Shackles of new-age slavery

A modern ‘slave economy’ is fast emerging on a global scale. The Global Slavery Index (GSI) 2023 estimated that 50 million people were living in modern slavery on any given day in 2021, an increase of 10 million people since 2016. It is observed that modern slavery thrives in silence and takes many forms. It 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.

GSI 2023 mentioned that the Group of 20 (G20) nations were contributing to the increase in slavery, as their trade operations and global supply chains allowed for human rights abuses.

The Global Slavery Index (GSI) provides national estimates of modern slavery for 160 countries. GSI 2023 observes that countries that have the highest prevalence of modern slavery are either conflict-affected, or have state-imposed forced labour, or have weak governance. For example: North Korea (ranked 1st), Eritrea (2nd), Saudi Arabia (4th), Turkey (5th), Russia (8th), India (34th) have poor ranks. According to the report, in 2021, 11 million people were working as forced labourers in India. On the other hand, the countries with the lowest prevalence of modern slavery are those with strong governance and strong government responses to modern slavery. Example: Switzerland (ranked 160th), Norway (159th), Germany (158th).

Genesis of modern slavery

Since the beginning of the slave system of the colonial Atlantic, in the late 15th century, slavery was tolerated in the West for over four hundred years. In August 1833, Parliament passed an Act for the abolition of slavery throughout the British Colonies, converting enslaved people into apprentice labourers and taking steps to protect their work and wellbeing. In order to emancipate all slaves and get rid of racism against the blacks, the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery in 1865. “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude… shall exist within the United States, nor any place subject to their jurisdiction”, he said. However, even after its abolishment, there were still racial systems and laws in place that gave leeway for slavery to prevail.

In 1846, Karl Marx theorised the relationship between slavery and modern capitalism in his seminal essay, ‘The Poverty of Philosophy’. According to him, slavery was not a peripheral but a central part of modern capitalism. Marx did not view the large-scale enslavement of Africans by Europeans, which began in the early sixteenth century in the Caribbean, as a repeat of Roman or Arab slavery, but as something new. It combined ancient forms of brutality with the characteristically modern social form of value production. Slavery, he wrote in a draft for Capital, reached “it’s most hateful form … in a situation of capitalist production,” where “exchange value becomes the determining element of production.” This led to the extension of the workday beyond all limits, literally enslaving the working people to death. “Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery that has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies that have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance”, he wrote.

Scholars have defined slavery in various ways, but there are three important criteria for recognising if someone is a slave. The first is the complete control of one person by another, through the use of violence – both physical and psychological. The second is, hard labour for little or no pay and the third criterion is economic exploitation—making a profit for the slaveholder.

In the 1926 Slavery Convention, slavery was defined as “the status or condition of a person over whom he exercised any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership” (Article 1). This legal definition was the product of a highly politicised conflict involving the various imperial powers struggling for colonial territories and their interest in keeping several forms of forced labour mobilised there outside the scope and concerns of the Convention. Meanwhile, in 1956 came the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery. In its draft form the Convention was called On Slavery and Servitude, but the final version replaced the last term with the expression “practices similar to slavery” referring to four types: debt bondage, serfdom, servile marriage and child exploitation.

Since 2013, GSI reports have included “slavery” and “slavery-like practices” as a sub-type of “modern slavery”. The International Labour Organisation (ILO), which for decades classified slavery as “a form of forced labour,” in its 2017 report adopted the nomenclature of “modern slavery” as an “umbrella term” and the type of the species as “forced labour.” According to ILO, modern slavery occurs in almost every country in the world, and cuts across ethnic, cultural and religious lines. More than half (52 per cent) of all forced labour and a quarter of all forced marriages can be found in upper-middle income or high-income countries.

This article will primarily remain confined to the ‘forced labour’ aspect of ‘modern slavery’.

The rise of modern slavery

Slavery was never actually abolished; rather it has redefined itself into newer forms. One of its manifestations is in the form of worker exploitation. Here, we shall briefly discuss three forms of worker exploitations: (i) Capitalism has led to severe exploitation of workers employed in the factories, where they are forced to work for long hours in extremely harsh conditions to make a living. Indeed, in many countries they are almost always working as slaves; (ii) slavery footprints in global supply chains, managed by transnational corporations, are increasing; and (iii) capitalism has also enslaved the prison population. Private organisations across various countries, including India, are generating profits out of the prison population, who are engaged as workers in the growing Prison-Industrial Complex.

(i) Over exploitation of workers:

Recent statements of few global corporate leaders on unsustainable and unethical working hours would provide enough clues about the growing enslavement of the workers by the modern capitalists. Here are few examples which points to the resurgence of ‘slave capitalism’:

• NR Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys, sparked controversy by endorsing a 70-hour work week to boost India’s economic progress.
• Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, in a November 2018 post on Twitter, wrote: “There are easier places to work, but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” “Work like hell. I mean, you just have to put in 80 to 100-hour weeks every week. This improves the odds of success,” he tweeted in 2018.
• Bhavish Aggarwal, the CEO of ride-sharing app Ola, dismissed the concept of taking Saturdays and Sundays off from work, stating that the idea has been borrowed from the Western culture.
• Jack Ma, co-founder of Alibaba, has sparked significant controversy with his endorsement of the “996” work culture, which stands for working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days a week.
• Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has emphasised the challenges of achieving work-life balance, instead preferring the term “work-life harmony”.

It may be recalled that as early as 1593, Spain became the first country to introduce the eight-hour work day by law for factory and fortification workers. The eight-hour day was the first topic discussed by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) which resulted in the Hours of Work (Industry) Convention, 1919 ratified by 52 countries as of 2016.

Though Tata Steel introduced an eight-hour work day in 1912 and leave-with-pay in 1920-ushered in the rest of India only in 1945, the working condition has dramatically changed in India during recent years. Last month the Karnataka government proposed to extend work hours for IT and ITeS employees to 14 hours a day. Women employees, women’s rights organisations, and employees’ unions say such a move will affect women professionals more.

The Economic Survey presented on Monday (July 22) by the Finance Ministry of India, has advocated for longer overtime working hours with lower wages. The Economic Survey also highlighted that the corporate sector’s profits have surged, with over 33,000 companies showing a near quadrupling of profit before taxes from FY20 to FY23. However, hiring and compensation growth have not matched this financial boom. The survey stresses that it is in the best interest of companies to increase hiring and worker compensation. Last year, both Tamil Nadu and Karnataka amended the Factories Act to allow up to 12-hour work shifts. However, Tamil Nadu had to withdraw the legislation following protests from labour unions.

Not only long working hours, workers also face extremely unhealthy working conditions in shop floors. Down to Earth has chronicled the scorching lives of India’s factory workers in sweatshops where employees face dangerous heat, inadequate ventilation and minimal relief in their struggle to make a living.

(ii) Slavery footprints in global supply chains:

Slavery can exist in every stage of the supply chain, from harvesting or extracting raw materials – such as cocoa or cotton – to manufacturing and shipping. The reality of this can be seen in children forced to mine cobalt for use in the latest mobile phones, or women forced to produce coffee for one of the best-known brands. Every day, millions of people are exploited to fulfil the market’s relentless drive for cheap products and services, ranging from consumer electronics and garments to services including shipping and cleaning. Around 27.6 million people are believed to be trapped in forced labour worldwide in various forms. This includes 17.3 million people who are exploited in forced labour exploitation in the private economy and 3.9 million who are subjected to state-imposed forced labour. This includes the supply chains of international businesses supplying goods and services, observes Anti-Slavery International.

Modern slavery hides within complex supply chains, making it difficult to identify instances of human exploitation. A study by Hannah-Jayne Shilling, Thomas Wiedmann, and Arunima Malik (2021) reveals a displacement of slavery from developed to developing nations through the global supply chains of production. The results expose hotspot sectors, including construction, trade, and agriculture. These footprints go beyond current estimates of slavery in supply chains, revealing hidden impacts and the true risk.

Australia’s Modern Slavery Act has brought to light human rights violations hidden within the supply chains of big tech companies operating within the country. For example, tech giants Apple and Microsoft reported over 50 suppliers who did not meet compliance standards, while Amazon cited the discovery of human rights violations in 10 per cent of their supplier base. These findings are hardly surprising, given that big tech companies have complex, global supply chains and direct connections to high-risk industries like mineral sourcing, metal refining, and electronics manufacturing.

(iii) Growing Prison–Industrial Complex:

The Prison–Industrial Complex describes the many relationships between institutions of imprisonment (such as prisons, jails, detention facilities, and psychiatric hospitals) and the various businesses that benefit from them. The term is most often used in the context of the contemporary United States, where the expansion of the US inmate population has resulted in economic profit and political influence for private prisons and other companies that supply goods and services to government prison agencies.

Studies reveal that the prison industry in the United States is massive and growing. Since 1970, the number of incarcerated people in the US. has increased by 700 per cent, to the point that the US prison population is the largest in the world, both per capita and in total numbers. As of 2019, there are an estimated 2.3 million people behind bars and 4.5 million people on probation or parole. The estimated cost of the US mass incarceration system is USD 182 billion a year, with hundreds of private companies competing for government contracts. Whether public or private, all prisons, jails, and immigration detention centres rely on for-profit companies for their operations, as nearly every aspect of the prison industry has been privatised to a certain degree. For example, McDonald’s—the world’s largest fast-food chain—uses incarcerated labour at its restaurants and has prison labour in its supply chain. Wal-Mart—the largest retailer in the world—sells products that are made using prison labour.

The Indian prison economy is also growing. The numbers of prisoners are increasing every year. A 2022 data suggests that the national prison occupancy rate has mostly oscillated between 115 per cent and 118 per cent, and there has been over a 30 per cent jump in the previous two years.

In 2015, the value of goods produced by jail inmates was Rs 201.8 crore, according to a report by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), which was a 33 per cent jump from Rs 151.8 crore in 2014. Prison wages are far below the minimum in nearly every State In 2022. Prisons all over India sold products worth Rs 267.03 crore.

A new type of prisons (detention centres) are being constructed in India to detain ‘illegal immigrants’. Construction of one such detention centre at Goalpara district of Assam has been completed. The centre, considered the biggest in the country, is spread over 2.5 hectares of land and has facilities to house 3,000 prisoners.

The construction work of the detention camp amid the exercise to update the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam in 2018 triggered fear among

those left out of the exercise. More than 19.06 lakh applicants were left out of the “complete draft” of the NRC, released in 2019. Many feared that those left out of the NRC would be lodged in the “detention centres.”

It is reported that said all the states have been asked to establish detention centres according to a Model Detention Centre Manual prepared by the government.

In Assam, which has witnessed a movement against mainly Bangla-speaking migrants for more than four decades, at least six detention centres are already operational. There have been nearly 100 deaths in these centres since 2008, including suicides by the inmates.

Observations

The latest Oxfam study reveals that USD 42 trillion has been amassed by the world’s richest 1 per cent in ten years while the poorer half struggles. It has advocated for 8 per cent wealth tax on the ultra-rich. Oxfam said that the USD 42 trillion figure was nearly 36 times more than the wealth accumulated by the poorer half of the world’s population. Billionaires “have been paying a tax rate equivalent to less than 0.5 per cent of their wealth” across the globe. Nearly four out of five of the world’s billionaires call a G20 nation home, the report noted.

The wealth gap between the Indian ultra-rich and the enslaved poor is not different from the global trend. Now Indian capitalists have planned to enhance their wealth further through enactment of draconian labour laws. Increasing the prison population will also help them to establish a stronger prison-industrial complex in India.

India is following the path of slave capitalism which is not only unethical and anti-people, but also not sustainable in the long run.

Views expressed are personal