International, Justice, Society, Things That Tick Me Off

So You Don’t Think You’re A Slaver?
Slaver?
Or Emancipator?

Submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger

So you don’t think you’re a slaver?

Of course you don’t.

Statistically speaking, most of you are decent people.  You find the notion of slavery abhorrent.  Slavery is illegal in this country and immoral and unethical everywhere.  You’d never hire someone using slaves to work for you.  You’d never buy something you knew without a doubt was made by slaves.

Right?  Or would you?  What if you didn’t know your subcontractor relied upon slave labor or the goods you purchased were made by slave labor or relied on natural resources gathered and processed by slaves?  If you did, would you do something about it?  Knowledge is power.  As your quantity and quality of relevant information increases, so will the quality of your decision making.

Would you like to get an idea about how much slave labor goes into maintaining your lifestyle, if any?

There’s an app for that.

Slavery Footprint is a website created by Call + Response, a non-profit dedicated to ending slavery, in collaboration with the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.  The Slavery Footprint website has a Flash-driven survey that asks a variety of questions about how you live, from where to the food you eat to the type of products you use in the bathroom to the clothes in your closet.  They also have a downloadable application for both Android and iPhone.  You can answer the survey in as little or as much detail as you like.  The questions are not brand specific.  No questions ask for personally identifying information.  However, the more detailed answers you give gets you a more detailed response as to how you live might be contributing to the global slave trade and forced labor practices.  You might be surprised at the results, even if you’re an informed and conscientious consumer.  I know I was and the knowledge was well worth the time to take the survey.

You might be wondering exactly how Slavery Footprint scores the various products in question.  They are quite upfront about both their methodology and their sources of information.  Combining data both on the manufacturing country and the source materials used, the algorithm they use is explained by the following graphic:

Slavery Footprint Product Scoring Algorithm

The sources for their data are as follows:

“The five main reports we used were:

  • 1. Department of State “Trafficking in Persons Report 2011” The most comprehensive worldwide report on the efforts of governments to combat severe forms of trafficking in persons.
  • 2. Department of Labor (DOL) “List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor 2010” A list of goods from countries that the Bureau of International Labor Affairs has substantiated used of forced labor or child labor its production.
  • 3. International Labor Organization’s (ILO) “Committee of Experts Reports 2011-2003” The Committee of Experts undertakes investigations of government reports on ratified conventions. The Committee’s role is to provide an impartial evaluation of violations of international labor standards.
  • 4. Transparency International‘s “Corruption Index 2010” This index is used to measure and quantify the levels of public sector corruption in 178 countries around the world.
  • 5. Freedom House “Freedom in the World 2010 Combined Average Ratings – Independent Countries” The Freedom in the World 2010 survey contains reports on 194 countries and 14 related and disputed territories. Each country report includes a narrative on the following information: population, capital, political rights (numerical rating), civil liberties (numerical rating), status (Free, Partly Free, or Not Free), and a 10-year ratings timeline.

Additionally, we utilized published data pertaining to forced labor issues. This included vetted data drawn from a variety of international sources. The following inclusion criteria were used:

  • Drawn from ONE Internationally credible source with expert review (i.e. ILO, International Office for Migration, World Health Organization, United Nations Security Council)
  • Referenced in at least TWO multi-national reliable sources (i.e. CNN, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International)
  • Reported on by at least THREE disparate and unrelated local news sources (i.e. The Guardian, Swedwatch, Jakarta Post, Enough Project)

Note: This data set will continue to be expanded based on emerging research and the results of further investigations that meet the aforementioned inclusion criteria.”

The fight for human rights is more important now than ever.  With oppressive practices by both governments and industry on the rise globally, it is imperative to speak truth to power by standing up for human rights everywhere in addition to standing up for civil rights in your home country.   In an ever connected and interconnected world economy, slavery isn’t just a local problem in some far away place.  It’s a problem in your very own kitchen.

What can be done to address this problem?  What should be done to address this problem?  Both locally and globally?

What do you think?

Source(s): Call + Response, Slavery Footprint

~Submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger

61 thoughts on “So You Don’t Think You’re A Slaver?”

  1. erykah,

    Did the Emancipation Proclamation free all the slaves, no. True, it only freed slaves in the territory of the Confederacy. Which was a mute point until the Union came to occupy an area once held by the Confederacy and free the slaves. And it is true that Lincoln signed the EP under his presidential authority to conduct war and confiscate any ‘resource’ that might aid the enemy, which slave labor certainly did for the Confederates. So when Lincoln signed the EP, he was able to both shorten the horrid war and free at least some slaves. Lerone Bennett Jr.’s book is, as far as I can tell, ignorant of who Abraham Lincoln was and claims that he was a racist. But Abraham Lincoln was no racist. President Lincoln had no authority to free slaves under any land governed by the U.S. government. And he would have preserved the nation as have slave and half free if it had ended the war, for he felt that a nation of at least some free men was better than a nation dissolved by rebellion and succession, which he feared would continue unchecked if the Confederacy succeeded, thus leading to no one any longer enjoying the benefits of the experiment set in motion by the Founding Fathers. Whether you agree with that train of thought, I leave such to you. But a nation of half free men leaves it’s citizens in far better position to correct it’s errors than many small squabbling, unorganized, unstable nations would. People in such nations, if those nations did have slavery, wouldn’t be able to stop the sins of slavery even if they wanted too. They would be to busy just try to secure their next meal, prevent theft of what little they had, and trying to gain any stability in their lives.

    The problem is not Lincoln, it is elevation Lincoln to god like status. Lincoln was just a man trying to transcend his time and place. But, knew he could not ignore the realities around him and simply will his wants into being. So, he tried to do what he practically good, as it would be better than nothing. He could only do so much, as he was just one man. Even presidents are not all powerful. Thus I agree envisioning him as the Great Emancipator is not correct, and ignores the works of Fredrick Douglas, those akin to him, and all those who’s names are lost to history, who worked for freedom. But that doesn’t mean to recognize those people one must lie about the truths of Lincoln, turn him into some sort of cartoon bad guy.

    ——————————————————————————————————

    In reply to the focus of this post, one of the many solutions I feel to be craftsmanship. Learn how to make your own high quality goods. Not everyone can know every useful craft. But if enough people are craftsman, a person’s ignorance of one skill would be counteracted by a fellow local citizen. This was how the world worked before mass industrialization. Not to say that all industrialization is bad. For example mass produced vaccines, and the like, are a very good thing. It is a matter of balance. But why make abroad what you can make here at home? Why make in some distant corner of the country what you can make around your home? Plus, making something of quality is highly rewarding. It is not a perfect solution, or the only solution, but it goes a long ways towards helping I think. One of the easiest ways to counteract evil corporations and their ilk is to make them irrelevant.

  3. Just by chance last week I heard something on the radio while driving, of all places, to the dentist. It was a report on the incredible amount of child slave labor in west Africa at the cocoa bean processing plants.

    After I returned home and trying to distract myself from chewing my numb lower lip, I did some research and found the story to be true. It was difficult to find the names of large cocoa bean importers here in the states but finally found Hershey to be one of the biggest users of these cocoa beans out of west Africa.

    Here’s just one link: http://www1.american.edu/ted/chocolate-slave.htm

    It is in our kitchens

  5. @Oro Lee: Good ideas, but never gonna happen.

    Not as long as the corporations and moneyed interests control Washington, and that is an extremely difficult problem to solve all by itself, but I do not think it is out of the question. I think a majority of people would find these to be good fair ideas, and I also think the majority of people feel as you do: Never gonna happen. That means the majority of people think the government works against the will of the majority of people!

    Oh, by your own standard, the amount of your hourly wage probably needs a 200-300% bump at a minimum.

    I did not think I put forward a standard of living the minimum wage must produce. However, were I to do so, I would say an individual earning minimum wage should be able to work 40 hours a week and pay the minimal cost of living for themselves and one child; meaning shelter, basic nutrition, clothing, utilities, school supplies and medical care for emergencies and annual checkups.

    When I was a teenager I worked my way through my last two years of high school at minimum wage. It was enough to pay my rent, buy my food, and pay my bills, which included utilities. My transportation was bus, bicycle and on foot, I had no TV, music or electronics of any kind. I only needed medical care once, for a bad knife cut I suffered while washing dishes, and the E.R. didn’t charge me a dime (way back when). But I survived on my own and had money left over.

    Using CPI as the inflation rate, my wage back then works out to about $10.22 an hour today, about 40% over the current minimum wage.

    On the other hand, going to public school full-time I worked less than 40 hours at every opportunity and still had money left over. Today, I have relatives that work and survive long term at minimum wage.

    So I do not think the minimum wage needs to be doubled or tripled, to me the minimum standard of living is pretty damn ascetic. I think the minimum wage should be high enough to make crime unnecessary to one’s long term survival. To me, that is society’s interest in setting a minimum wage (and in unemployment insurance), if wages are so low that working a full-time job is literally not enough to live on, then the choices facing the worker are death and crime. Their only rational response is crime, which means society as a whole has to fund their survival anyway, which typically means the employers that benefit from a lower-cost of labor (in terms of higher profit margins) are getting a free ride, paid for by society through greater losses due to crime.

  6. Martin,
    The representation of Lincoln as the great emancipator is one of the most pervasive of our national myths which has yet to be thoroughly debunked. Leone Bennett’s Forced into Glory (2000) made a honorable attempt at this, but people (both black and white) were pissed that Bennett would dare attempt to challenge the master narrative of the iconic Lincoln. Bennett received, what in my opinion was, an unfair backlash and so the myth remains unchallenged.

    First, what folks need to understand is that the E. P. was a military document much as Lord Dunmore’s E. P. which was issued during the Revolutionary War and promised freedom to those slaves who would fight on the side of the British. Blacks fought on both sides of the War of Independence and those fighting for the British emigrated to Nova Scotia once the war was over.

    Second, regrading the Civil War, there was no such thing as a Black Confederate or Black Confederate soldier. This is modern day revisionist history and neo-confederate propaganda. Black slaves were a part of the menial labor force in the south and this is what gave the Confederates initially the upper hand. Blacks had already begun freeing themselves and deserting to Union lines. Lincoln was in fact a sort of Johnny come lately with his E. P. which he issued as a military necessity. He stated from the outset of the war that if he could win the war and not free a single slave he would, but if he had to he would free the slaves in order to win the war. He chose the latter.

    But there were a number of shortcoming with the document. Lincoln’s Proclamation only freed slaves in the Confederate states. Hence, while my great-great-great grandparents, William and Millie McGruder of Virginia, were “free” on January 1, 1863, slaves residing in Delaware, West Virginia, even Virginia’s Eastern Shore and other regions which did not secede from the Union were not. So the question is, who the hell did Lincoln free? Certainly not the folks he had jurisdiction over. Hence, the E. P’s legal validity and the question regarding whether or not it included children born after the E. P was issued was the reason the 13th amendment was necessary. But as stated in my earlier post, the amendment abolished chattel slavery while leaving a loophole for another form of slavery to take its place.

    Frederick Douglass (and a number of other Black abolitionists) did not see Lincoln as the great emancipator. Douglass had a love/hate relationship with the E. P stating ” “The question as to what shall be done with Slavery—and what shall be done with the Negro –threaten to remain open questions for some time yet to come. It is true we have the Proclamation of January, 1863. It was a vast and glorious step in the right direction. But unhappily, excellent as that paper is—and much as it has accomplished temporarily—it settles nothing. It is still open to decision by courts, canons, and Congresses. I have applauded that paper and now applaud it, as a wise measure—while I detest the motive and principle upon which it is based. By it the holding and flogging of Negroes is the exclusive luxury of loyal men,” (Mission of the War, January 13, 1864).

    Douglass went so far as to denounce Lincoln and refused to support his reelection. He nevertheless relented his opposition once he learned of the Democrat party’s alternative. Nevertheless, he still did not see Lincoln as a friend of Black people or Black freedom.

    Here is a link to the text of the Emancipation Proclamation: http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured_documents/emancipation_proclamation/

    The 13th Amendment:
    “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

  9. Another related topic is the issue of ‘blood diamonds’ and ‘blood minerals.’ Those are the natural resources mined by slave or semi-slave people and traded for arms and munitions so that civil wars can be waged, also to support pirates and criminal gangs. Since diamonds and minerals do not have taggins, it is next to impossible to know if that diamond engagement ring you got your sweetie, or the rare minerals in your cell phone, are tainted with the blood of innocents.

    http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=10-P13-00007&segmentID=4

    The link below takes you to an article written by a good friend of mine. She is a materials physicist.

    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/07/02/748686/-DK-GreenRoots:-Blood-Stains-on-Green-Technology

  11. “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction” (13th Amendment).

    Slavery and involuntary servitude are contrasted in the Constitution, and are, therefore, different in some respects.

  14. “[N]o way to really know if one is using products produced by slaves, or underpaid workers, or mistreated workers, or in unsafe conditions.”

    BINGO –that’s the whole point of free trade, intentional ignorance. On the one-hand, this is what our working people are up against, and on the manufacturing side it’s countries like China — manipulating currency rates, erecting non-tariff barriers, and pumping billions into emergent industries.

    There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, or free trade — jut the 1%ers doing what they have always done.

    “So I think the answer is relatively simple and pragmatic: Enforce our labor laws, at home and abroad. . . .” Good ideas, but never gonna happen. Id.

    Oh, by your own standard, the amount of your hourly wage probably needs a 200-300% bump at a minimum.

  15. erykah/eniobob,

    That being said, the use of prison labor directly in agriculture and/or industrial manufacturing is quite relevant to the current conversation. The for profit prisons problem creates wider systemic and sociological problems than just that though ergo is another topic deserving of its own column.

  16. Tony C.,

    Great post. I framed the problem in the terms of slavery in general as related to manufactured goods to encourage the very kind of avenues of discussion you raised.

    *************

    erykah,

    An interesting, but ancillary, topic to the discussion at hand. The for profit private prison system and the abuses it creates is a fine topic that I’ll most certainly get around to writing an article about in the future.

  17. “erykah
    1, October 30, 2011 at 9:16 am
    Slavery is not illegal in this country”

    “HB56 has also cut into the States agricultural labor force at a time when farmers are bringing in crops. Farmer’s are being offered inmates from the state’s Department of Corrections to help pick produce before it rots. Growers blame the lack of workers on HB56, which they say has caused laborers to leave. ”

    Alabama – Pushing out Latinos and Instituting Chinese Style Slave Labor Program

    http://weirdloadreboot.com/blog/2011/10/11/alabama-pushing-out-latinos-and-instituting-chinese-style-slave-labor-program/

  18. It depends upon how you define the “problem.” If I define it as my personal consumption of slavery-produced goods, I think I can probably do something about that.

    If you define it as slavery in general, then realistically speaking I do not think we can do much about it. Slavery reduces the costs of production, but is an easily concealed practice. It leaves no characteristic markers on the products produced, so (as your article suggests) there is no way to really know if one is using products produced by slaves, or underpaid workers, or mistreated workers, or in unsafe conditions.

    We cannot eradicate greed, and we cannot control the law or law enforcement in other countries, especially where the law and law enforcement are corrupt and greed-based.

    On to what should be done about it: What we can control is our laws, and our laws should be fair to all people, citizens or not.

    So I think the answer is relatively simple and pragmatic: Enforce our labor laws, at home and abroad. That includes OSHA and minimum wage laws and hourly laws. Redefine the minimum wage to an objective standard that permits an objective standard of living relative to the local prices of a basket of goods, shelter and services. In the USA, that would be defined by the current minimum wage, the take-home pay when working at 7.25/hr. For people that pay less for food, or shelter, or clothing, their minimum wage would be less, but they would have to pay it.

    If a company on foreign soil wants to sell goods in the USA, they would have to be licensed, inspected, and operate according to our labor and wage laws, or their goods would be barred from the USA. One of our rules: Employees work voluntarily and get paid and we will have rotating inspectors, chosen by us, with salaries and expenses paid for by tariffs on the foreign company, that verify and enforce our rules of humane production in accordance with our rules. We do the same thing for their suppliers: They can’t use raw material suppliers that we cannot inspect.

    We may not be able to stop slavery in the world, but as a nation we can easily set conditions for what we will buy and enforce. And we are not coercing other nations. If they don’t want to let us in, we won’t buy from factories in their country. If a foreign company has a supplier that isn’t on our list of inspected vendors, they can either change suppliers or stop selling to us.

    Being a business-friendly nation does not mean being a slaver-friendly nation.

  19. Slavery is not illegal in this country. The 13th amendment sanctions slavery in cases of imprisonment. It is this loophole which has sanctioned our Prison Industrial Complex and the push for privatizing prisons. There is a reason why we have mass incarceration and the largest prison population in the so called civilized world. Chattel slavery no longer exist in the US, but slavery by no means is abolished in this country. As Angela Davis stated, “We went from the prison of slavery to the slavery of prison.” See Douglass Blackmon’s Slavery By Another Name (2009) and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010).

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