On Modern Slavery

The Real Cost of Capitalism

Here at Mission, we’re really adamant about partnering with businesses that engage in fair trade practices. It’s important to us that the people we work with fight against slavery. So for this article, we’ll start and end with a seemingly simple question. How many of us are slaves?

According to The Guardian, the answer is about 1 in 200 people worldwide. More than any other time in history. The clothes we wear, the food we eat, the cars we drive, the phones we use, almost everything we touch is a product of labor abuse. Everything we buy is sourced from human labor. And unfortunately, that human labor is often exploited in horrifying ways.

• Children are forced to work long, arduous hours in jobs too dangerous for most adults.
• Immigrants are promised a better life, charged inflated, imaginary costs for travel and boarding, and paid so little they become debt slaves, their passports taken so they have no option to leave.
• People are kidnapped and forced into hard, dangerous jobs on threat of violence or death if they leave.

Slavery is an “industry” that makes $150 Billion (with a B) every single year. That’s why we can purchase $1 soap bars, $5 tee shirts, and $20 shoes. Even when those prices are marked up, often the difference goes to the company coffers, not to the people exploited to create the goods we buy.

Say you decide to shop Fair Trade only. You look for ways to reduce or eliminate any contributions to slavery. What you quickly find is that even the most affordable Fair Trade brands are often ten times more expensive than those made with slave labor. And although this is a cost that some of us are able to pay, many people are not in an economic position themselves to engage with their morals this way.

Which brings me back to my original question. In America, we’re still fighting to increase an ever stagnant minimum wage. Many, many people cannot afford to pay fair prices for fair labor. But, if most people are working jobs they do not want to work, to make just enough for housing, clothing, and food (things they need to survive), how is that not another form of forced labor? And if the corporations they work for often rely on exploited slave labor on the manufacturing side, why would we assume they use a different model when it comes to the rest of their workers?

Under capitalism, labor is exploited for as low a cost as companies can manage, so that people can’t make enough money to stop contributing to others being exploited, or enough to free themselves from exploitation. Levels of pay are often illusions to keep exploited workers content in their labor. And the cost for most of refusing to participate through working like or buying from slaves is ostracism, homelessness, starvation, and death.

If then, many of us are being coerced into working on threat of our safety and the safety of our families, I ask again, how many of us, really, are slaves?

Want to learn more and do more about slavery? Check out these resources:

End Slavery Now | All People Free | Free the Slaves | 50 for Freedom

International Justice Mission | Collective Liberty | Anti-Slavery