The connection between modern slavery and ecological disaster
blog.longreads.com
blog.longreads.com
The war came about after the dictator Mobutu died and the chaos and aftermath of the Rwanda genocide spilled over the border. All the surrounding countries saw enormous natural resource wealth to be claimed and started funding and equipping their own proxy militias to seize power. The whole thing was a huge chaotic mess that destroyed what little infrastructure there was in the country.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbD76cWdBHc&list=PLDD34C9812...
[1] http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/28/world/asia/korean-war-fast-fac...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties
[3] http://web.mit.edu/CIS/pdf/Human_Cost_of_War.pdf
[4] https://books.google.com/books?id=YpV7vbvclfgC&pg=PA354#v=on...
However, it is still a good indication of just how little attention we pay to Africa here in the west, that people in general don't even know that it existed.
And for the Congo in particular, their experience under Belgian (well, Leopold II) rule was so horrific that other colonial powers exerted pressure on Leopold to give it up. The death toll in the Congo at that time was about the same as for the recent Second Congo War (plus the war's aftermath). Given the population of the day, it's estimated that the Belgian rule in the Congo halved the population, whereas the recent war 'only' claimed a bit less than 10%. The Belgian rule also left a lot of people maimed without hands, since there were bounties on hands, and the payors weren't too fussy about where they came from. Leopold II is one of history's lesser-known evil kingpins. After Leopold was forced to hand it over for management elsewhere, it became a more regular colonial story of exploitation for little in return.
In short, for Congo in particular, the modern day is better than it's experience in colonial times, even with the recent war.
The professor's family was highly placed in the Mobutu government. He had enjoyed a childhood of education at the best private boarding schools and colleges in Belgium and England. My fellow CS student? He had been labeled a communist, and fled the country with his wife and children. He somehow managed to make his way to the US and enroll in college.
Still, they were genuinely friends, and great company to be with.
We learned so much from this, just look at Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria...
This is one of the worst things ever, and recent enough to be photo-documented. They cut the hands and feet off children if their parents didn't gather enough rubber.
http://shop.antislavery.org/category/Images-Historical-Belgi...
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=congo+slavery&tbm=isch
https://discoveringbelgium.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/congo...
There is something deep in human nature that sees something it wants and narrows our thoughts to just getting that item. Maybe its a holdover from our Hunter/Gatherer instincts. But we seem to be using it to hack our minds to ignore the damage we do to our fellow humans in the process of acquiring.
We may need to aspouse minimalist ideology at a mass scale (something I see in fellow Gen Yers.)
The same society whose middle and lower classes are demanding ever lower prices at the cost of inhumane treatment of workers is the same society which produces the upper class you hold that hope for. I think you must be living in a different world than I am, because the upper class I'm familiar with is just as happy as everyone else to have their goods produced by the not-quite-but-almost-slave labor described in the article.
I agree that this will require a cultural change, but at all levels. The upper class isn't going to jump on that any sooner than the rest of us without a major shift.
The upper class I'm familiar with consumes products by people like Brunello Cucinelli who goes to great lengths to verify the ethical sourcing of his products. They eat localvorically, and in general buy ulta-high end goods that they research a bit before purchasing (because they are finicky about many aspects). This new hobby is a ultra-status conversation piece that can be traded at parties. You should be able to name the region your boat deck's teak came from, and then drop that the hunting rifle you just had hand crafted has a recovered Lebanese cedar stock that came from an old chest of drawers.
That doesn't mean it's wrong.
Food in particular is a source for this controversy. Over the past fifty years, the population of the planet has doubled, but food cost as a proportion of the economy has halved. This is due to the techological advances of "green revolution" agriculture - tractors, transportation, and chemical fertilizers and pesticides. But there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Cheap food comes at the price of health and environmental damage, among other things. (want slavery? Check out the chocolate supply chain.) And it's not a huge luxury to eat more ethical foods. Middle class people can afford it.
The true middle class is focusing on critical value trade offs (getting more for your money) and family unit stability. This narrows their energy away from the broader problems and closer to matters of survival. Consider how even Whole Foods or "Goop" is seen by your average middle class individual -- a spot for dilettantes to overpay for apples rather than a representation of hope for working farmers and healthy children.
I think the upper-class must steer away from the concerns of themselves and shoring up their wealth and towards a reinvestment on society, something the recession in the US and depots in Russia and China have set back as members now fear assets could disappear at any time. A portion of the super-class (Gates, Buffet etc) have already tried to evangelize this with some progress -- whilst facing opponents like the Kochs and others who seem to have a more socially adverse ideology.
The real cost of quality food isn't so much money as time. My daughter does most of the cooking for the household, because she loves it. She spends a couple of hours a day at it. I love to cook too, but I don't spend hours a day cooking, because it's not a good tradeoff in my life.
I wonder what effect there would be on the electronics industry if all iPhones in the EU had to be sold with a prominent sticker 'Produced with slave labour' ? I honestly think that regulations can nudge the behaviour and expectations of 'the masses' through this kind of labelling.
(1) http://www.rspca.org.uk/adviceandwelfare/farm/layinghens/far...
http://www.geek.com/apple/apple-approves-then-removes-app-hi...
Which criteria should we label for that are meaningful in other countries across the world?
Made by workers:
Receiving Minimum wage (which one)?
Receiving Free healthcare?
Working a maximum of 8 hours / day?
Over the age of 16? 18?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for it, but defining what is acceptable is not easy. Don't forget that in most western countries no access to free healthcare would be defined as unacceptable. Also in some poor countries 14 year old "kids" have fought against anti-child labour laws because they were the only provider for their family and there is no help from the government regardless of your condition.
The problem isn't trying to define meaningful labels, but to record the most salient facts. For starters: record and disseminate the human hours exerted and wage paid for each manufactured item.
2 Assemblers @ 1 hr/each @ $2/hr
1 Packager @ 1 minute @ $1/hr
etc
Consumers may then dynamically choose based on their current preferences. I don't think it's an ideal system, but it would be a significant improvement over the current situation.
Lots of time "free range" is the same as caged, just... without the cages. The hens are too fat to go anywhere anyways.
Love it.
Daylighting externalities is key to changing behavior. Enough of us vote with our dollars to move the needle.
I stopped eating chocolate (cold turkey) when I first learned about the plantations using slave labor, children, etc.
I resumed buying chocolate when I learned about the Fair Trade program.
It's impossible to prove that the entire supply chain for any electronic device is 100% free of exploitative labour conditions. Metals are fundamentally untraceable and a modern device contains components from hundreds or even thousands of suppliers, sub-contractors and second sources. All it takes is one manager twenty steps down in the supply chain to lose a piece of paper and your chain of custody is broken for a sizeable batch of devices.
In practice, every electronic device would be required to carry such a warning label simply as a precaution, rendering it meaningless.
For this to work, there has to be an ethical alternative available (if at slightly higher cost).
You can't depend on people to do the right thing. That's why we have laws. International labor laws will hopefully one day become a thing. In the meantime we have trade agreements. We shouldn't allow import of slave produced goods to western societies. IMHOP.
The same regulatory policy regularly subverted by small bribes in the article?
Also, couldn't small bribes also be a problem in things like fair trade certification?
well, except that in a way.. regulation comes from the government, which is the collective us. I prefer that the government spends some money to work out what regulation would be useful so that the collective us can spend our money on fairly traded goods (as an example) rather than every person in the collective having to do that research constantly to overcome the hard sell and marketing lies that are produced to facilitate somebody making a quick buck and externalising costs which I wouldn't otherwise wish to pay.
As an example, if the government says that in truth, gravestones imported from India are largely produced by slave labor and then it refuses to admit them into the country. That means, that when my relative died and I am not really in a frame of mind to research the supply chain of the headstones and the sellers lay on the hard sell, I can still be assured that I am not funding this terrible system. I would welcome that..
Maybe we'd make more progress if we stopped denigrating people for trying to do what they can. It may not be enough, but at least some people are trying to do _something_. But when you put people down this way, it makes them less likely to do anything, because no one wants to be labeled as vacuous and superficial (AKA "hipster").
I've been surprised, at times, that others can interpret this personal decision about my own behavior and beliefs as some "social cudgel" that I am wielding against them. I guess it doesn't take much to leap from "oh, are you a vegetarian?" to "you must think eating meat is unethical," to "you must think I'm evil for eating this burger," to "annoying snobby vegetarians, always acting superior and rubbing it in your nose."
Anyway. That hipster buying his fair-trade coffee might not be doing it to insult you. It might be something he's read about, thought about, and decided he cares about. He might figure that mostly it's an empty gesture, but maybe it'll do some good. If you want to buy some other coffee, he might be totally OK with that. Of course, YMMV.
That said, I think the "socially-conscious hipster" is less likely to be vegetarian or vegan and more likely to buy "free range" eggs and eat "happy meat". The thing that makes them hipsters is their lack of commitment and their willingness to abandon the position once something more hip comes along.
Some people do care. Enough for an ever-growing range of products that are part of the Fairtrade scheme.
In the UK, the Fairtrade logo is almost universally recognised by consumers because you can find fair trade products in just about every supermarket (obviously the number of products varies by supermarket, but even discount Supermarkets like Lidl and Aldi stock a few items).
One major supermarket in the UK (Sainsbury's) sources all it's bananas under the fair trade scheme.
Fair trade has its critics and perhaps the scheme fails at times to live up to its ideals, but it's still a scheme worthy of support. And I'm glad it's going strong (at least in the UK - I think other countries have their own versions).
Here's an excellent blog post from the Fairtrade foundation on some common misconceptions about fair trade
http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/en/media-centre/blog/2015/july/d...
Has there ever been a time in human history where slavery wasn't the fundamental backbone of a prosperous society?
Also, a googler complaining about slave-labor prices is rich with irony.
Now, in the long run, that will be better than just keeping the status quo. But we should remember that a quick change can be significantly worse in the short term, especially one where the focus is incorrectly applied (in these cases, the focus is on goods being produced by a child labor instead of the conditions that result in children working to begin with; ending the child labor does not end the conditions and will sometimes make things much worse).
It's one thing if the situation was a matter of children being forced to work. If a kid finds work on purpose to help himself or his family eat and you suddenly make it illegal without removing the NEED for him to have to work to help his family then you've made the situation worse while instituting a policy to make yourself feel better.
My view on politics as I've gotten old has gone squarely to the singular point: No complaints. No rules. Solutions or shut up.
This is a really good way to make sure that important things aren't talked about (and, it should go without saying, disproportionately hurts already marginalized people even further). Complaints about a situation are step one of finding a collaborative solution. It may take time to get there, and the process might be annoying (heaven forfend). But I would suggest considering the circumstances you find yourself in that allows you to find them annoying, and being charitable about the search for a solution instead of decreeing from on high.
Can parties opt-out of your definition of a collaborative solution, or does your definition of collaborative include forcing people to participate, whether they wish to do so or not?
Can I choose not to leave, if I respect other people's natural rights?
My issue about leaving is that if I have done nothing wrong, I shouldn't have to flee from others who wish to violate my rights. Instead, they should respect my right to be unmolested.
Interested in your thoughts, if you wish to expand on this topic.
To that end, there is no "right to be unmolested", and I would underline that particularly for--given the context of this thread--conceived-of rights that effectively serve to provide legal supremacy over other people. (Of which we have many.) "Done nothing wrong" can mean very different things to very different people, and while I am not in favor of ex post facto convictions or anything of the like, I am in favor of amending the rules to the game to be more equitable and, I hold, thus better for the aggregate of humanity--and enforcing them to that end.
So, no. The general will sets the rules of the road, and dissenters can comply (and seek to change that general will if they so choose; part of the societal privilege to try to change that general will is the societal responsibility to obey it when it breaks against you), accept the consequences of civil disobedience (the abrogation of the aforementioned responsibility in hopes of demonstrating injustice to encourage a change in that general will), or leave (fold your hand). As it happens, there are cases where I'd do the second and a couple where I'd do the third.
I expect people who are campaigning on the basis of those complaints to be able to explain why the problem is a problem and exactly how they plan to solve it along with the expected ramifications of their solution.
Campaigning on complaints without being able to extrapolate those details is essentially nothing more than pandering.
How does this fix the problem of solutions not actually solving things?
But in these "We must keep the slaves so they don't starve" arguments, there's always a nasty whiff of condescension - the implication that they cannot care for themselves, without handouts. Given freedom and sufficient resources, most people will choose to better their circumstances. Humans fed themselves for a long time before they were enslaved. Getting back to feeding themselves may not be easy, but it's certainly not impossible.
In my reply, I said if they were being forced to work (aka - slaves) it was not okay but if they went out and choose to work it was another story.
In your response you cited a "we must keep the slaves so they don't starve" argument...which is not at all what I said. That's the logical disconnect that happens in many political discussions of these types. You're arguing with something I didn't say unless I'm misreading you, because it partially looks like you're agreeing with me as well regarding people choosing to better their circumstances.
To better themselves, they need to be able to make something where they're at, or be able to go somewhere else. If they're sitting on ruined land, unable to leave, that's a problem that can't be solved with mere hard work. But that's a problem that would not have happened without the slavery in the first place.
In other words focusing on "conditions" misses the whole point: child labor is anticompetitive because it's all about lowering prices by exploiting the weak and the defenseless. Thinking about the "conditions" won't move the needle, not as long as child labor remains competitive. Child labor would happen near you if the law would allow it, because it makes economic sense to hire children instead of adults for half the price and there are always poor people to exploit.
Also, have you ever considered that some of those exploited children were born because child labor is a possibility?
One should not forget that an economy is a very complex beast, any changes have far reaching consequences and that doing the right thing is never easy.
I am reminded of Joseph Campbell:
“Life lives on life. This is the sense of the symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail. Everything that lives lives on the death of something else. Your own body will be food for something else. Anyone who denies this, anyone who holds back, is out of order."
No, there is not going to be pure and blameless system of production and consumption.
Current failings of our world are not excuses not to improve it, or to be better people.
On another note, a personal attack is not appreciated here, regardless of where I work. Your comment history is rich with these types of things. We are happy to have you here, but please think about contributing more constructively.
Almost everyone in America is a descendant of immigrants, for that matter. In many cases, those immigrants were fleeing violence and persecution, their passage paid by overlords who felt it was very decent and moral of them to ship the people overseas rather than just killing them off (i.e. the Irish in America).
Concretely, if an iPhone is replaced on average every other year but goes up 30% to the the ePhone (ethical phone) it is now only replaced every 3 years. This means fewer ephones are produced, which means that roughly 1/3 of the workforce is no longer required. What are those 1/3 to do?
Older forms of oppression have always existed. Look at other species to see that even without a culture or society, the weak are exploited.
The point, though, is that Roman slavery wasn't very different from modern slavery. They had all the key elements we do - the tools to both imprison humans en masse and exploit natural resources, a standardized transportation network to move both troops to where the exploitation happened and and remove goods from where the exploitation happened, literacy and bureaucracy to manage large-scale, ongoing enterprises, etc. And of course, they had their moral rationalizations for brutality, especially brutality that happened somewhere out of sight.
Without metal, without roads, without heavy transport, without structured military units, without literacy, the tools for mass enslavement really don't exist.
This is very much not slavery. It's terrible, it's fraud, and it's arguably some form of servitude, but it's not slavery. Calling it slavery is an insult to people who are owned and chained.
Edit: much, much later at the very end of the article there is a more in depth accounting of what's happening. It seems to be mostly fraud tied with corruption, but there are accounts of straight servitude and some of the men say they were not able to leave. If this testimony is accurate, i'd say it's slavery.
There isn't one. This article is about slavery as a real, physical condition, not a legal condition.
It's fucked up, but it's not slavery.
Honestly this is such a pedantic distinction to make for anybody but a human rights lawyer in court.
It's one thing to say, workers are being shorted, cheated, etc, but if your headline is "your iphone is being built by slaves" then you should be referring to, at least, people who are being held against their will. Not simply people who are confused about the law and are working for free because of this confusion.
Never mind that the slavemongers are generally incredibly abusive on their own because their victims believe they will have no recourse from the government.
It's slavery.
I'm not an expert on this subject, but have learned in the past minute of looking at the bonded labor links in this thread that the UN and other international organizations agree that bonded labor is within the modern definition of slavery. Do you have any sources that say otherwise?
I disagree. Any form of coerced labor is slavery whether the coercion is legal or not.
Things can still be characterized as being pretty messed up without resorting to misrepresentation.
This is a fundamental distinction. It's still fucked up, but it's not slavery.
Actually, your original point referenced people being "owned and chained" as being distinct from what was described in the quote you pasted from the article, which has this right in it: "This debt bondage is illegal".
Do you also take issue with the article's use of the term debt bondage?
From Wikipedia:
> Debt bondage (also known as debt slavery or bonded labor) is a person's pledge of their labor or services as security for the repayment for a debt or other obligation.
How is debt bondage different from "staying out [of] a sense of duty"?
Keep in mind that these people aren't free to just walk away--if they are to escape, it has to be just that: an escape. I saw a documentary on this a year or two ago, probably by Vice. The family wanting to leave had to run under the cover of night and rendezvous with someone with a car--only possible with existing outside connections.
There were allowances made for crimes of passion in some cases, and slave codes differed from place to place. Slave codes were revised over time, depending on the goals and fears of the plantation class at the time.
You're trying to draw a bright line here, but it will be hard to do so, because forms of slavery did differ, even in the heyday of slavery in the Americas.
For example, the Code Noir that controlled slavery in New Orleans was less draconian than the codes used in other parts of the American South (e.g., see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Noir). This is one reason for the unique character of black/white/creole relations in New Orleans to this day.
The same can be said of any piece of paper that assigns ownership to a piece of land, or anything else on this earth.
I thought it was powerful. My girlfriend who grew up here didn't get it.
Faux slavery of this kind is very widespread. Very.
http://www.notraffickahead.com/campaigns/
Powerful indeed.
I think if humans could handle it, matching concepts with made up words would even be useful (rather than each side insisting that a word with a lot of baggage be attached to this or that concept).
But at the end of the day (and from the point of view of those directly affected), it's a fairly picayune one. And to deny, from the safety of the comfortable and protected position where we sit, that it isn't basically the modern, moral equivalent of slavery is to dodge the key issue at hand, and seems quite callous to the suffering of those affected.
To be a slave is to be the formal or informal property of another. It is to be considered subhuman, and all the dark implications that go with that status.
Pretending that the lowest pits of wage-slavery, as described in this article, does not qualify as slavery is the mark of the cruel and misshapen.
Where the hell does it say they could just get up and walk away? Do you seriously think that the people in this situation wouldn't have done so if it were possible?
Once you include wage-slavery as slavery, you open up a big question of what wage-slavery counts and what doesn't.
Actually trivializing it because it doesn't meet some ideal of what slavery should be is the actual insult to people who have to live through that hell life.
And the people indeed are or have been "owned and chained" would have no problem with calling such an injustice slavery too. That would be actually petty of them...
Not to mention that historically and globally there have been many forms and traditions of slavery and servitude -- including similar debt schemes, used even back in ancient Greece and Rome.
So I can believe alll those workers in many multinational agencies who all call this modern slavery, or I can believe you.
It's not slavery because it's legally called slavery. It's slavery because those people are not in any way free to leave.
This is Debt Slavery (or Debt Bondage)[1], and you are correct that it is a different thing to chattel slavery. However, it is still considered slavery. In particular, it is outlawed under international law under the "Convention on the Abolition of Slavery"[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_bondage
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplementary_Convention_on_th...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_II_of_Belgium
Other than that machinery for exploitation has been geographically dispersed and greatly optimized, such that these days, our slaves don't drop like flies quite so often, but instead are kept around in a state of minimal sustenance -- so that their skills can be most efficiently extracted without all the, you know, rotting corpses, piles of severed limbs & ensuing bad PR.
The reason slavery goes on there is armed thugs from neighbouring counties (Rwanda and Zaire) have invaded and are forcing the locals to hand over the ore which is not a good thing. Though the solution is not to feel guilty about using phones, it's to kick the thugs out.
I disagree with you, there.
The reason slavery goes on there is because we choose to permit it. It may be a passive choice, rooted in (willful) ignorance for some, or a sense of powerlessness ("I can't help those people, what do my own decisions matter?") for others. But if we really wanted to, we could just stop buying (at least discretionary) products which, by this point, everyone knows to be sourced from conflict zones, and human suffering that are inseparable from them.
I don't claim much knowledge of the area, but I'm confused that you're saying Zaire borders Congo, when in fact Zaire became the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997.
Imagine we found a rich vein of cobalt ore in Tim Cook's backyard: The Congo would still be in an unimaginably terrible state, but at least that part of our phones would be humanely supplied. What's next on the list? My guess is that it would be substantially less upsetting, and probably much easier to address.
Many times what appears to be growth is really just inefficient forms of wealth transfer where we're seeing only one side, causing more poverty than it solves.
The word "externalities" don't mean that no one pays. It means that powerless third parties pay (who are unable to consent) -- poor children and the elderly breathing diesel fumes because their family can't afford to live far from the dump, or the indigenous people displaced/exterminated to raise cattle in slashed-and-burned rainforests, or the slave laborer, or our grandchildren who will have to deal with the effects of climate change and species extinction. Externalities aren't on a ledger somewhere, but it makes them no less real.
Environmental protection is actually just humanity's enlightened self-interest, a fact the human/"environment" distinction serves only to mask.
I genuinely don't understand this.
Inasmuch as while the history of humankind seems to be one rife with violent domination of one group of people by another there is usually some overriding order enforced. Or if not an overarching order then at the very least some general mindfulness to a larger picture.
Even when comparing to organized crime in the States...there are rules and a set of "laws" that are generally followed. Not exactly and not without violation, but there is a group enforcement of a base set of standards that provides the stability required to find growth and development.
But in so much of Africa is seems that there is nothing but senseless savagery and violence.
The wealthier nations absolutely feed it...but if I'm recalling my history of the continent correctly there was plenty of violence and savagery long before the first European colonists invaded and exploited the indigenous peoples.
It's very effective.
Submitters: the HN guidelines ask you not to use the original title when it is misleading or linkbait.
Or Replace "advance on wages" with "Free Higher Ed system" EU but 50%-70% tax for life.
Are we all slaves, one way or the others? :-)
Minus a few 1% who become the masters with luck, family connections or intelligent.
Absolutely not. Our lives of relative luxury don't even come close to the misery experienced by bonded laborers.
At the end of the day - you go home to your laptop, heated apartment and fresh food (and can get legal protection for bankruptcy/loss of wealth).
Don't compare that to the suffering of the truly poor. I get your philosophical point, but it has no place here.
"Josef suggested ‘roboti’, which gave rise to the English ‘robot’. ‘Roboti’ derives from the Old Church Slavanic ‘rabota’, meaning ‘servitude’, which in turn comes from ‘rabu’, meaning ‘slave’."
It's not that complicated.