Combatting Modern Slavery. Genevieve LeBaron

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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; it is known to be widespread in many sectors, especially agriculture, the garment and footwear industries, domestic work and hospitality, construction and the extractives sector. While statistical data on forced labour is shaky at best, the ILO estimates that 24.9 million people were victims of forced labour in 2016 and that the private sector’s use of forced labour generates US$150 billion per year in illegal profits gives a good sense of its scale.²² But whether corporate antislavery efforts are making a dent in the problem is less apparent.

As calls for greater corporate accountability have increased in recent decades, initiatives to address the labour exploitation fuelled by discount-driven consumer markets have exploded. Many of these initiatives focus on combatting modern slavery. Governments have passed new regulations to address labour abuse and modern slavery and to bolster transparency in global corporate supply chains. Corporations have invested millions in new CSR programmes and have expanded ‘ethical’ auditing initiatives, certification and the civil society partnerships they rely on to monitor labour standards. MSIs like the Sustainable Palm Oil Initiative and the Better Cotton Initiative are touted as solutions to sector-based labour problems. Ethical certification schemes like Fairtrade promise to build better futures for the world’s workers. Yet, by most measures, and across many sectors and regions, severe labour exploitation continues to soar.

      Why Global Labour Governance Is Failing

      Why aren’t these governance efforts working? And what type of supply chain governance is needed to protect the world’s most vulnerable workers?

      The answers, as this book will reveal, are complex and vary across different sectors, type of governance initiative, and parts of the world. But stepping back, it is clear that two mutually reinforcing problems stand in the way of improving labour standards in global supply chains: both the design and the implementation of contemporary labour СКАЧАТЬ