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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

"The kafala (sponsorship) system binds all low-status migrant workers in the Gulf to their employers. Generally, the kafala system requires the worker to obtain the employer’s permission to travel or leave the worksite to look for other employment. Regulations require a minimum of two years of work for the sponsor (kafeel) before such permission will even be considered. This encourages widespread wage suppression and conspiracies to deny such permission. Such ‘labour bans’ effectively bind the worker to the employer for a long period of time. More significantly, a worker can’t get an exit visa from the government without permission of the kafeel. "

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A friend of mine worked there in the 70s. German civil engineer, and the conditions, albeit luxurious, have been what I would call a labour camp. There seems to be a pattern there.

And don't forget Europeans and Westerners in general have a super privileged position compared to the other workers.

Three things:

a.) your German friend would likely have not been in the kafala system since that is for the labour force.

b.) the kafala system has been banned in the UAE since 2005, with a pretty punitive fine regime, although that hasn't done enough to eliminate it (Govt. lenient treatment for its cronies vs independent contractors, both who follow the practice). It's still in force in other countries in the region.

c.) Your friend will likely have been staying at a township for workers, which is often the common pattern for mining towns in most countries in Asia. Conditions usually tend to be luxuriant, and nowhere near the labour camps (which are actual camps).

Oh yes, his position was absolutely privilged. It was the stories of how the local powerful people treated women and the fact that all f them had to turn over their passports. And the curfew covering leave from the compound, that bothered me. Pay was very good so. And yeah, the actual "workforce", e.g. manual labor, construction workers and so on had it way worse.

I had a project in Dubai a couple of years ago, and all the people I was inc contact with were foreigners, on all levels. GM of logistics companies, warehouse workers, manaement, everyone was a foreigner. At the higher levels of management that changes, so.

When I tried to get residency in Canada as a Software Engineer I was told by my local MP to get a minimum wage job for two years at Walmart, McDonalds or Canadian Tire because they had rubber-stamp approval with the government, and it was the easiest way.

In my town, all the immigrants worked at those places, and they lived 15 to a small house. Not surprisingly, no Canadian was willing to do those jobs.

While obviously not nearly as bad as the conditions in the article, it's certainly in a similar vein.

Sounds a lot like the way the serfs were treated in medieval Europe.

Sounds like the H1-B

The US lets immigrants leave if they want. Most US immigration issues revolve around people being forced to leave.

Or around people being prevented from working rather than forced to work.

I didn't have to get permission from my employer to look for another job. Not sure if you are trolling. Flagged the comment.

H1-B is far from ideal to put it mildly, but it's about an order of magnitude away from what's described in the article.

No it doesn't. Please educate yourself before contributing further.

Yes, that is slavery.

You could argue that a less organized de facto system of slavery exists for migrant workers in many other countries including the USA. Migrants roam in and work but really have no rights as they are undocumented. People can intimidate them or worse largely with impunity because who would bother investigating? Sure technically it’s illegal to abuse migrants but nobody’s watching.

Migrant work is something that really demands a coordinated international effort to reform.

Then you have Uyghur forced labor in China.

Slavery has not been abolished in anything but name.

Not to mention the prison-industrial complex in the US.

Where does the wealth from such labor go?

The shareholders for the private prisons in which they are incarcerated: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/10/how-private-prisons-p...

“In 2015, just 8% of the nearly 1.53 million state and federal prisoners in the U.S. were in private facilities” [0]. Prison slavery is not concentrated in and won’t disappear by closing private prisons. [1]

[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/11/u-s-private...

[1]https://corpaccountabilitylab.org/calblog/2020/8/5/private-c...

Sometimes it's used by the state itself for cost savings, as in California under then-attorney general Kamala Harris (now Vice President):

> “Extending 2-for-1 credits to all minimum custody inmates at this time would severely impact fire camp participation — a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought,” lawyers from Harris’s office wrote in a filing.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/kamala-harris-of...

The benefits of reduced labour costs are the middle class.

Similarly the middle class benefits from the lower working class wages that come from exploitation of illegal immigrants.

Well, the upper middle class who have higher tier jobs. Not the working middle class. (In USA everyone is "middle" class, because most are too proud to have class consciousness.)

IIRC the first prison in the US was established in Auburn, NY specifically because slavery had been outlawed and some sociopath was like “ok, yeah, technically, but if we just convict them of a crime first...”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_State_Penitentiary serves as a notable modern example.

No. The Auburn prison was not the first prison, and it employed prisoner slave labor before slavery was outlawed.

Prison slavery existed before chattel slavery was rerouted through the prison system.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auburn_system

I see nothing wrong with making prisoners earn their keep

When they work for a $1/hr and put actual contractors out of business you understand why it’s like slave labor.

Even Alcatraz didn't do that. "You are entitled to food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. Everything else is a privilege" - Alcatraz rules.

Private businesses pay private prisons far more than the prisoners get paid but less than legit labor driving out fairly paid labor.

Everyone who is benefiting lobbies far stricter laws and harsher sentences not for societies benefit but so their labor force can grow.

This slave labor is disproportionately taken from minorities and the poor who it is more acceptable to enslave. Mostly by patrolling areas which have lots of minorities and shaking them down in hopes of finding drugs. See the fact that black and white people do drugs at the same rate but white people are far less likely to be prosecuted.

In one case they actually caught 2 judges taking bribes from private detention to hand juvenile offenders maximum sentences. Effectively selling other people's kids.

Banning private prisons only removes a fraction of the incentive.

It's not just private prisons. Public prisons also sieze prisoner labor for sale to private customers or for government work like makit license plates.

The cash doesn’t refund taxes used to pay for said incarceration, to my knowledge. I don’t see how they are earning their keep.

The idea that they should earn their keep implies that residing in prison is something of positive value for the prisoner that they should feel obligated to give something back.

Perverse incentives.

When the prisoners make the prison owners (public or private) more money than they cost, there is pressure to imprison more people and for longer. That can lead to pressure on the enforcers to look harder for infractions… but they might turn a blind eye to infractions by their friends and bosses[0]. Pretty soon, you get feudalism.

[0] Seven of the candidates in the last Tory leadership contest (including the winner) admitted to using drugs. The government has no plans to decriminalise recreational use of any of those substances: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/09/high-tories...

Do you see anything wrong with having the most incancerated population in the world (25% of the global prison population for just 5% of the world population), or having the most horrendous prison conditions in all the western world?

Do you see anything wrong with blacks and latinos being overrepresented?

Do you see anything wrong with being such a backwater that you still have the death penalty, not to mention BS like "three strikes" laws?

Do you see anything wrong with forced prison labor undercutting regular businesses in the same areas?

You can buy products from American prison slaves here.

https://unicor.gov/index.aspx

Not to mention the prison-industrial complex in the US.

Kept well supplied with labour thanks to Kamala Harris and her draconian persecution of marijuana related “crimes”.

In many ancient Roman and Greek societies, migrant labor was actually lower on the totem pole than slavery. If you are a slave, at least your owner theoretically has an interest in your survival.

Let's point out that being a slave in those societies until very late in their existence did not always mean being locked with a chain.

You would take out a loan or lose a costly war and there were whole shopping districts like Keramikos (pottery shops area) in Athens where the slaves had shops and tried to earn their way out of slavery. Any similarities with present societal structures purely circumstancial ofcourse.

It's actually really depressing reading about this :/

Sounds really close to the current student loan regime in the US when you think about it.

No it doesn't. You came do whatever you want while you pay back loans.

It was actually the same way. Outside of their slavery obligations, they were allowed to do whatever they wanted to pay back their sum to earn freedom, more or less. And of course, they did have their housing and food covered meanwhile.

I have to figure there were a few textile mills in cotton states that were operating before the Civil War using slave labor.

This could be run like a regular factory with bookkeeping techniques where labor cost was certainly not zero even though laborers were not getting paid nor free to do anything else but go back to picking cotton.

Labor cost could be reduced to a single line on a spreadsheet like any other business.

After the war with slaves now being paid and free to work elsewhere if they could manage it, this would be offset by the workers paying their own upkeep after the slaveowner had become the employer.

There would have been pressure to keep labor cost from escalating at all if possible.

So things could go forward with as little change in financial risk as could be.

A lot of companies today still have the same type structure as these places had after the war, which can be not much different than the structure they had before the war, and Wall Street is still in the same place it was before the war . . .

While the comparison here is not about chattel slavery of the type practiced in the US, if I remember correctly the amount/ratio of surplus value extracted from slaves and then emancipated workers was not actually all that different. There was a drop, but it wasn't that big.

A big part of that was the increased productivity of freed laborers being compensated by an increased cost of reproduction.

'outside of their slavery obligations' do some heavy lifting here. Slavery means something, and nothing can mitigate that.

If we're talking about late ancient societies, slavery often meant social subordination to your master and some obligated work.

It is not dissimilar from undischargible debt. In fact, the historians and anthropologists writing about these societies have made the link themselves.

There are many types of relations that were referred to as slavery throughout history. The common, vernacular English definition does refer to chattel slavery and there is an onus during discussion to make oneself clear.

Having said that, equating all slavery to chattel slavery and thus denying that other slavery-like arrangements have existed and continue to exist today is not only a misleadingly US-centric perspective, it also removes the ability to criticize and try to reform social arrangements that severely restrict freedom in subtler and more nuanced ways.

The situation was almost the same in the Classical world. The only difference being the debt relationship was personal and not institutional.

You can do whatever you want while you pay back loans today as long as you keep your contact information current. Just try and move without informing your lenders. That can be treated as a default. And if you can do whatever you want while maintaining a suitable income to make these sort of loan repayments, your experience is an outlier for all but a very small portion of Americans.

In ancient Rome, selling oneself to slavery of prospective business owner was both a popular immigration path for foreigners and a career for poor citizens.

Migrants, even illegal migrants, in the United States DO have rights. The bill of rights covers all people in our country, whether they are undocumented, tourists, students, or whatever. If you abuse them, they may be deported, but you can be prosecuted and serve prison time for abusing them.

Taking away someone Visa is a crime too.. and preventing them from leaving is a felony. And we prosecute people all the time for that.. human traffickers, for example.

You should read about migrants from central or south america - what they go through while traveling through intervening countries and mexico and then coyotes. And deportation back to that is a real threat which means they will shut up in the US.

EDIT: wasn't picking on the US, just saying it's only part of their journey, and once they're in the US, lots of stuff goes unreported.

There is a power imbalance between the employer and an illegal immigrant... they can certainly push that further than they could with a us citizen, but since they do have rights, there are limits to the abuse. The immigrant always has a way out, with the worst case penalty being deportation.

Additionally:

- In some cities ("sanctuary cities"), reporting a crime does not lead to deportation.

- They can also apply for amnesty if the conditions in their home country are that bad.

- Agencies accept anonymous reports. The immigrant doesnt even need to be working at the place at the time of the report.

So depending on the circumstances of the abuse, there may be no consequences to the illegal immigrant for reporting.

Sounds like the real issue is the pull factor of lax immigration enforcement and widespread under the table employment in the US. We should be emulating the Australian model which has saved thousands of lives by effectively deterring dangerous human trafficking. With robust work visa verification and strict border security, coyotes and other human traffickers would be put out of business.

Solve the problem of employers hiring illegal immigrants, and the issue of these employers abusing the inherent power imbalance disappears as well.

Its a politcally untenable position on both sides sadly in the US. If employers were fined 2x, 3x, 4x salary for every single employee found to be working under the table the issue would solve itself. But democrats are of the position that people over staying their visas, illegally immigrating, are as an entire group people who will be killed if they go home so will do nothing to actually make life more difficult for people who do those things. Pro business republicans are happy to allow their constituents to get a leg up in their businesses off the back of immigrants before they deport them so the immigrants can't use any public services.

Republican businesses owners like trump love illegal immigrant labor because it's another thing they can hang over their head. If they start organizing or complaining they can just anonymously tip ICE about the workers and suddenly their problem is solved.

When they say they want to punish immigration they mean punish immigrants.

Yeah, I doubt it'll be solved anytime soon, given how Democrats see it as a way to gain future votes, and corporate Republicans use it to privatize gains and socialize costs. Paying someone under minimum wage while they collect far more in government services than they pay in taxes is a classic example of abusing unpriced externalities.

I lack the perspective to say if the following point applies in this case, but one must not assume that what is written into law or constitution is what actually happens.

To give a deliberately extreme example, Wikipedia says this about the Constitution of North Korea:

"""Citizens have the right to elect and be elected (Article 66), freedom of speech, the press, assembly, demonstration and association (Article 67), freedom of religious belief (Article 68), right to submit complaints and petitions (Article 69), right to work (Article 70), right to relaxation (Article 71), right to free medical care (Article 72), right to education (Article 73), freedom in scientific, literary and artistic pursuits (Article 74), freedom of residence and travel (Article 75) and inviolability of the person and home and privacy of correspondence (Article 79).""" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_North_Korea#...

>Migrants, even illegal migrants, in the United States DO have rights. The bill of rights covers all people in our country, whether they are undocumented, tourists, students, or whatever. If you abuse them, they may be deported, but you can be prosecuted and serve prison time for abusing them.

This means they will have to weight-in the deportation cost to them. So they have half-rights compared to someone who doesn't have to be concerned with that...

I hope people understand that this is exactly why sanctuary city policies and government identification for undocumented individuals is so important. If an individual does not feel safe seeking recourse from the government, they are not capable of exercising the rights they do have in the US.

Theoretically having rights, and actually being able to take advantage of those rights, are two very different things.

For example, if the asylum seekers during Trump had been able to take advantage of their rights, they would not have had their children stolen from them.

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