Maids trafficked and sold to wealthy Saudis on black market
thetimes.co.uk
thetimes.co.uk
It involves having a replacement passport printed for her in the Philippines, her brother flying to Qatar under his Canadian passport and then bussing her to a neighbouring country to fly out of.
I won't post about how we plan to get her out but I believe it is a good one and it has very littler risk to her or their brother. Perhaps when it is all done will feel ok posting more.
It is costing us a lot of money in the end, but the woman we employ is part of the family at this point and it's important to us that her sister is safe. We will employ the sister on her landing in our country and will do so for at least a year.
edit:
I'm almost 40 now and stories like these have been prevalent since I was a kid.
I cannot imagine any reasoning to do this other than to take advantage of farm workers that are poor and probably do not know English.
So politically, the nation wanted people to have a minimum, albeit pathetic, pay to quality of life at work ratio. But even then, it was okay to explicitly screw at least one tribe of people. And entering 2023, there is still no political impetus to fix this.
lots of men are imprisoned there too in similar circumstances. People think slavery is a relic of the past but We have the highest number of slaves now in history of humanity.
Like Eva Kaili who was defending Qatar in the European Parliament. In that case it seems that a few bags of money was the culprit for her ignorance though, along with a few drinks in some kitsch club there.
There are men imprisoned on fishing boats in asia where public turns a blind eye because of their own selfishness. And then there is slaves digging up cobalt in africa with their bare hands( JRE episode recently ) to supply us gadgets.
I think politicians just give us a way out to absolve ourselves from the exploitation that we all are willingly involved in.
It was just a bunch of houses in which maids who don’t have things going well with their Sponsors stay in, waiting for a ticket back home. The QFCHT would just host them and negotiate the sponsor for sending them home.
Like, a 2-floor 5-room or so house that has 10 maids living in it. Their passports are confiscated by their sponsors, who were often times irrational egoistic wretches who believe they’re superior (keep in mind that the sample at QFCHT was the set of maids with the worst sponsors, I’ve seen a lot of kind Qataris who were fair and respectable). I heard though that this sponsor system has changed a while ago, not sure how is it done now since I no longer live there, but hope it’s better.
We once, at our home, needed help cleaning so we called one of those Maid agencies for a temporary cleaning. They sent us a Filipino maid. While she was cleaning, she came across my little library that I had been growing during my ECE bachelors. She looked at the books and asked me if I am studying electronics. Started talking about her graduation project back home. She had graduated from ECE too..
I saw that with Nepali workers too. Many of them were highly educated, qualified, individuals, but I don’t know what financial situation compelled them to come to Qatar to work as waiters, maids, and other jobs that are way below their qualifications.
I tried to learn some phrases in their language to joke with them and cheer them up when I interact with them. It always felt odd being on the service-receiving side. A lot of them were resilient in keeping their smile and sanity in spite of the assholic treatment a specific class of customers. That class earned the “bakla” title.
How does this work? As an adult, if someone tries to take my passport I would refuse. If they snatched it out of my hands, I would take it back. If they somehow got the better of me and hid it or locked it up, I'd go to the police.
I could see maybe an abusive situation where going to the police isn't an option because the victim is locked in the house. In that case I'd expect that when the perpetrators are caught they'd be charged with kidnapping for that. And then some other charge (theft?) for locking up the passport.
They're also in another country that's highly male power oriented, probably talking to a male head of a household, potentially to someone wealthy and even powerful. Meanwhile you may be significantly smaller, may be female (this isn't meant as an insult... just that you may have less muscular mass/strength), and are in a country where someone may claim you stole your passport from their possession and they may literally cut your hands off, where the authorities may even agree with this should you go to them. Or, at the very least, they may no longer sponsor you and you may go home to your starving family with few other options. Some may argue that means the option you had was better, I think it's an argument to promote modern slavery and exploitation.
My situation and I suspect yours are not remotely the same to these folks. If someone snatched my passport, I'm a fairly good sized and a reasonably strong male to muscle myself in (I also have a concealed carry permit, so I have a weapon should I need it). I have several more explicit rights and resources at my disposal, I have a government that issued my passport that will look at it say it's clearly my passport. My stance in such a situation is significantly different, assuming it happened here in the US.
Meanwhile you have examples like Britney Griner who had similar advantages to me, arguably even more given her fame, and even she was detained and at the mercy of the Russian government where we literally had folks like Tony Blinken bartering a hostage exchange for her return. I'm not sure that would be the case if I was detained in Russia on similar charges (then again I probably wouldn't have been targeted as readily, either). The power dynamics in these situations aren't so dry cut but I assure you, these maids have very little power and rights. I recently had a layover in Qatar and even I was a bit weary of that--I tend to like to have layovers in more progressive countries where I'm less likely to deal with some abusive government.
Griner though? She broke the law and got arrested. And she's not a desperate person. I don't see the similarity.
There is a "breaking" period for most of these workers where they are demoralized as well.
Before that, employers had the right to do so and it was (might still be) the norm.
Refusing to hand over your passport is like refusing to hand over your passport at immigration.
So if a migrant worker called the police and said "my passport has been stolen" they'd be laughed at (and possibly punished for wasting their time).
I once worked at a company where some had to go to Dubai to install one of our systems. Some of my more knowledgeable colleagues refused to go, and after hearing their stories, I would also never go.
I guess that's my answer though. Things are just drastically different in some places and the authorities are on side to support the perpetrators rather than the victims.
I'll leave this as a small taste of what can happen: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31692914.
Who says you're the victim? In their eyes you're the perpetrator.
I was a bit confused, but as a junior developer I wasn't going to make a scene for that,.when apparently nobody from the group was blinking at the request (perhaps everybody was thinking the same?).
Luckily a senior manager from $bigcorp barged in and when asked to hand his password just confidently yelled "there is no fucking way I'm going to give you my passport" and walked through. We followed.
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?tags=Nonprofit
Given odds of for profit application getting YC funding are already in the low single digits, odds of a nonprofit getting funding are basically nonexistent.
Why would non-profit applicants be competing with for-profit ones? Surely they'll be separate pools.
More importantly: Are there partners focused on nonprofits? Do the batches have enough nonprofits to cluster like nonprofits? Is there training that’s specific to nonprofits? Do they have a demo day specifically for nonprofits? Is there a nonprofit alumni network with 10,000+ members? Does YC have a significant brand within the nonprofit funding community? How many significant nonprofits have been a part of YC? Etc.
What's the businesses model here?
Basically, much likely for profits, there patterns which provide insights into paths which are most likely to provide significant opportunities for impact.
After war and hunger, human trafficking is one of the worst problems society still have to this day.
[Edit: Fixed broken URL.]
“Muttontown slave trial” will bring up lots of search results.
https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/nye/pr/2008/2008jun26.h...
https://sherloc.unodc.org/cld/case-law-doc/traffickingperson...
edit: nevermind, original link needed a trailing slash
I don't even think this is what they were talking about but there are over one million prisoners in the US and prisoners can be forced to work without pay. The constitution doesn't consider that slavery but the rest of the world certainly can.
It does actually.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
I also don't have a reference on hand. I listened to an NPR radio segment that blew my mind. There's a bunch of information from reputable sources but finding a specific number can be tricky. First of all, it's estimated because it's obviously unknown. Also, defining the "bounds" of slavery inherently changes the count. There is a fairly recent citation that states there are 400,000 enslaved people in the United States on any given day.
https://www.state.gov/what-is-modern-slavery/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking_in_the_Unite...
https://www.cbp.gov/border-security/human-trafficking
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/19/us-modern-slav...
Section 1 of the 13th Amendment explicitly refers to this as slavery:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_...
Had a group try and grab my young adult daughter and pull her into a van.
These are real issues that many Americans completely ignore.
"The Global Slavery Index 2018 estimates that on any given day in 2016 there were 403,000 people living in conditions of modern slavery in the United States, a prevalence of 1.3 victims of modern slavery for every thousand in the country."
I'm not entirely sure how they got to that number though.
It's also important to remember that slavery is explicitly allowed in the US constitution, and there are certainly valid interpretations of modern slavery that would count significant numbers of those currently incarcerated as being victims of modern slavery - for example https://harvardpolitics.com/involuntary-servitude-how-prison...
So it does still exist - but America only considers criminals for it. From what I've gathered, though, that is still a lot of people.
That is not > 1m as previously stated.
Whether that number is 1m, 500k, or 100k... who gives a fuck. It's 2022 and hundreds of thousands of people are living through modern slavery.
Nonetheless, there's naturally more outrage about places (like Saudi Arabia and Qatar) where it's still quasi-legal.
https://theexodusroad.com/does-slavery-exist-in-america-toda...
I explicitly note that in my own country (NL) there are also many such cases, especially in the exploitation of women for the sex trade which is particularly lively here and a reason why plenty of women from Eastern countries are trafficked here, as well as the agricultural sector where people are grossly taken advantage of to labor under very bad circumstances often having to rent their bed for roughly what they make during a day of work.
It's despicable.
https://ia801803.us.archive.org/14/items/dutroux-x-dossiers-...
Dutch speaking people can also watch this documentary regarding the X-Dossiers: https://www.bnnvara.nl/zembla/artikelen/de-x-dossiers-deel-i
And I certainly have no intention of crapping on America, which has provided me with many opportunities. But I think we should be aware that horrors like slavery can happen here too, not just in far-off countries.
The information is new to me, I assumed human trafficking in the US was exclusive for sexual exploitation/prostitution, not labor.
Best case, she could get a backup from him.
Also, she should definitely build that scraper with some help independently, then pitch to YC.
This should be easy to prove. Closest I can think of is some Telegram groups you might find in places like Syria, but that hardly warrants the Amazon comparison.
What do you even mean by "dark web"? Stuff like this definitely doesn't exist on the onionland.
A good blog post would be a detailed tour of this site and going through the process of buying a slave and then interviewing them about their experience, afterward I guess you could let the slave go off and do whatever they wish or perhaps resell them to get your money back since you are unable to take care of them anyway.
Not sites?
One thing I know about the internet, is that there isn't just one of anything, even if it's illegal.
I'm fascinated because I track things like this for a living, but have never heard of anything similar to what was described here.
Modern slavery certainly happens - but I've never seen it on silkroad-style websites.
A post by someone online, who once talked to someone who said you could buy slaves online ain't exactly first-hand evidence - Perhaps someone was mistaken, or taken in by darknet scam artists.
not gunna link for my own safety but theres links to it all over pedo sites
im a greyhat who tries to take these sites down so i seen some shit
If they find some idiot willing to send them money to "buy a child sex slave" they will just perpetually extort them with that.
Only places where these sorts of markets can actually work are places like Syria where they're backed by some sort of local authorities like IS.
Some of the very obvious differences between pure historic slavery and what we have now is that human rights are significantly better across the board and individuals have some degree of autonomy to decide what aspects of their self and time to sell and whom to vs previous time periods where those things were just taken from individuals.
So long as we're able to give labor that degree of autonomy (e.g. autonomy enabled by the ability to provide necessities for themselves and their family like basic food, housing, and so on) then I think we have a reasonable compromise. Vast wealth disparity (leading to monopolistic behavior on the employment side), lack of competing opportunities to sell your time/skills, and markets trending and stabilizing to states that are not labor-friendly undermine this.
This continuously peels away the abstractions we have to create autonomy for individuals and moves the needle back towards owning people like slaves, holding them on a leash indirectly through monetary mediums of exchange (i.e. currency) and so on. If I need money and food and shelter and the only real viable route to attain this reasonably is to sell myself or allow myself to be sold on abusive markets that may want more than say just my maid services (perhaps 'maids with benefits' situations, i.e. disguised prostitution) then that's what's ultimately going to happen.
We may claim the people have autonomy but we've just created complex systems around their autonomy that give the appearance of choice. People need viable and reasonable choices, not just a set of options where only one is reasonable for a stable and happy life unless we want to slowly erode back to systems like indentured servitude and beyond.
The article explicitly calls out Filipino maids as the highest selling and having been to the Philippines and now being part of Filipino family, I understand why. The country is very poor overall and the culture exports labor to import wealth due to the lack of local opportunity. Sure they can study anything and go anywhere in the world but it turns out, many go to certain middle eastern countries and pursue maid careers because it's their only real viable option. Some of the more lucky Filipinos study in school and are able to get degrees in healthcare or hotel services and work abroad in countries with better protections. Even then, they're held on a leash and abused through visa programs like in the US where they're paid a fraction of the rates their US native counterparts earn and lack mobility to transition positions readily to negotiate competitive wages, so they lose rights to employers and work in undesirable locations, under market rates, and often the under the worst sort of contract situations.
It's not like this story of maids in Saudi Arabia where conditions are even worse but it shows how we need to maintain autonomy for everyone. Aside from the being most humane thing to do, out of sheer self-interest, if you sell your labor for time in any fashion, these infringements on rights slowly peel away your rights as well. You may not see it in your lifetime but we should push for better labor rights across the globe to prevent stepping back to past atrocities we've seen in slavery systems.
Blaming “the market” is similar to not taking responsibility for climate change by demanding government action and changing your own habits.
Until we look in the mirror, there can be no change or progress.
If modern slavery has slaves picking fruit in the UK or working in brothels in Germany or washing cars in France, that's absolutely something those governments could crack down on, I agree.
On the other hand, if some lithium is mined by slaves and, after going through a complex supply chain spread across a bunch of countries, some of it ends up in devices that make their way to the Spain, or lowers world lithium prices benefiting Spanish consumers indirectly - the fact the slavery happened outside of Spain's jurisdiction makes it far more difficult for Spain to to throw the slavers in jail.
On the other end if a country is engaging in slavery or various derivatives of it, it’s still the fault of that government for allowing slavery to take place. If it’s a failed state then we have an obligation to not trade with that state, or perhaps even engage in nation building activities in an extreme case.
There are always things we can do. We simply choose not to as a people and by extension as a government. Unfortunately human nature and cognitive dissonance play a leading role in this and they are very, very good actors on the stage.
Spain has heard that some slavery is used by Subcontractor A at Mine B in Zimbabwe, which sells to Distributor C which also works with Mines D, E and F and sells bulk lithium on the international lithium markets where distributors G and H also sell, and where Battery Factory I buys some of their lithium but they also buy from J and K, and they manufacture cells under contract for battery brand L which sells them to home solar battery assembler M who also buy cells from brands N and O and actually only sell things ex-works in China, and Reseller P imports them into the EU.
Subcontractor A says the reports of slavery were wrong, that was actually perfectly legal prison labour. Mine B says actually they no longer work with Subcontractor A, and a local government inspector has certified them as slavery-free. Between C and O all the bulk materials get commingled, records occasionally get a bit mixed up, and precise sourcing details are commercially confidential. The battery reaches the shores of the EU with no known links to slavery.
-- Upton Sinclair
Producers have responsibility as well. Government should enforce such laws and consumers, in an idealistic sense, should be able to choose products and services that don't require slavery. Meanwhile, pretending that as a producer or supplier, I have no power or choice in the selection of labor is a farce at best. Every participant in a given market has some degree of responsibility.
The market itself is a system of policies, regulations, actions, and so on contributed to not solely by government or its constituents but also by private entities that have financial influence in policy making, often more than the people we're looking at in the mirror. Yes, as a consumer I have some responsibility and yes, governments have some responsibility as well, but so do other players like businesses and the very structure of the policies, regulations, and even incentives in a given market structure. Ignoring these is just passing blame along to others. It's critically important to realize that not everyone has the same weight of influence in a given market. I can look in the mirror all day but the influence in my choice of a my potential future EV purchase has miniscule sway relative to the opinions of someone like, say Elon Musk with a mountain of resources and influence.
I’m not saying businesses are absolved of responsibility, but if they are acting poorly it’s our responsibility to change that behavior. But how can we do that when we don’t actually want them to change?
Until the US government makes Nike stop using child labor to make sneakers, I’m not going to get mad at Nike either. Everyone is getting what they want except those who we treat poorly (oversimplification). Nike makes money, you get your new shoes every year for cheap, and the US government doesn’t have to do anything or risk have people voted out of office.
The more quickly we all come to understand this and stop trying to shift blame the more quickly we can actually solve problems. Until then we will keep buying our Nike shoes and complain about child labor and not actually do anything. If you don’t like these things like child labor, you can minimize what products you buy and where you buy them from. If you don’t like factory farming then yea suck it up like I do and pay more for eggs. Put your money where your morals are.
> Even then, they're held on a leash and abused through visa programs like in the US where they're paid a fraction of the rates their US native counterparts earn
That is not abuse. They can leave anytime. And if you talk to them, they are grateful for the opportunity to work here for "a fraction of the rates their US native counterparts earn" and would resent people like you who would take that away from them.
What is outrageous about the story posted is that they can't leave anytime they want. Their passport is taken from them. That's wrong.
Anecdote time, slightly related ! Be me, in wealthy western Europe. Walking a Sunday trail, hundreds of people. Taking a break on the side of the trail, looking at a community garden and reading the plaque about which vegetables is being grown, by who: local public "help" centres (read: a public social support program, state-funded, it's a pillar of our society, to help people find jobs and get back on track). The plaque reads that when vegetables are ripe people are free to pick it up (just don't take everything). Was having a nice chat with a random lady up to that point, most likely a bit leftist, nice, then she drops that line "Well, it's free, it's fine, after all it's all being paid for with our money".
On the way back I kept thinking about that and came to the conclusion that slavery could easily come back in less than half a generation. And I am not talking about how work is structured or how our society regulates work and employment and how it's an abstraction. We are always half a generation away from losing our social advancements (English correct wording escapes me at the moment).
Edit: for once I caught the comments before losing the ability to edit so I'll reply here.
> I can't help but to think some meaning was lost in what you are intending to say. What is "it" that the woman was talking about? Is "it" picking the a ripe vegetable from the garden, like the sign says you can?
It's that "it". But the most important thing is in the second part "it's being paid for with our money". The goal of that community garden is not really to feed anyone but to get some people back on track through a regular schedule, group activity and supervised work. Social services are not supposed to produce vegetables or anything that anyone should pay for, a bit like the US prisons that have become free/cheap labor. It's hijacking the original goal. From this I could easily picture a world where people without jobs are forced to get through that system and become free workers tasked to grow vegetables or clean the streets (and it's something that happened in the Netherlands: a public worker whose job was cleaning the street lost his job then got through a back-to-work program in which he was tasked with the same job but for no salary (he was paid - much less - through social support).
> Is "it" the government paying folks to plant and tend the garden for the benefit of the public?
That's how it was framed in her mind but that's not the reason why there are free vegetables there at that place and time.
She's not supposed to get vegetables for free because it's paid with her taxes, she gets them for free because those vegetables are not grown to be sold or make a profit.
> I don't understand this anecdote. What was objectionable about what the woman said (if anything). I'm a leftist and I think its important to recognize that value does not come from nothing, but is the result, one way or another, of labor, which is all she seems to be acknowledging.
She normalized having people working without a salary and not being fairly compensated (or being compensated by whatever price the market set). Plus, people working that garden somehow don't have a choice in choosing that job (growing up vegetables) because it wasn't a job, it was part of a reinsertion program. The fact she pays taxes to finance such programs shouldn't mean we get free labor. That's where she crossed into indentured work.
I'd like to add something else: there are community gardens a few blocks away from where I live. But there's a waiting list to get on it, it's real garden but more for hobbyists and retired people. It's all financed by city taxes through a "green/food/health" kind of program.
But the gates to the garden are closed and the fences are high and fact is it can only be used by retired people who lobbied to get some parcels in the first place.
There are no free vegetables from those gardens.
Why is "it" (whatever "it" is) somehow related to slavery?
Some of the staff have been on podcasts to discuss... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoHHwRjPASc
A lot of Western solutions sound like variants of Simpson's Paradox, where equity is increased locally, and decreased globally.
This is, for example, true if one provides people with a better-but-not-good-enough option. If I do something not meeting Western standards, I'm liable to get cancelled. On the other hand, many options a step up from slavery are just that: a step up from slavery, and would be considered very exploitative by Western standards. Sustainability matters for scalability.
Likewise, cultural imperialism is bad, and a lot of options do a lot more (distributed) harm while helping individuals. I like cultural diversity.
Options also need to stakeholders and implementation. It's easy to say "If I were dictator of the world, I would do X," but they do need to content with incentive structures, politics, and similar types of issues.
I'm not quite sure how to even have that discussion, since if something can be misinterpreted, you're liable to be cancelled (or at the very least, receive some very bad press).
cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8
Not everyone has The Comedy Store stage to relieve their depression.
I'd suggest investing research time proportionate to the weight of your opinions.
It’s that sort of thought pattern that allows the mob to justify its behaviour.
Getting “cancelled” causes real world harm. Imagine losing your job, being too toxic to find work elsewhere, being unable to pay your mortgage, being unable to keep a roof over your family’s head.
You obviously sympathize with the mob destroying people's lives to trivialize the effects like this.
1) Transferring money between crypto exchanges and regulated financial institutions in ways that trip fraud or AML detection measures leading to closed accounts
2) Actions against one or more social media accounts in reaction to content this individual has posted or shared
People love to act like one social media post against the "mainstream" is potentially life destroying but there's yet to be an actual example of that. Just loud jerks being loud jerks and getting mad when told to leave the party.
There are places I'm willing to stick my neck out, and there are places I'm not. Each of these is an ROI calculation.
But there are actual victims of this cultural diversity, and cultural imperialism which destroys such cultures as have victims would be strongly preferable to the continued existence of such cultures.
Not all cultures are equal.
If a culture is okay with that maybe it's okay to want to nudge that culture to change.
I think the correct course of action would be to "tax the shit out of that" too. (Just as with all the other stuff mentioned in the comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34172394)
But of course it's never the right time to do that, as currently half the EU is trying to suck their dick for a bit more natural gas. :/
Ending slavery isn't controversial. Western notions of equity are, in both gross and subtle ways.
If I:
- work harder than you;
- have greater aptitude;
- have richer, more educated parents;
- have better / more culturally-aligned social skills;
- have a wealthier social network;
- have higher test scores / university pedigree;
- have better ethics; and / or
- am more ambitious, greedy, and motivated than you
What should are relative outcomes be? Cultures differ here. Some would like more equal outcomes. Some would like more meritocratic outcomes (for different definitions of 'merit'). Some would like more laissez faire / libertarian / freedom-oriented outcomes (e.g. preservation of property rights).
That's okay. I'm not a cultural relativist on ending slavery. I do respect diversity on concepts like what "equity" means.
I think narrow, targeted interventions could work well around slavery, but would break down the instant those were perceived to touch on LGBTQ, women's rights, religion, equity, or a swarm of other issues around values. On the other hand, omitting at least a few of those, I'm unlikely to make headway in the West. That's not to mention economic / corporate issues, like IP rights.
Of course it isn't. What is not obvious is what replaces it that isn't de facto slavery or even reduces opportunities for people so that they are exploited elsewhere. Nor how the replacement is monitored for effectiveness and compliance.
It is easy to say that slavery is bad and make it illegal. Fixing the actual problems in monarchies/dictatorships and impoverished countries with little opportunity is not easy or simple. The fact that a lot of slaves are not technically slaves but officially and legally "employed" makes the issue pretty plain to see. How do you see the solution to compliance in Middle Eastern monarchies and even in Western democracies where it is already illegal but happens none the less? I assume you are going to go out and implement these right away if it is so easy and obvious.
You are looking for equitable solutions in places that explicitly do not value them. Improving that is hard, if it is not already obvious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_views_on_slavery
Another good starting point is prestige and how it impacts perceptions of individuals involved.
A lot of the framing in this discussion carry a lot of Western baggage which is likely to rub people the wrong way in the Middle East.
I can think of several solutions which I think could at least be more effective than what the West is doing; I do think there is room for prestige projects here. I'm not sure how helpful that would be, since in terms of "implementing," I don't know any Saudi royalty. Do you?
Are you okay destroying US culture? Or are you an apologist for our racist justice system?
Would, as you put it "cultural imperialism which destroys such cultures as have victims would be strongly preferable to the continued existence of such cultures" in the context of Western culture?
See what I did there? If the point I tried to make above isn't clear:
* The point isn't to say slavery is okay -- it's obviously not -- but a lot of stuff in every culture is not okay.
* A lot of other stuff in every culture is not okay as perceived by other cultures (especially around sex, gender, and religion), but comes down to values.
* And a lot of other stuff is beautiful, unique, and good.
Western cultural imperialist interventions haven't worked out well in the past. I'm glad to write more about that too. Even if you -- as most of these comments seem to -- believe that Western culture is superior, culturally imperialist interventions haven't led to the outcome you want.
What interventions are you proposing, and why would you believe they would work any better here?
This just means you’re getting information from unreliable sources. “Cancelled” sounds like you’ll be unemployable but 99% of the time it means someone said something insulting, some people criticized them, and they had no significant consequences. The American and English right-wing like to talk like cancellation is a real problem because it’s both an effective marketing tool (notice how often complaints about being cancelled are delivered in for-profit books and media by people making upper-class incomes from it) and as a proactive defense against criticism.
I think you’re spot on that we in the West find “step above slavery jobs” extremely distasteful. This results in situations where the news media celebrates the closing of a “child sweatshop” in Cambodia, but the cameras aren’t rolling when, faced with poor economic conditions due to the factory closing, those same children are now working in a child brothel, which everyone agrees is worse.
Similarly, Siddharth Kara has recently revealed the horrors going on in the Congo involving the Cobalt trade with the warlords and the Chinese. That ones interesting too because thirty years ago the operations were run by South Africans but the western world largely agreed this was wrong so they ceded the land back to the Congo. This resulted in warlords becoming enriched by the power vacuum and becoming well armed and making things horrific for the poor people living in Congo who have to mine up toxic cobalt with their bare hands in dangerous tunnels and pits.
This is a coordination problem first and foremost. The solution is to tax the shit out of supply chains that don't provide the basics.
...
And yes, development economics is ugly. There's no royal road from subsistence farming to Switzerland-level, but whatever road there is it's not composed of separately inscrutable steps. It's perfectly okay to strive to make each step better and less horrible. Just as on the other side of globalization it's not some unknowable force closing non-profitable mines, and again it's a coordination problem that the disadvantaged folks and regions of globalization, in the developed economies, only got a big pat on the back. (And yes yes, there were a few programs to try to retrain unemployed people here and there, but it was simply a waste of money, because they got no help to mentally deal with the situation. Folks should have been encouraged very heavily to move where the jobs are instead of wallowing in semi-deserted corporate towns of misery.)
Unfortunately what is available to most is far less than what is possible.
In this case we also presumably have these companies that replace 'master' with 'main' etc. in technical literature and comments, but which are cooperating with things which may well be actual slavery.
This is something that leaders from Africa and Latin America have talked about a lot.
Western democracies love using the appearance of moral superiority as a diplomatic tool while turning a blind eye to their own corruption and failings (ie. United Fruit, JP Morgan Chase, Boeing, gun violence, police brutality)
1. It’s cheaper to whitewash (ie. affirmative action) than effect change (ie. reparations for Haiti, descendants of slaves in US)
2. It perpetuates the good guys vs bad guys myth /propaganda at home that makes it easier to wage war and disenfranchise “third-world” countries.
Slavery is abolished in the west and currently existing slavery should be a primary focus-- whether it's a western company participating in a possible slave market, or Saudi participating in it-- such entities and individuals must obviously be destroyed, and immediately.
How we deal with morality and history is a separate question and of less interest.
There are of course Roma beggar-gangs who have travelled to Sweden and who practise some kind of forced labour system on their members, but this is not something officially permitted and to the degree that this is a phenomenon it is only possible because of the foreignness of these gangs the the difficulty of Swedish policemen to genuinely understand what is going on.
When we have access to experts we try to break these things up and to prosecute.
Furthermore, we are not in any way reliant on these groups, since they are, as I have mentioned, beggar-gangs. They do not offer any service, but beg for money outside supermarkets and on trains.
We may not have overt slavery any more in the Western world, but covert slavery and human trafficking? Absolutely.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/20/tomatoes-italy...
[2] https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/26136/strawberry-picker...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/feb/07/spain-salad...
[4] https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/moderne-lohnsklaven-in-...
[5] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/schneller-schlau/mode...
It is a stepping stone toward greater legal rights, and not an all-or-nothing goal.
- https://www.vera.org/news/slavery-is-still-legal-for-two-mil...
Additionally, it’s also estimated that the US has at least a half million people in domestic servitude as stated in the article. This does not include sex trafficking which is a separate issue.
(Or the 1960s, if you wanna go back further. https://www.nytimes.com/1967/03/28/archives/saudi-arabian-sl...)
I would say it is possible, likely, that people have false impressions of the general conditions in other nations based on news organizations' choosing to cover stories that are not generally representative of conditions in the nation. This will be true for all nations, regardless of whether anyone in the organizations are choosing, consciously or unconsciously, to cover stories confirming or creating biases. I think a greater problem is our own biases and attention selecting the news coverage we attend to. I think it is not the case that bias in coverage is centrally coordinated as you imply.
This is all aside from whether a particular article is true. This is something actionable. Choosing to believe or ignore individual articles based on your prior belief in bias leaves you in a hall of mirrors.
For example, even POTUS Trump* got a free pass. His first overseas visit was to SA. Imagine that, of all our allies, he goes to SA first. And yet, not a peep of outrage, even from The Left leaning media. Why would that be?
* This is not an attack of DJT. It simply a perfect example of how (intentionally) blind the media is to those who accept and enable SA.
Regardless, it's one example. The point is, the Western Media is relatively blind to anyone or anything that involves itself with SA. RT probably does a better job.
Conclusion: We have a conpletely failed Fourth Estate; which means "the democracy" (they're so fond of fearing for) is no democracy - by the text book defintion - at all. The irony is absurd.
It’s interesting if your media diet has changed favorably for either KSA culture, military, or business connections. Maybe the career arc of Rex Tillerson, or the investiture arc of Jared Kushner have been sculpted by some outlets and not others.
But as long as they have oil, and we need to kneel before them, our media plays along.
Note: This is not a critique of SA. They're a sovereign nation. I'm not fit to judge (and it's off topic). This is a critique of Western media and it's willingness to look away.
What is happening in the Middle East is a modern version of the Thirty Year's War. This time, instead of Catholic vs Protestant, it is Sunni vs Shiite.
Disclaimer: I've lived in both Iran and Saudi Arabia - dad was in the oil business.
> I guess now that SA has signaled a slight shift away from the US empire, we're going to be seeing a lot more articles about how evil they are.
But this is not a piece intended to help the slaves. This piece is intended to slander the Saudis.
This piece is slanderous because it does not focus on slave owners in general, but rather on a specific slave owner. This piece does not convey the message "owning slaves is wrong for all people" but rather "Saudis are bad, because they own slaves". There is no focus on other groups of people who own slaves, only the Saudis.
Dubai, Qatar, all these barbaric places flourishing in oil wealth, using it toward trafficking and slavery as they drive Mercedes over sand dunes and eat Johnny Rocket…makes me so angry
Maybe they should just stop prescribing opioids, for a start.
The way these treatments are administered and checked upon matters, too as well as the underlying social dynamics.
The point is not to compare alcohol & fentanyl, but to note that "enough X to kill Y" is a really bad way to think about quantities of drugs.
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2022/12/23/california-seized-enough-f...
We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, for starters.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/911927/drug-overdose-dea...
Tackling drug overdoses by hanging dealers doesn’t even try to address the underlying issues that cause drug usage and overdoses.
There's a huge list of cultural, demographic, political, sociological and historical factors to take into account here.
The number of deaths from not-fentanyl is low so calling it "drug overdose deaths" instead of "fentanyl overdose deaths" is disingenuous.
We shouldn't learn anything from fascist Singapore.
I've always been against hiring people to do my chores, but eventually I can only defend this from the perspective that doing my own chores makes me a better person. (Instinctively I don't want to do it, but morally I cannot justify not doing it now.)
I don't believe that hiring servants is bad. Ultimately, it creates an opportunity for them as well.
If you have a maid and pay them well, give them better than average working conditions, and don't punish them when you have emotional problems, you give them an opportunity to grow an alternate career on the side.
If you "refuse to participate", that does not fundamentally create more equality in itself.
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/some-bosses-holding-o...
2) You should pay them to do something for the world, not yourself.
Why not provide a good experience for one person?
I was once thinking like the OP too. However, life taught me that you can find someone to do any sh*t job (provided you pick from a large enough pool). Likely because their circumstances are improved by it, at least a little.
Hence I'd rather try to improve things a little bit for one person, unlike my purist (and naive) younger self.
I must admit though, personally I still find it hard still to make someone else do something I myself loathe doing.
Not sure how you avoid it. I assume you don't pick all of your own apples or slaughter your own cows or mine your own iron or cobalt. Delegation is the cornerstone of civilization.
Opting out of an exploitative system is self-justified.
A cleaner will clean better and faster than you, letting you not only enjoy a clean stress-free home, but also enabling you to make a more productive use of your time.
Once you know the current code words for the gender, type of slave, and job, you can even use Google to search and find open sites.
It was depressing to see but I honestly could not see what could be done. The fact it is done so openly and with so much money involved, I found it hard to believe that law enforcement was clueless if not complicit in it.
Well, don't hold back. Open a window for us into that realm. If it was that "open" would it not be on the radar of agencies combating the human trafficing?
Chinese get smuggled by the truckload into Western Europe and the only time you will hear about it is if they end up suffocating, which makes it newsworthy. And that's just one example of many. I'm against the death penalty but human traffickers make me doubt my stance on that.
Slave labor in the United States is explicitly allowed by the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
The removal of their liberty is supposed to be punishment for their crime, and that's plenty of punishment. Ideally, they'd be reformed while in prison. And while I'm dreaming, they could build a nest egg by working there, instead of being exploited.
I'd like a pony, please.
Arguably community service under threat of imprisonment is also compelled labour. If you agree that's a valid punishment for a crime, then we're not really talking about whether compelled labour is a problem in and of itself so much as the specific conditions under which labour can be legitimately compelled.
That said there are multiple ways to do this. One is compelled labour the proceeds of which they'll never see, but perhaps work can go to lowering their sentence. Another can be deferred compensation, where they get a fixed stipend once out based on their work while incarcerated.
I can think of a bunch of other ways, but I'm not sure I agree that the compensation should be minimum wage. People fund the government via taxes, but criminals aren't just not paying into the system, they are actively draining it. I'm not sure garnishing wages they'd otherwise earn is in principle unjust anymore that income tax is unjust.
I'd call the difference of prison wage and the minimum wage lost money.
I doubt it exists but subservience — or near slavery — is everywhere.
I see Mexicans working in very subservient conditions with all kinds of legal constraints.
I don’t think we treat our undocumented immigrants better than the Saudis — or anyone else.
In addition, I object to the 'black market' terminology. Unlike the objections these companies have with 'master' on git - which doesn't have any relationship to slavery, black is an actual term related to a race that's misappropriated with a derogatory connotation.
It doesn't appear that "black" in "black market" refers to race:
"The term “black market” first appeared in print in The Economist magazine in 1931 in reference to an unofficial, or “black,” market in sterling exchange." -- https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences-and-law/law/cri...
Likewise, https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/3wfpdo/comment/c...
Black is an actual colour, and in opposition to light. That's where all these black/grey/white trichotomies come from.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kafala_system
Of course maids get abused, tortured and raped by their employers and the family, and even when they travel to Europe with their employers, they are mistreated the exact same way. But since the Saudis are filthy rich, Europe turns a blind eye...
Yet is clearly an unstable (high maintenance) collective mental state. It is predicated on active oppression. The stable ground state is fundamentally egalitarian. Almost by definition.
Progress and civilization are not relative concepts. They are counted objectively by the number of brains that can reach full emotional, perceptive, creative etc maturity.
I would not be able to come to this conclusion based on my experiences. Humans are very tribal animals, and it takes a lot of work to work towards egalitarianism. You can even see it in children, where they form “cliques”, and engage in bullying, even amongst siblings.
Not that it is inevitable that humans will “otherise” other humans to the level that they are OK with keeping them as slaves, but there is a large spectrum of ordering in probably all of our minds, as opposed to viewing everyone as the same.
without oversimplifying though the complex interplay of these and other factors (e.g. the degree to which technology can diminish the need for subjugated human labor) the point is that no human likes to be considered a subhuman. Hence the construct is predicated on social machinations and its persistence, at least at scale, is always precarious.
Am I missing something?
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
I think there's still a significant difference between that and the Saudi maid example, where they've not even been convicted of a crime of any kind.
Finite resources, unrestrained population growth, paired with rampant individualism where everyone wants more than their neighbour.
I wonder what the effects of having a perfect enforcement mechanism against exploitation would be ? Would we finally plan resource allocation and population growth more reasonably ? I suspect it would just go horribly wrong somehow and we would end up in some version of Malthusianism.