Combatting Modern Slavery. Genevieve LeBaron

      Modern slavery is a slippery concept, because even the people that use the term can’t agree on its boundaries or exclusions, and, when pressed for a definition, tend to emphasize that modern slavery takes a plurality of forms. John Bowe captures the modern slavery literature’s basic stance on defining the term: ‘It is helpful to think of slavery in the modern world as something like a resistant disease, refusing to die off, constantly metamorphosing into new guises.’¹⁶ Some scholars and activists include hugely varied practices within the boundaries of modern slavery; for some, all forms of sex work, forced marriage and child sexual exploitation are slavery. But proponents of the concept have cautioned against dwelling on precise definitions. As Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter put it: ‘We know that slavery is a bad thing, perpetrated by bad people.’¹⁷

The concept of modern slavery, and the real-world ‘abolitionist’ movement purporting to combat it, have been widely debated within the academic literature. Concerns include that the modern slavery framing (1) obfuscates the true nature of the problem, (2) is a fig leaf that bolsters the credibility of corporations, anti-feminist and anti-immigration politics, (3) reflects paternalistic tendencies of western humanitarianism and (4) de-politicizes and naturalizes labour exploitation and disempowers workers.¹⁸ Law professor Janie Chuang has powerfully shown that the elevation of the causes of ‘modern-day slavery’ and human trafficking has caused ‘exploitation creep’, focusing attention and responsive legislation on extreme forms of abuse, while normalizing and distracting from the forms of labour exploitation that are widespread in the global economy.¹⁹ Julia O’Connell Davidson, a vocal critic of the modern slavery concept and movement, has noted that contemporary abolitionists see modern slavery as constituting ‘a uniquely intolerable moral wrong’ ‘that can be separated from other social and global ills for purposes of practical intervention and for purposes of quantification’.²⁰

      I dislike the term modern slavery. Those who use it tend to place way too much emphasis on criminal justice solutions and not nearly enough on the political economic root causes of the problem, the dynamics that give rise to a supply of people vulnerable to forced labour and businesses built to systematically profit from it. They tend to assume that one can cut an easy line around victims of modern slavery and those stuck in more routine or minor forms of labour exploitation, when in fact, as I discuss in Chapter 2, that’s much harder to do than one might think. Modern slavery discourses tend to portray people as helpless victims waiting to be rescued, when, in reality, no matter how vulnerable they are, those in forced labour situations, migrant workers, trafficked workers, always have agency. Indeed, one (of many) strange things about the modern slavery field is that almost nobody bothers to speak to workers themselves. More often than not, they are assumed to be too oppressed to speak for themselves and are then patronized by the imposition of solutions they’ve had no say in.

As well, businesses do sneaky things when they say they are combatting modern slavery. They use the antislavery cause to focus our attention on an evil, monstrous crime occurring in the shadows of supply chains, so that we don’t pay attention to the scam they are perpetrating in broad daylight: business models that perpetually and endemically make massive profits through human suffering and exploitation. The language of modern slavery keeps people focused on the base of the supply chain, rather than on those up at the top, who are stockpiling more cash than they know what to do with, giving out huge bonuses, acquiring other companies and growing year on year. As I argue throughout the book, there is a reason that businesses are combatting modern slavery instead of labour exploitation; the former can be portrayed as a randomly occurring and individualized crime, attributed to individuals’ moral shortcomings and greed, while the latter is more systemic. With modern slavery, businesses can be the heroes that save the day, but when we talk about labour exploitation, they are the culprits.

      For these and many other reasons, I dislike the term modern slavery. In fact, I dislike the term so much that in 2014 I co-founded a website, the ‘Beyond Trafficking and Slavery’ section of openDemocracy.net, and edited it for three years in order to move the conversation about severe labour exploitation beyond ‘the empty sensationalism of mainstream media accounts of exploitation and domination, and the hollow, technocratic policy responses promoted by businesses and politicians’.²¹

So why, you might be wondering, have I used this term in the title of this book? I have called it Combatting Modern Slavery for two reasons. The first is that I am interested in exactly that – what it is that business actors, civil society and policymakers are doing when they say they are combatting modern slavery. Since the early 2000s, huge amounts of resources and energy have been poured into this cause, from the halls of the United Nations (UN), to documentary films, to nongovernmental organization (NGO) efforts to rescue ‘slaves’ from abusive workplaces. Because these efforts encompass very diverse actors with different visions of the problem, such activities can only be summarized using the language they use themselves – that of modern slavery. This is especially true of the business activity that is at the forefront of this abolitionist movement. Companies like Apple, Unilever, The Coca-Cola Company and Amazon have all recently taken up the cause of combatting modern slavery. They are partnering with NGOs to design ‘blueprints’ for how governments, civil society and the private sector can collaborate to tackle the problem. They are investing millions in programmes to audit and promote fair recruitment in global supply chains and are publishing colourful modern slavery and human trafficking reports documenting their efforts. Companies are championing the cause of modern slavery at World Economic Forum (WEF) meetings, launching business networks against it, and paying consultants, assurance and advisory firms, and NGOs lots of money for their advice on how best to combat modern slavery within their supply chains. What they actually mean by that term differs from company to company and initiative to initiative, and sometimes the term isn’t defined at all. I’m interested in the impact that the focus of businesses and policymakers on combatting modern slavery rather than on addressing labour market issues is having on labour governance. As I argue in Chapter 3, the fact that businesses and governments are combatting modern slavery and not labour abuse and exploitation is in fact part of the problem.

After all, when you scratch beneath the surface of antislavery initiatives, you realize not all of them relate to labour issues: they are about everything from crime to sexual abuse to migrant smuggling. And yet, efforts to combat modern slavery are having a profound impact on labour governance. So that’s what I’m keen to point out with the title: that we need to understand and pay attention to efforts to combat modern slavery, ask whether and under what conditions they align with or undermine a labour perspective and a workers’ and migrants’ rights agenda, and to understand how the rise of activities to combat modern slavery are reshaping labour governance. In this book, I use the term modern slavery to describe activities that are self-described by businesses, policy actors and others as relating to modern slavery. Otherwise, as I explain further in Chapter 2, I opt for more specific, clearly defined and less nebulous terms such as ‘forced labour’; this book is fundamentally about the severe forms of labour exploitation and the corporate structures, ownership patterns and supply chain dynamics that have made them an endemic part of the global economy.

      The second and overlapping reason that I’ve called the book Combatting Modern Slavery is that I have written it with the hope of persuading those who see themselves as doing just that that they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the problem and are in fact advancing solutions that don’t and won’t work to help the people they’d like to see helped. By using the term ‘modern slavery’ in the title, I hope to attract readers whose aim is to combat modern slavery from within their jobs, whether they work in governments or corporations or NGOs, or through their activism or scholarship. If you are one of those people, welcome! I hope that reading this book will help you to see the problem differently and to channel your efforts into more effective strategies for change.

      Regardless of the terminology that is used to describe the problem, there can be no doubt that severe labour exploitation is a major problem in the world economy;