I spend yesterday reading Emily Kenway’s excellent The Truth About Modern Slavery (Pluto Press, 2021). Kenway, a former advisor to the UK’s anti-slavery commissioner has her sights set on one of the most pernicious moral panics of recent years, espoused by right-wing politicians and “radical feminists” alike and used to legitimize a range of policy interventions, but particularly the hardening of borders, increased surveillance and, in relation to the sex industry, the “Nordic model”. Kenway’s argument is that the “modern slavery” industry, leveraging a parallel with actual slavery that is unjustified, promotes a focus on practices of coercion and exploitation that are represented as exceptional and abusive and as contaminating a system of labour and employment that is otherwise well-functioning. It leads to a discourse that emphasises the rescuing of victims from the evil gangs that exploit them and obscures the fact that the everyday operations of capitalism and the nation state generate the the conditions under which people make choices, often freely and rationally, to accept pretty horrible conditions, because those conditions are, for them, the best ones on offer. The book is very much focused on the UK, but readers elsewhere will certainly find parallels in their own countries.
Kenway is very good on the way in which the very same politician who have made “modern slavery” into a crusade have also been the ones who have increased the precarity that marginalized workers and irregular migrants experience. At the same time as May was issuing declarations on the subject, she was pioneering, as UK Home Secretary, the Hostile Environment that made it far more difficulty for migrants to get employment in the regular economy. Kenway highlights the ambigious status that workers at the sharp end of this discourse have: victims, if they are found dead in a trailer or “rescued” from a brothel; perpetrators and immigration offenders if they emerge from a trailer alive. The book is very up to date, but since its publication Priti Patel, the UK’s new Home Secretary, introducing a yet more restrictive immigration regime has complained that “illegals” are “abusing” the modern slavery protections in order to remain in the UK. So it goes.
Another strong point in the book is an examination of the way in which horror statistics are manufactured to fuel moral panic. How many trafficked women are there in the UK, for example? An academic study starting with 71 definite cases in 1998, moved through extrapolation to an upper bound of 1420, but by 2007 the now-disgraced MP Denis Macshane was confidently telling the House of Commons that there were 25,000 sex slave. Something must be done.
Kenway exposes the limitations of voluntary reporting of abusive practices by companies checking their supply chains (often difficult to impossible to achieve) and of suggestions that consumers can change practices by ethical shopping. If often turns out that plantations and factories with ethical certification have more abuse going on that those without. Rather, she argues for states tackling abuse through properly funded inspectorates and application of labour law. At present, even in countries such as the UK, sweatshops can thrive because the same policians who are banging on about modern slavery are starving factory inspectors of resources! Trade unions also provide a necessary defence against exploitation. And safe, legal migration pathways coupled with better wages and conditions in origin countries would both provide workers with better options and deny the unscrupulous the opportunities to take advantage of them. UBI gets a mention too, though not uncritically. “Modern slavery” is represented as contaminating something that is basically OK: the reality is that people face horrible choices and practices that are common in the mainstream of the economy (hello Amazon, Uber, Sports Direct) are cranked to an extreme for the most vulnerable. Recommended.
{ 30 comments }
Matt Matravers 04.03.21 at 4:07 pm
Many of these points are made in a 2020 volume (full disclosure: to which I contributed), What is Wrong with Human Trafficking? https://bit.ly/3rMVpSL There is a particularly good piece on the way the numbers are inflated. My contribution makes the point that the focus on modern slavery provides a distraction from working standards and the scandalously low number of inspectors and inspections in the UK (from memory, I have a go at Sports Direct and poultry packing factories). There are also some nice pieces from a European perspective. No doubt all developed at greater length in the Kenway book, but still (I hope) worth mentioning.
Jake Gibson 04.03.21 at 6:00 pm
At the heart of Capitalist apologia is “work or starve implies a choice.”
Gorgonzola Petrovna 04.03.21 at 7:25 pm
Some horror stories, in Russian:
https://strana.ua/news/325000-v-evrope-ukraintsy-massovo-popadajut-v-trudovoe-rabstvo-na-tabachnye-fabriki-.html
https://strana.ua/articles/analysis/108383-rassledovanie-strany-kak-ukrainskie-zarobitchane-stanovjatsja-rabami-v-polshe.html
The first link (underground cigarette factories) is from a week ago.
Bob 04.04.21 at 12:07 am
Thanks for this Chris.
What I don’t understand from this though is whether there is actual slavery or not.
Slavery presupposes that the slaves have alternatives, which they prefer, because of some combination of pay and working conditions, to whatever the slave-holder wants them to do. Otherwise, the slave-holder could just hire workers in the usual capitalist fashion and save themselves a lot of bother. (Owning a slave is like owning a machine or any other kind of capital equipment. You make the investment in the machine and then, if it breaks, or “gets sick” or whatever, it’s your problem. Whereas with workers, you just move on to the next.)
So are you/Kenway saying that there in fact is NO slavery, that people’s choices are just so bad that what looks like slavery is in fact ordinary wage labour; OR are there in fact people who are slaves who, absent coercion (locks, chains, violence, threats of violence, threats of being reported to the authorities), and constrained by market forces only, would move to a different job? I think the distinction is important.
Chris Bertram 04.04.21 at 6:53 am
@Bob, there are certainly some people who are physically constrained. But there are far more who have entered into debt bondage contracts and the like or who, say, work for criminal enterprises as, say, drug dealers in circumstances where it is hard just to move on. In both of those cases, the original decision to subordinate oneself may have been a rational one. The modern slavery discourse, however, sees “slavery” everywhere, in nail bars and car washes. It is, afaics, no part of Kenway’s case that vile, horrible and coercive forms of labour don’t happen, but rather that the modern slavery discourse obscures how continuous they they are with practices in the regular economy and, but partitioning them as criminal abuse by a few evil people, gets in the way of measures that would actually work.
Gorgonzola Petrovna 04.04.21 at 9:29 am
“You make the investment in the machine and then, if it breaks, or “gets sick†or whatever, it’s your problem.”
Normally, when they get sick they’re just thrown out. But yes, there is a risk. This piece
https://strana.ua/articles/207676-kak-ukraintsy-stanovjatsja-zhertvami-zarabotkov-v-polshe.html
tells the story of one Vasily Chorney, 36 y.o. carpenter from Iwano-Frankiwsk oblast, who worked illegally in Poland, at a coffin factory. When he lost consciousness at the workplace, the owner, Grażyna F, drove him 125 km away and dumped him in a forest, where he was found dead later. No coffin for Mr Chorney (‘black’).
…oh, and here’s Pani Grażyna’s story in a local Polish paper:
https://nowytomysl.naszemiasto.pl/tag/grazyna-f
apparently she was convicted, but, as of March 11, hasn’t served any time.
I understand this goes against the point of the post. Sorry. Feel free to moderate away.
RichardM 04.04.21 at 11:20 am
That makes it seem like a debt bondage contract is a legal thing that wouldn’t be, at the very least, voided by bankruptcy. Wher-as in reality it is more like a conditional threat to use illegal violence.
Both a simple slavery/not slavery divide, or a straightforward ‘its a spectrum’. are two simplistic. I think if you want to understand the dynamics, how things would change in response to policy, you need three groups. Those who work
A: for the money
B: to avoid being deported
C: to avoid having their legs broken.
‘modern slavery’ confuses B and C, but you seem in danger of just adding A to the mix. If the bottom end of ‘for-the-money’ jobs has conditions little better than ‘work or leave’, then that’s a consequence of two different things existing and competing, not of them actually being the same.
For example, a more effective justice system that would reliably punish leg-breakers might be expected to raise low end wages, as that means of getting people to work on the cheap became noncompetitive . Or maybe something else more complicated would happen. In any case, you can;t talk about what would happen without considering all three groups.
Chris Bertram 04.04.21 at 12:00 pm
Richard M: 1. read the book. 2. usually there’s a mix of things. One reason you are washing cars for below minimum wage is because you are prohibited from working legally because of your immigration status. One reason you might be working for nothing, is because your employer can get you deported. One reason you end up selling drugs is because the social stopped your benefits. One reason you end up many more hours than you are paid for by your legit employer is because they have the whip hand and you need the little you can get and you’ve no comeback if they sack you. &c
Barry 04.04.21 at 3:17 pm
Note that immigration restrictions help this. An employer can report people to ICE, those people will be deported, and the employer is good to go.
“Owning a slave is like owning a machine or any other kind of capital equipment. You make the investment in the machine and then, if it breaks, or “gets sick†or whatever, it’s your problem. Whereas with workers, you just move on to the next.”
Same with slaves, and the investment might not be that much.
J, not that one 04.04.21 at 5:30 pm
It seems the argument is either the teen prostitutes and sweated workers are not victimized and shouldn’t be infantilized (they chose rationally) or criminalized (an enterprise they identify with shouldn’t be prohibited), or they are atypical members of a larger class of victims of capitalism and therefore shouldn’t be a focus of public attention.
Similarly, seeking out specific employment abuses should presumably take a back seat to transforming capitalism into noncapitalism. As likely, however, understanding that the inner logic of the victimization is tied up with the structure of capitalism doesn’t seem to suggest any obvious action that might be taken, other than reading more books. At least it seems compatible with any imaginable politics whatsoever (except one that doesn’t like saying “capitalismâ€, because reasons). These books often seem to be the only way readers get a chronicle of abuses like the ones at Uber, though, which is not nothing.
Robert K Fullinwider 04.04.21 at 6:42 pm
For a thorough look at the so-called Nordic Model, see essays 6, 7, 8, and 10 at http://newprostitutionwars.net
Neville Morley 04.05.21 at 8:08 am
I can understand the motives for presenting campaigns against labour abuses in terms of “slavery has been abolished but actually there is still lots of stuff that’s just as badâ€, but for reasons outlined above the extension of the concept seems unhelpful – and threatens to undermine understanding of actual enslavement in ways that may not be entirely innocent. As a historian, I find it a bit strange that ‘modern slavery’ is apparently being defined just in terms of exploitation and loss of freedom; historically, enslavement is widely understood in terms of the loss of personhood and being treated, legally as well as effectively, as property. That then leads to loss of freedom, and in most but not all cases to exploitation, but those things on their own don’t equate to enslavement. One question would be whether we can ever talk about ‘slavery’ in a society that does not recognise the legal rights of the enslaver to treat people as property, as opposed to just lax enforcement of laws against such treatment.
Hidari 04.05.21 at 10:02 am
@12
As I believe Jon Savage mentioned somewhere, one of the most important lines in modern cinema is from the Beatles’ movie ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ where one of the supporting characters throws out a comment:
‘The New Thing is to care deeply, and be right wing.’
This discourse, mentioned in the OP, in which ‘touchy-feely’ ‘I care deeply’ rhetoric masks hard right politics explains so much about contemporary discourse (cf discourse around ‘slavery’, sexwork (as mentioned in @11), ‘hard drugs’ and so on. CF trends in politics more generally since the early ’90s).
J, not that one 04.05.21 at 3:32 pm
@12
I wonder if early modern piracy represents a transition point between the original and modern definitions of “slavery.” A person taken captive on the high seas, and enslaved in a country foreign to him, still retained all his rights in his own home, if he could get back to it. The loss lies in the gap between the two regimes and the impossibility of return. The concept of “slave labor” retains the idea of kidnapping or some other form of physical capture.
(I’m currently switching between email addresses and don’t remember which I’ve been using to post here, sorry if this messes up auto-moderation. The beginning, name part of both of them is the same.)
Fake Dave 04.05.21 at 7:47 pm
The sex slavery discourse also seeks to continue the Victorian habit of treating those who pay for sex as being unwitting accessories (or even victims) of the real criminals. That seems entirely counterproductive. If we charged every busted John as a felony sex offendor and set up regular stings to make hiring prostitutes actually risky, that would be hitting the demand side of the equation. Since the supply of vulnerable/desperate young women seems virtually endless, surely attacking the customer base makes more sense. It also fits much better with the notion of “slavery” to punish the masters than the slaves, yet that’s exactly what we do.
J-D 04.05.21 at 11:29 pm
It’s not clear what you mean by ‘the original definition of slavery’. Since it’s practically certain that slavery predates written records, there’s no way of being sure what the original definition was. To me it seems possible though unlikely that the earliest slaves were captives of pirates, in exactly the position you describe of retaining all their right in their own homes if only they could get back to them. More likely the earliest slaves were captured in war, but still in exactly the position you describe: if only they could escape to the places from which they came, they would cease to be slaves. I can’t think of any good reason to suppose that there weren’t people in this situation before early modern piracy created it.
J-D 04.05.21 at 11:44 pm
It is this kind of argument that supports what is somewhat misleadingly* described as the ‘Nordic model’, referred to by Chris Bertram in the post. On my reading, Chris Bertram (and presumably also therefore Emily Kenway) would reject this kind of argument. The kind of counterargument I have encountered elsewhere (and which I therefore imagine is the kind of argument that Chris Bertram and Emily Kenway might make) is that it is inaccurate and harmful to suppose that sex work is in a separate category from other kinds of work as being intrinsically abusive/exploitative/oppressive in a way that work in general is not; the kinds of protection of their rights and protection against victimisation which are genuinely helpful to sex workers are the same kinds which are genuinely helpful to workers in general, and that is what would be generally beneficial to them, whereas efforts to shut down the industry are not.
*Misleading in that three of the Nordic countries (Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) have adopted models of this kind but the other two (Denmark and Finland) have not; similar models have also been adopted more recently in other countries.
Chris Bertram 04.06.21 at 7:17 am
@J-D “On my reading, Chris Bertram (and presumably also therefore Emily Kenway) would reject this kind of argument.
Yes, that is correct.
Gorgonzola Petrovna 04.06.21 at 7:38 am
@13 “…‘touchy-feely’ ‘I care deeply’ rhetoric masks hard right politics”
For something like ‘the war on drugs’, yes. But in this case, not quite, methinks. Global economy, national-level remedies, it’s complicated. For example, unionization could very well be a factor leading to offshoring, resulting in much worse working conditions.
John Quiggin 04.06.21 at 7:28 pm
Pro-slavery advocates in the US before and during the Civil War used the idea of “wage slavery” to argue that enslaved Blacks in the South were better off then White workers in the North.
Neville Morley 04.06.21 at 8:26 pm
@John Quiggin #20: echoed, to some extent, in a line from Capital: “The Roman slave was held with chains; the wage-labourer is bound to his owner with invisible threads.†But that was comparing the situations, rather than suggesting that slaves were better off.
Fake Dave 04.08.21 at 3:21 am
The mention of antebellum apologia is interesting because it reminds us that the “no worse than any other workplace” argument is basically whataboutism and usually merit-based. There are specific things about chattel slavery that make it worse than other forms of “making a living” and it’s not about the pay. Many chattel were paid, in fact.
Likewise, if you believe, as I do, that there are specific injuries incurred by “modern slavery” that go beyond economic exploitation, then decriminalization is not a blanket solution any more than laws against abusing slaves (which did exist) were a solution to chattel slavery. Economic exploitation might be the nature of capitalism (and worthy of challenging), but most wage earners do not become the “subhuman” property of their employer and don’t face the threat of violence if they quit. That’s what makes it slavery, not what they get paid. People who think decriminalization of prostitution or illegal immigration will end that are naive. There are many ways to control people besides taking their visas and most of these mechanisms are already illegal. It’s not enough to change the circumstances of enslavement. We have to end the institution itself. Sex slavery is an industry and an institution in itself, not just an unfortunate accident of overzealous enforcement. Decriminalization of prostitution won’t change that and may even make things worse if it legitimizes the objectification of sex “workers.”
I actually support ending the persecution of prostitutes and don’t think arresting them to help them makes much sense. However, I don’t see how this logic extends to the people who exploit prostitutes and I think pimps and johns should be punished for their crimes against human dignity. The objectification and “ownership” of a human being, even in the short term, is an abhorrent crime and I don’t think it should be legitimized either by the law or by economists as being just another kind of “work.”
John Quiggin 04.08.21 at 10:37 am
Another relevant parallel is the panic about “white slavery” in early C20, which gave rise to the Mann Act in the US, now likely to ensnare the appalling Matt Gaetz.
J-D 04.08.21 at 10:57 am
Many sex workers emphatically disagree. Have you considered their point of view?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sex_worker_organizations
Tim Worstall 04.08.21 at 10:58 am
” One reason you are washing cars for below minimum wage is because you are prohibited from working legally because of your immigration status.”
True. It’s also possible that the minimum wage has been set “too high” in that there aren’t enough tasks worth that sort of payment to employ all the people who desire an income.
Tim H. 04.09.21 at 2:08 am
The current US minimum wage doesn’t buy as much as $1/hr did 65 years ago, $15/hr might not go as far either, but a “High” minimum wage is a common complaint of people who almost have a business plan.
nastywoman 04.09.21 at 8:18 am
and about:
”it’s complicated. For example, unionization could very well be a factor leading to offshoring, resulting in much worse working conditions”.
Now isn’t that the… damndest or weirdest thing?
That there are people in this world who think that unionization could very well be a factor leading to offshoring?,
As it isn’t if ”GREED” would lead to offshoring – as if GREED leads to offshoring it’s very obvious that something really, really BAD leads to offshoring BUT if ”unionisation” leads to offshoring something very, very good ”leads to offshoring” as doesn’t unionisation help the workers and avoids Modern Slavery –
Petrovna?
Trader Joe 04.09.21 at 11:13 am
As has often been famously noted, the minimum wage is Zero….which is to say, the job doesn’t exist.
In the U.S. the minimum legal wage is $7.65/hr. The difference between zero and the minimum legal wage – wherever society chooses to set it – is the window in which non-legal wage setting set via coercive contracts and all that entails can plant its seeds.
Its a place where sex work tends to be an exception because usually (not always) sex workers are able to earn more than legal minimum wage but for whatever reasons they don’t operate within the legal framework. Accordingly its an area the requires unique protections for participants.
I’m skeptical there is a single ‘best’ solution for sex work because while the demand for such service has fairly constant motivation – the supply has vastly different interests ranging from “high priced” sex workers who largely do it by choice and the most subjugated on the other end. People can moralize and pearl clutch all they want, but its an industry that has been around forever and its one that won’t go away just because those pretending to be helpful have a plan.
J, not that one 04.09.21 at 4:53 pm
There does seem to be an element of moral panic in discussions of “human trafficking.†On the one hand, the people who used to worry that their blond grandchildren were at especial risk for random kidnappings because little blond kids are so desirable now worry that the young unmarried women in their own community are susceptible to the blandishments of traffickers. The other side of that, however, is that activists are frequently coy about what they think should be prohibited.
I’m not clear at all what the Nordic System has to do with immigrants rights, frankly.
Gorgonzola Petrovna 04.09.21 at 5:41 pm
@nastywoman,
If you have ever bought something produced offshore, for a fraction of the price you would have to pay to a unionized local producer, then perhaps you’re right: not unionization but you, possessed by GREED, are a factor leading to offshoring.
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