Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy

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Description

Slavery is illegal all the way through the world, yet more than twenty-seven million people are still trapped in one of history’s oldest social institutions. Kevin Bales’s disturbing story of slavery today reaches from brick kilns in Pakistan and brothels in Thailand to the offices of multinational corporations. His investigation of conditions in Mauritania, Brazil, Thailand, Pakistan, and India reveals the tragic emergence of a “new slavery,” one intricately linked to the global economy. The new slaves don’t seem to be a long-term investment as was once true with older forms of slavery, explains Bales. Instead, they’re cheap, require little care, and are disposable.

Three interrelated factors have helped create the new slavery. The enormous population explosion during the last three decades has flooded the world’s labor markets with millions of impoverished, desperate people. The revolution of economic globalization and modernized agriculture has dispossessed poor farmers, making them and their families ready targets for enslavement. And rapid economic change in developing countries has bred corruption and violence, destroying social rules that might once have secure the most vulnerable individuals.

Bales’s vivid case studies present actual slaves, slaveholders, and public officials in well-drawn historical, geographical, and cultural contexts. He observes the complex economic relationships of modern slavery and is aware that liberation is a bitter victory for a child prostitute or a bondaged miner if the result is starvation.

Bales offers suggestions for combating the new slavery and provides examples of very positive results from organizations such as Anti-Slavery International, the Pastoral Land Commission in Brazil, and the Human Rights Commission in Pakistan. He also calls for researchers to follow the waft of raw materials and products from slave to marketplace to be able to effectively target campaigns of “naming and shaming” corporations linked to slavery. Disposable People is the first book to point the way to abolishing slavery in today’s global economy.

All of the creator’s royalties from this book go to fund anti-slavery projects world wide.

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