK, Australia).
The Walk Free Foundation reported in 2018 that 40.3 million people
worldwide live in conditions that can be described as slavery. According
to the foundation, more than 400,000 of those are in the United States.
Andrew Forrest, founder of the organisation, was quoted as saying that
"the United States is one of the most advanced countries in the world
yet has more than 400,000 modern slaves working under forced labor
conditions". In March 2020, released British police
records showed that the number of modern slavery offences recorded has
increased by more than 50%, from 3,412 cases in 2018 to 5,144 cases in
2019. This coincided with a 68% increase in calls and submissions to the
modern slavery helpline over the same time period.
There is an estimate of 10,000 potential victims of modern slavery in the UK.
Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on modern slavery
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an impact on the global supply chains including factories in Malaysia providing PPE to the NHS in the UK,
and an influx of online clothing shopping, which has led factories in
third world countries to rapidly expand to deal with the influx of
demand. A result, this rapid increase in demand for clothes and PPE has led to
some companies using the pandemic as an excuse to exploit vulnerable
workers, even forcing them to work through the pandemic, putting them at
risk of contracting the disease. The pandemic has led to multiple impacts across the globe.
Creation of new risks and abuses for victims
Self-isolation and social isolation is a major aspect of the
pandemic, and it may increase the chances for young people being
vulnerable to grooming and abuse due to a lack of contact with friends
and family. Ordinarily some Quranic schools in West Africa practice forced begging. Since many of the pupils began to reside within the school premises due
to the pandemic, they are subject to further abuse/punishment as a
result of them not bringing in as much income.
Wealthy families in Mauritania have exploited the pandemic as well, by firing Haratine
domestic workers, or allowing them to work on the condition that they
are confined within the workplace to avoid travel. This entraps the Haratine
people, since if they do not take the work they starve, but if they
continue to work they leave their families without resources.
Increased susceptibility to slavery
The use of lockdowns has been implemented to attempt to stop the
spread of the virus. This has led to mass firings as a result of global
brands cancelling orders resulting in factories shutting down. By March 2020 over 1 million workers in Bangladesh were fired or suspended. Workers in Cambodia, India, Myanmar and Vietnam have experienced similar problems. A lack of government support for citizens has led to an increase of human trafficking as a result of people turning to bonded labor for survival.
Increase in risk for migrant workers
Victims of modern-day slavery are often hesitant to go to the
authorities for help due to a fear of being criminalized, detained or
deported rather than being treated as victims of a crime. Victims of
modern-day slavery often live in cramped conditions in which the Covid
virus can spread quickly. This, along with the combination of being fearful to get help from the
authorities such as the NHS, leads to victims catching diseases and
potentially dying as a result.
Disruption to anti-slavery campaigns
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries adopted lockdowns, which
hindered the operations of anti-slavery organisations as people were
not allowed to meet up during the lockdown. Anti-slavery support
services and educational centres were also shut down as a result of the
lockdown.
Impact of the pandemic on modern slavery in the UK
The Home Office has stated the number of suspected modern slavery
victims in the UK has fallen for the first time in 4 years, as a result
of the pandemic. Officials say this is due to the restrictions implemented in the UK and an increase of self-isolation and businesses shutting.
The national referral mechanism has recorded 2,871 referrals of
potential modern day slavery victims in the 1st quarter of 2020, which
is a 14% fall from the previous 3 months. There has been an increase of child victims "partially driven" by an increase of county lines.
Impact of social media on modern slavery
The appearance of social media and new digital technology has
exponentially change the growth of modern slavery, working as a tool
that facilitates the exploitation of vulnerable populations facilitating
its growth as it enables perpetrators to control and reach a wider
audience.
As the NGO Walk Free claims, perpetrators are now able to more
easily reach a higher cipher of victims in different locations, access
all their information, and identify their vulnerabilities without even
revealing their identity. Not only that, but because technology is
constantly changing, laws and measures cannot manage stay up to date,
resulting in a lack of accountability that allows modern slavery to keep
growing on the internet.
The documentary film A Woman Captured follows the life of a 52-year-old woman in Hungary who is kept as a modern-day slave.
There have been a number of documentaries that highlight worker abuse and other human rights issues in Arab states of the Persian Gulf, for example Qatar. There were also calls to boycott the 2022 FIFA World cup in Qatar.
.jpg)
_(cropped).jpg)
