Slavery Part 2: The 21st Century is Built on Bones

Slave (slerv) - n

1) A person legally owned by another and having no freedom of action or right to property
2) A person who is forced to work for another against his will
3) (fig) A person under the domination of another person or some habit or influence: a slave to television

4) A person who works in harsh conditions for low pay
5) a. A device that is controlled by or that duplicates the action of another similar device (the master device)
    b. (as modifier): slave cylinder

Origin: via Old French from Medieval Latin Sclavus  a Slav, one held in bondage (from the fact that Slavonic races were frequently conquered in the Middle Ages), from Late Greek Sklabos a Slav
In current Western philosophy and literature and popular commentary, any form of slavery is considered to be, and to have always been, a Very Bad Thing, and now, happily, it's been completely eradicated, thanks largely to the Americans following the Civil War. 

Both parts of this statement are untrue.

• Slavery comes in many forms, and while most of them are morally indigestible, slavery is generally pretty good for the slave owners (from whom most of us descend at some point), and not all types of slavery are bad for the slaves*. There is a 2001-Nobel-prize winning model of economic development which argues that more-or-less-slavery is more-or-less responsible for modern life. which I will get to in due course, possibly in the next post because this one has taken me so long.
• Slavery has not been eradicated. True slavery - being legally owned by another human being and forced to work for no pay - is a normal condition of marriage for many of the world's women due to tradition, religion, or circumstance; and is part of normal life for most children in the developing world, and much of the rural and urban poor globally. We - those with computers and the leisure time to sit and read blogs on the internet - know this but deliberately and carefully forget it. We also deliberately forget that we benefit quite nicely from this in our day-to-day life. Furthermore, by the loose definition - working in harsh conditions for low pay - many of us have access to slave-type labour for our own benefit.

*"WHAT!" I hear you say. "You're so wrong! Slavery is always bad for the slaves!" Now hangonatic. You've followed me through several counter-intuitive ideas over the last few years. Give this one a chance too.

Slavery and Modern First-World Lifestyle - Leveraging the Latent Need

I rely on a whole structure of domestic conveniences and community resources which up until last century were only available through the labour of unpaid slaves or subsistence-paid manual workers. The acceleration of social, domestic and technological structures through the Age of Sail to modern times came from identifying latent needs, then fulfilling them through slavery.

People in the marketing industry look for the 'latent need'; ie the thing you didn't know you needed until it was available, and then very quickly it becomes indispensable and essential.

Most household conveniences are designed to fill a latent need which up until the invention of the appliance had been performed by slaves, and before the slaves the need had not been necessary: heating and pumping water, disposing of waste from excess consumption, making and cleaning clothes, organising our calendars and contacting our acquaintances; even our cars, which were invented to drive us and our posessions around the city, were preceeded in other times and still exist in other places as a slave-carried sedan chair or litter, or slave-pulled rickshaw or betchak.

Take the example of clothing management. Our ancestors washed far less often: once a week or once a month, or in colder climates they would sew themselves into woolen 'long john' underwear at the start of winter, then get a cutting implement and and cut off the skanky things every spring. We consider it normal to wash clothes every time we wear them, and sometimes we change outfits once or more during a day. But the transition between being smelly all winter, and the automatic washing machine chugging along in my laundry, was carried by generations of slaves who washed the clothes of those who had access to their slave labour.
Likewise, nobody would have invented the forklift or the lawnmower or the hot shower if the lifestyle which required them hadn't developed first, with bone-breaking slave labour. Nobody would have invented the sewing machine without wanting to save seamstresses from going blind by candlelight as they had previously - or at least by making their time more profitable for no financial advantage to them, as I will get appropriately incensed by below.
(And yes, you may notice that I am already stretching the definition of 'slave' to include womens' domestic labour as well. If unsure, re-read the Collins definition above.)

The thing is, leveraging these latent needs make a huge positive difference to our comfort and longevity. Latent needs were the drivers of plumbing, heating, lighting, transport, availability of goods, mass agriculture, and all the pieces of history that go into the development and deployment of medicine, literacy, industrial manufacture, electronics etc. I am free to pursue a profession and even have spare time to write this blog, because, for example, I have a refrigerator to get me out of the traditional work of constantly sourcing, preparing and preserving food.
Thankyou, historical slavery.


But before I romanticize things too much, let's look at the reality of historical slavery.

The Pit of Despair - Triangular Trade: Circa 1580 - 1863+

Historians generally agree that the advances of the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment in Europe was driven by the economics of the Age of Sail and the Triangular Trade. This was not just more-or-less-slavery uniting a workforce in a common direction - this was European and white American prosperity squeezed from the blood and bones of African Americans.

Ships travelled from various European trade centres to various African territories where manufactured goods (especially weapons and ammunition) were bartered with slave traders who had gone into villages carrying guns, captured and chained all the locals, and marched them to the dock to load onto boats. The ships would then travel to various sites in the Americas where their crowded holds were unloaded, and the slaves who had survived the journey were sold (40%-70% depending on the proportion of vulnerable, children, & pregnant women, and the particular flavour of cholera onboard). Different ships (built with dimensions for cargo not prisoners) were loaded for the return journey to Europe with raw materials from plantations and mines such as sugar, coffee, cotton, silver, hemp, bar iron. On arrival, these raw materials were processed in Europe and Britain (hence Manchester cotton, Belgian chocolate etc) where industrialisation was driving the prosperity of industrialists, the introduction of basic labour laws, the gradual development of a middle class, and the resources and leisure time required to produce the social and scientific leaps which characterise the 17th to late 19th centuries.

Over those four hundred years (+/- 20%) of the Triangular Trade, somewhere between 13 million and 20 million black people were transported to the Americas to work as slaves. Almost all of them died. (To contrast, the current African-American population is only estimated to be 41 million.)

The history of African-American slavery is epic, beyond horrific, extremely complex and multi-layered, and large sections are lost because of the monstrous mortality rate and the Civil War and the passage of time. The brutality was unimaginable to us now. The death and the torture and the deprivation of liberty, the eradication of hope, leaving the few survivors traumatised beyond comprehension, without roots, without names or stories, without plans for any kind of future. Few books or films do this period justice.The nice triangle diagram doesn't begin to describe it.

Now consider the other side of the triangle, where some of our European ancestors were doing quite well from this trade - even without actually owning or managing the slaves. The primary crops shipped from the New World provided the incentive to industrialise and develop better ways of processing bulk goods. The Manchester cotton mills and Belgian chocolate factories triggered the first industrial labour laws and ultimately the Labour Movement. The glut of goods led to the development, marketing, and exploitation of latent needs, and higher working wages for the growing middle class led to the ordinary person's ability to obtain (and consider entirely normal!) such slave products as new fashion clothes, and regular cups of tea and chocolate biscuits.

It is hard to put parameters around the secondary effects of slavery. For example, here by Steve Johnson in a TED lecture is a proposal that coffee fuelled the enlightenment. Coffee houses provided just the right social environment, and allowed people to drink socially and remain sober, leading to all kinds of important human connections and developing ideas which fuelled the 18th century leaps in in literature, science, philosophy, art, technology, and morality.

Coffee was a slave crop, and in many places it still is. If curious, go read a book. Mark Pendergrast provides a detailed history of coffee in America, touching on slavery but focusing more on big business. Antony Wild takes you on a broader trip into the moral depths of coffee production. Both talk about the massive historical and ongoing slavery in North Africa, Cuba, and South America, now into South East Asia as well. Maybe that's cos it's hard to miss.




Don't even get me started on chocolate.


Back to the Deep South for a moment. Even after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation on 1 Jan 1863, slavery did not end. The rules changed a bit (scroll to the bottom and read to get appropriately indignant), but indentured labour and persistence of a desperately poor working underclass are still key to the economic structure of the United States today.

This leads me neatly to my next point, that slavery is a very contemporary and important issue.

Modern Slavery

We have a need and a glib justification for slavery in order to permit ourselves to keep drinking coffee for a couple of dollars a cup.
We need slavery to keep supporting those parts of our lifestyle where technology hasn't automated the leveraged latent need yet.
We justify it that the slaves are better off than they would be without the work that the slavery offers. The short version of the economic argument is that if someone is not forced to work at the equivalent of gunpoint, then however they are working is better than not working - and increased trade builds infrastructure which gradually improves your quality of life. Don't worry, the moral discussion is definitely coming in the next post.

If you are about to stop drinking coffee, hold off a few more minutes. Consider the enormous populations of slaves in hidden and just-about-unavoidable industries, e.g. garment worker slaves, and waste/e-waste disassembling slaves.


There is evidence of slavery everywhere a machine doesn't yet exist to do that job. Televisions can be constructed on an automated robotic assembly line, but they can't be dismantled by robots.

Our new TV recently replaced a CRT which we sent to e-waste, and although the recycling FAQ website doesn't specify where e-waste goes, a bit more research indicates that it was almost certainly dismantled and burnt by slaves overseas.

My TV probably didn't go to Ghana after this article - maybe it now goes to some slum population in Bangladesh or China or Vietnam whose development and life expectancy is compromised by heavy metal poisoning (if it weren't already compromised by hard labour, hunger, and high-density-population infections).
Bulk mining (coal, iron ore, aluminium etc) is heavily automated but seam mining (gold, precious stones) is not, and is done by slaves.
 
Manual mine work is generally dangerous and scantly paid. Tunnel mines (eg. Burmese rubies) favour child and adolescent miners because the tunnels can be smaller. Pit mines (eg. gold) require dirt-carriers, as graphically shown at the start of the film Powaqqatsi.

Cutting of clothing is automated but assembly of clothing is not, and is done by slaves.

In my 4th year at university, I researched 'outworkers' for an assignment and I am still morally outraged. Outworkers are owned by their contractors in all but name. They take on an outrageous debt to obtain a sewing machine, which is set up in their own home. Laser-cut fabric pieces are delivered each morning for assembly, and it takes 18 to 20 hours a day to sew their quota. Pay is insignificant and the debt is unpayable. These are the 21st century seamstresses, in rural and suburban Vietnam, Hong Kong, and as immigrants in the suburbs of our own cities. I still feel ill when clothes shopping, knowing that the affordable clothes and shoes in our wardrobes may have been made by slaves - mostly immigrants, women, and children - orphans, or indentured by their parents, or working alongside their parents from age 4 to avoid eviction and starvation.

Less common but more terrible is the human slave market. The going rate for a slave varies a lot, according to various Google hits, ranges from US$300 for a south-east-Asian child sold by his parents to a pimp, to US$5,000 for a kidnapped Caucasian woman if she is blonde and attractive. The Western news world was horrified by the kidnap and expected sale of more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls. However, a UN ILO report estimated that 5.5 million children, and 21 million people worldwide, are stolen and forced into slavery. 85% of them are women and children in sex slavery.



Slavery is not cut-and-dried like Abraham Lincoln had hoped. It might be a continuum, where the ratio of worker income/financial means to shareholder (slave owner) income/financial means might be a simple measure of the depth of the slavery.

(If I had time, and were not working 2 jobs with 3 young kids, I would love to look at a PhD and develop this.)

• A wealthy plantation owner whose workers have a flat 0 income forever is clearly a slave driver.
• A magnate or industrialist with an income 500 or 1000 times her average worker is also somewhat of a slave driver, whether it's a badminton racket factory employing children in Cambodia or a bauxite mine in WA (Hi, Gina, Clive and Twiggy).
• A company where the directors earn 8 times the average employee's salary is less oppressive than one where the ratio is 20 or 50 times.
• The greater the gap between rich and poor, the further along the slavery continuum.

Local Slaves

 I think we do have slaves here in Australia. Clearly not in the scale or horror of the Deep South or even open-pit gold mines or Bangladeshi sweatshops or Hanoi brothels, but there are people around me every day who are working excessively hard in inescapable financial situations and for inadequate remuneration.
All the slaves I know personally are recent immigrants, and/or women with labour capacity but no financial or property capital at all.

I sometimes work late in the office, and I have started getting to know the 9PM cleaners. Rosandra and Andre are both new immigrants from Colombia. Rosandra is in her 40's, and works two cleaning jobs at the minimum wage (roughly 60 hours a week). Her husband drives a taxi. Her kids are at a slightly rough Northern suburbs state high school and they totally love Australia. The neighbour looks after them until she gets home at night. Her husband pays the rent and she has a savings account for their university education, she hopes it will be enough. It won't be. Andre is in his late 20's, and has an engineering degree from a Colombian university, but he has no Permanent Residency and his English isn't good enough to get a technical job. He studies English, and works two jobs to save up enough to fly his brother out here too. He tells me Australia is great, it's a much better place for him than Colombia because the police are not so corrupt and it is safe to walk down the streets.

My fortnightly home cleaner is Kerry. She works about 30 hours a week, which lets her live with enough extra for cigarettes, and she also contributes to her daughter's university living expenses. Her daughter is studying engineering - and is the first in the family to go to university. She is so proud. Her son got through a plumbing apprenticeship and she is so proud of him too. She has been divorced for some time and the divorce was financially disastrous - she lives in a cheap rental unit and has no retirement money, so she will work as long as she wants to live on more than a bare-minimum government pension.

The women at the childcare centre work at just above the minimum wage for 20 to 40 hours a week. Some ended up in childcare after long-term unemployment, and are just grateful to have a job. Some don't consider themselves qualified, or smart enough, to look for work in other industries. A rare few chose it because they love children, and they frequently move on to a better job (managing the centre, or teaching at a larger kinder).
The early childcare work is relentless and they are magnificent, and yet my hourly salary is over three times theirs.

Why aren't there more worker revolutions? 

Another blind spot in Western literature, philosophy and culture is the question of why slavery apparently suits many people in their context. For every slave or ruby miner or prostitute who runs away, or turns on their oppressors (even during the Triangular Trade!), there are hundreds or even thousands or tens of thousands who don't.
Four thoughts occur to me, and once again I would love to investigate more. (And yes I am getting sloppy with the links. This post is getting a bit epic.)

1. It's neurologically very difficult to leave your context and step into the unknown. Mammal brains are wired to want to belong and to fit into a hierarchical order - even at the bottom. There is a very quick transition from "belong-with" to "belong-to". Belonging in a group is particularly important for female high-oxytocin brain chemistry, and women are also much more vulnerable to threats of persecution of their families - so we probably make easier-to-manage slaves.
2. Brutality and abuse, and extreme fatigue over a long period of time damage your brain to make escaping more difficult. Cortisol (a stress hormone) eats away at neurons in the hippocampus (which allows you to plan, and stick to a plan, against your emotional urges). This is adaptive for the slave in context (it stops them going crazy!) but handicaps their ability to leave the context of slavery.
3. Slavery also provides structure. Options are limited, which makes the world less scary. Some authors suggest that the key to maintaining a system of low-enforcement slavery is providing marginal benefit (like the house-negro has a marginal advantage over the field-negro), without ever allowing a path to freedom. A slave can hope for an incremental improvement in their life, or relish a tiny superiority over another slave (like the house-Negro over the field-Negro), and that's enough within the tight structure.
4. And finally, often the slaves (particularly in the first-world) are playing a longer game. They are working for survival, but with an eye on a future dream - and it's generally a multigenerational strategy. They break their bones to get away from persecution and then fund their children into university. And they all have flat-screen TVs which were manufactured in south-east Asia, worked on by much poorer people with more modest dreams - but dreams nevertheless.

So this first-world lifestyle relies on conveniences which are automated versions of slaves (motor vehicles, forklifts, combine harvesters, washing machines) or produced by distant slaves (coffee, clothing, recycling and waste disposal).
We are starting to learn the impact of this lifestyle on the planet. I have also illustrated how this lifestyle also exploits much of the world's population that we can't see.

It is becoming clear that we will need to give up slavery again.
For the plantation owners to give up the benefits of slavery in 1865 required a charismatic leader like Abraham Lincoln and provoked a civil war.

How do we give it up this time?