Disposable People

Review by Silja J.A. Talvi, Free Press Contributor

Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy
By Kevin Bales
University of California Press

It is a thing of the past. An ugly, chilling historic reminder of the savage inhumanity of racism in its most extreme manifestation. From the biblical era to the time of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, a story of suffering, dispossession, and resistance: slavery.

The ever-present legacy of the African slave trade aside, some might say that we've come a long way. Slavery has been abolished in every country on earth, and attention in the realm of human rights has logically turned to documenting and protesting incidents of discrimination, torture and abuse, the proliferation of sweatshops, and the declining rights of laborers worldwide.

But Kevin Bales, an American-born sociologist and economist now at the University of Surrey in London, sounds a different alarm with his new work, Disposable People. Slavery is here, he says, a by-product of a ruthless global economy, an explosion in population growth, and the corruption of governments who turn a blind eye -- or even give their tacit consent -- to such practices. There are at least 27 million slaves living on the planet today, according to Bales. They are worked regularly to the point of exhaustion, starvation and death, humiliated and violated as enslaved child prostitutes in Thailand, subjected to isolation and deprivation by trickster middlemen in the charcoal-making batterias of Brazil, and born into lifelong bonded labor in India. The specific circumstances surrounding the enslavement of these men, women and children vary from one country to the next. But if there is one common experience that Bales has recognized in the process of interviewing the new slaves of the global economy, it is the suffering of their bodies and souls.

A vivid and fast-paced book, Disposable People sets the stage for five case studies of slavery with a compelling introduction to the issues. It is of crucial importance, Bales believes, to understand the ways in which the "new slavery" is so different from the slavery of yesteryear. Without lessening the horror or severity of the American and European enslavement of Africans from the 1650s to 1850s, Bales points out the insidious nature of modern slavery: the abundant availability of disposable people in the wake of economic upheaval, rapid industrialization and sociopolitical destabilization.

African slaves had been costly and often lifelong financial investments to their plantation-owning masters and had yielded relatively low profits, explains Bales. Today's slaves cost their masters next to nothing and yield enormously high profits. With slavery banned throughout the world, modern slaveholders can actually avoid the "responsibilities" of slave ownership. Instead, they can easily obtain, discard, torture and even kill their slaves at will, with no concern for economic or legal consequences: "While slaves in the American South were often horribly treated," writes Bales, "there was nevertheless a strong incentive to keep them alive for many years. Slaves were like valuable livestock: the plantation owner needed to make back his investment. There was also pressure to breed them and produce more slaves, since it was usually cheaper to raise new slaves oneself ... Today no slaveholder wants to spend money supporting useless infants ... and there is no reason to protect slaves from disease or injury -- medicine costs money, and it's cheaper to let them die."

Child Labor

The surplus of dispossessed farmers and laborers from which to draw the slave labor pool, explains Bales, is supplemented by the availability of child labor. In Thailand, that availability is even made possible through parental consent. Left behind for two decades while the southern part of the country pursued a breakneck pace toward modernization, agriculturally-focused northern Thais saw the prices of their food, land and tools increase even as their returns on rice and other products were held down by government policies. Feeling pressure to participate in the consumerist frenzy taking place around them but lacking the income to do so, many poor families have opted to sell their daughters into debt bondage (for an appealing sum of money) to well-dressed brokers who arrive to procure fresh, new bodies.

Once a debt agreement is signed (with the understanding that a daughter can only return once she has repaid the money through her labor), the broker transports the girl to a southern brothel where she is beaten, raped, and put to work servicing 10 to 15 men a day: "The immediate and forceful application of terror is the first step in successful enslavement. Within hours of being brought to the brothel, the girls are in pain and shock ... For the youngest girls, with little understanding of what is happening to them, the trauma is overwhelming."

Theoretically, says Bales, the estimated 35,000 enslaved girls -- who make up a fraction of the thriving Thai sex industry -- can 'work' their way out of their debt bondage. But, as Bales witnesses, the debt accumulates while the girls are held in captivity (payments for rent, food and medicines are among the charges incurred), and so most girls are not released from their brothels until they cease being profitable -- usually when they are sick or dying from AIDS.

Bottom line: life is cheap

Utilizing an unusual research methodology, Bales draws on his background in sociology to examine the lives of enslaved men and women, and simultaneously sets out with an economist's eye to understand the financial aspects of modern-day slavery by approaching slaveholders -- or their middlemen -- to gather details about the way the business of slavery is run. In Thailand, Bales uses information from the appropriately named Always Prospering brothel to tally a sheet of monthly expenditures and income. The monthly profit for this small, working-class brothel? $88,000. The incentive to do this kind of business, Bales recognizes, is overwhelming -- as long as the value of human life is held in low regard. "Thailand is a country sick with an addiction to slavery," expounds Bales. "From village to city and back, the profits of slavery flow."

To his credit, Bales is careful not to overgeneralize when addressing prostitution in Thailand. It is true, he says, that many women opt for the sex industry and set the terms of their work lives with some amount of free agency. These people are not enslaved, argues Bales, and neither are those working in exploitative, low-paying sweatshops, even as horrible as those environments are.

In Thailand as in most other countries where slavery exists, Bales stresses that modern enslavement is rarely dependent on notions of ethnic, class or religious supremacy. "In the past ... the otherness of the slaves made it easier to employ the violence and cruelty necessary for total control ... Today the morality of money overrides other concerns. Most slaveholders feel no need to explain or defend their chosen method of labor recruitment and management. Slavery is a very profitable business, and a good bottom line is justification enough."

Mauritania, just south of Morocco, is one of the exceptions. Dominated economically by the minority Arab Moors, ethnically stratified Mauritanian society allows an entire group of people, the Black Moors or "Haratines", who share the same religion as their Moslem owners, to be enslaved. Mauritanian slavery, writes Bales, "both treats the slaves more humanely and leaves them more helpless, a slavery that is less a political reality than a permanent part of the culture ... The lack of overt violence has also allowed many outside observers, like the French and American governments, to deny that this slavery even exists."

Valuing its strategic importance as a buffer against Algeria and Libya, Western nations including the U.S. have preferred to ignore the obvious. On paper, Mauritania outlawed slavery in 1980, and the country is regularly held up as a model of African democracy.

Doing our part

Appealing to the sensibilities of his readers, Bales asks us to recognize that the complicity of our governments in ignoring slavery in countries like Mauritania is but one way that Western nations and their citizens participate in the continuation of slavery. The use of imported domestic slaves, in particular, has been a documented phenomenon in cities including Paris, London, New York and Los Angeles.

But Bales asserts that even those of us who have no such direct contact with modern slavery still reap its benefits. Bargain prices abound on the goods we buy and use, and too few Westerners stop to ask why that might be so. "Slaves in Pakistan may have made the shoes you are wearing and the carpet you stand on, " Bales writes. "Slaves in the Caribbean may have put sugar in your kitchen and toys in the hands of your children ... Your investment portfolio and your mutual fund pension own stock in companies using labor in the developing world. Slaves keep your costs low and returns on your investments high."

Making these points without treading too heavily into guilt-inducing rhetoric, Bales challenges his readers to understand that solutions are both immediately accessible and immensely complex, ranging from the successes of the Rugmark anti-child-slavery campaign to the long-term challenge of rehabilitating those battling the lifelong emotional scars of enslavement.

Bales doesn't hesitate to use Disposable People to make an overt, immediate call for action. It is an approach to the findings of his fieldwork that purist academicians may well frown upon, but when the issue is the still largely unrecognized phenomenon of present-day slavery, it seems we should be thanking Bales for sounding this kind of wake-up call. "If there is one fundamental violation of our humanity we cannot allow, it is slavery," Bales concludes. "What good is our economic and political power, if we can't use it to free slaves? If we can't choose to stop slavery, how can we say that we are free?"