The Motives of Modern Day Slavery- Money and Menial Tasks

1- (Modern day) Slavery is a multi-billion dollar industry, at least. It is woven into most facets of our daily lives, from the clothes we wear, which may have come from people who work in sweatshops, to the food we eat, which may have come from cocoa slavery or the slaves who work with the shrimping industry. Since it is a criminal activity, there are not really accurate numbers to describe it’s impact on the global economy. The best estimates that I found were that it generates between 13 billion (Ted Talk with Lisa Kristine) and 32 billion in revenue (http://www.forbes.com/sites/skollworldforum/2013/11/15/how-to-end-modern-slavery-and-human-trafficking/#7822d09d6d59).

My question is, won’t the global economy be off balance if billions of dollars are yanked away? Really, it seems that everyone benefits from modern day slavery, except for the slaves.

If you would like to check out how you interact with slavery on a daily basis, click on this website: http://slaveryfootprint.org

This leads to my second inquiry.

2- A plausible solution would be to free all of the slaves and pay them livable wages and send their employers to prison. Right? No. Why would anyone willingly let go of (basically) free labor, in exchange for paying wages and prison time? Corruption allows governments to benefit from slave labor. Also, every single society has a group of people who must perform the menial drudgeries of life. There are people who work with trash, excrement, back-breaking labor, etc. Those tasks aren’t going anywhere.

Let’s say we are somehow able to support most of the slaves in the world, but once people are free, they have to be rehabilitated, sometimes hospitalized, and then shown how to integrate into their societies. That’s another problem in itself, modern day slavery/human trafficking often means that people are displaced. They are now in a location where they may not speak the language or align with the culture. Then what?

I absolutely want slaves to be free, but I also want life to be better post-slavery than it was during slavery. You can’t remove someone’s physical chains without addressing their emotional and mental ones.

Bottom line, I think if more people were active in the multi-faceted work of ending modern day slavery, the likelihood of reducing the number of slaves in the world would be higher but how can people address an ‘invisible’ issue?

Aleah Fedorciw says:

February 9, 2016 at 2:37 pm

In Ivana’s post, she added a link to see how you interact with slaves on a daily basis. Expecting a chart and simple figures, I clicked on the link and was instead directed to a quiz asking me about my daily habits, what I have in my house, my closet, my fridge. In the end, I had what seemed to me, a fairly large “footprint”. I was told that 43 slaves work for me.

43 slaves work for me. If, as said in Lisa Kristine’s TedTalk, whole families could be enslaved over $18, and I only took one of them, my 43 slaves at $18 each would total to $774. Had I “saved” that much money when purchasing items? Had that money been distributed over miscellaneous goods would I still have bought them at more expensive rates?

While there is no doubt that slavery should be officially stopped, as many have said, the economic ramifications must be considered. However, just as it is difficult to know which companies use slaves in some way, it is also difficult to pinpoint which part of the economy would be affected if slavery was able to be officially ended.