Slaves to Progress 1 Transcript

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Chapters

  • 03:19 Pirates
  • 07:42 Slaves by the Numbers
  • 12:04 Diversity of Products
  • 14:33 The "Third World" and the Environment
  • 21:03 Vicious Cycle
  • 23:10 Global Demand; Local Conflict
  • 24:33 Conflict Mineral Supply Chain
  • 28:55 Debt Path to Slavery
  • 33:28 Malaysia
  • 37:53 Vulnerability through Migration
  • 39:56 Seafood
  • 48:00 What are Rights?
  • 55:28 Benevolence of Jobs?
  • 57:49 Thinking in Aggregates

Thank you Alexey for completing this wonderful transcript!

Transcript

Daniel Forkner:

[0:08] Before the application of the steam engine to sea vessels both merchant and navy ships required a ton of labor to operate. The seamen whom captains needed for their ships did not have to be skilled or literate, but they needed a lot of them, and they were always in short supply. The British Royal Navy got around this in part by the practice of impressment which just means they forced people into service. This was actually one of the major grievances America had against Great Britain in the lead up to the War of 1812. Great Britain employed a trade blockade against France. And to help supply their navy the British Royal Navy simply stole Americans off merchant ships. And the practice must have inspired American entrepreneurs because we developed our own practice of forcing people into the life at sea. In 1848 when gold was discovered in California the demand for American ships skyrocketed both from people trying to get to the West Coast by ship as well as the increased demand for goods. But as always seamen were hard to acquire and maintain in adequate numbers. So captains developed relationships with shipmasters who supplied sailors and the shipmasters developed relationships with boarding masters who owned hotels, bars, brothels and other establishments through which they could drug, intoxicate or otherwise render men unconscious through violence. And then deliver them to ships where they would become seamen until death or escape which could last years.

Daniel Forkner:

[0:21] The practice became known as shanghaiing likely because many ships bound for Shanghai relied on this practice and the men who did the work became known as crimps. And this was not a small-scale eccentric practice: these were major criminal networks that some estimate to have supplied up to 20% of ship labor in the United States during the last half of the 19th century. Crimps made a ton of money since captains could pay up to 2 months advanced wages to any sailor which the crimps collected for themselves on top of other fees. And they used this money to lobby Congress and bribe politicians and law enforcement. Crimping was in full force in New York, San Francisco, Portland, Boston and many other port cities and towns along the east and west coast. And like all organized crime a few infamous characters emerged, from Shanghai Kelly in San Francisco who in 1875 held a party on the water in a sidewheeler, drugged nearly 100 of his guests and then delivered them to three separate vessels to become enslaved seamen. Others, women like Miss Piggott owned boarding houses with trap doors through which her victims fell through.

David Torcivia:

[0:21] Equal opportunity slaving.

Daniel Forkner:

[3:01] Men and women alike. But this practice was all but dead by 1915 and ultimately the steamship is credited the most with ending this practice simply because fewer and more skilled men were required to operate those ships.

David Torcivia:

[3:20] You know a lot of this history lesson here Daniel is in the 1800s, the late 1800s, early 1900s. But this practice predates this by centuries, I mean, it's always been going on, as long as people have been traveling by sea, they’ve been capturing people and forcing them to help them do just that. I mean we have this image: think of Spartacus, this vessel where you go below the decks and all these oars are being pulled by slaves. It's not a new idea or topic, and I'm getting off track already here at the beginning of this episode, but I mean, this is actually what led to a lot of pirate ships, where we have this modern image today of these evil pirates, these like rapscallions that come into ports and they rape and they pillage, but for a lot of people a pirate ship was them escaping the slaving system and coming to a group of people sharing their bounties equally among the crew instead of just one captain or something taking all of it or some merchant who isn't even on the boat that foots the bill and get the profits of the journey. Instead they say, ‘you know what? this is wrong, being a slave is wrong, we need to take control of our lives, join together, have some sort of solidarity and be on the ship as equal crew members.’ and that was pirates, that was the vast majority of pirates, they were heroes in one sense. And a lot of local towns along the coast and in islands would defend pirates actually from the government organizations that would chase them down, the British, the Spanish: whatever. And when a pirate got tired of the pirate life and they came to retire in these towns and then, you know, lo and behold at some point a government official comes to track them down and charge them for their crimes, the townspeople instead of turning them over, like we would expect with our modern pirate fiction, in fact would defend them, would hide them, would keep them safe from the governments because they had as much problem with these people as the pirates did. And most townspeople respected pirates, they saw them as members who were fighting against an unjust system. And I'm already off topic like I said, but I love pirates, I could do a whole thing on pirates right now.

Daniel Forkner:

[5:19] Well, your rant on pirates is beginning to sound a little anti-American, David. But, you know, actually pirates are going to come back into the show in part 2 when we talk about some of the modern pirates that have made their way into the mainstream and how our image of them has been shaped in part by what we're going to be talking about today and next week. But, you know, that history lesson at the beginning, as horrific as it is, it's in the past, right? I mean slavery, which is what that was, was widespread in the past and in the ancient world but today in every country around the world slavery is illegal.

David Torcivia:

[5:55] Well, that's great news, I don't know why we're bothering to do this show in the first place because it sounds like the problem has already been solved.

Daniel Forkner:

[6:02] Or has it?

David Torcivia:

[6:04] I’m David Torcivia.

Daniel Forkner:

[6:05] I'm Daniel Forkner.

David Torcivia:

[6:06] And this is Ashes Ashes, a show about systemic issues, cracks in the civilization, collapse of the environment and, if we're unlucky, the end of the world.

Daniel Forkner:

[6:16] But if we learn from all of this, maybe we can stop that. The world might be broken, but it doesn't have to be. Despite universal condemnation of slavery and its universal illegality there are more slaves than ever before and they are cheaper and more disposable than they have ever been.

David Torcivia:

[6:35] When we start talking about numbers on this topic it's sort of a touchy thing and, depending on how you estimate this what constitutes a slave, these numbers will adjust pretty wildly. And in the context of this episode we're not going to talking about a lot of things that probably could be considered slavery and instead using like the very base definition that the UN and or these other human rights organizations will use in reports about slavery, so this means prison labor, which is definitely slavery even though it's paid technically, is not part of these numbers. This means wage slavery, this means places where people are compelled to work to survive but technically could: that's not slavery even though it basically is. So, we’re using the strictest possible definition of slavery in the context of this show.

Daniel Forkner:

[7:20] And in addition we're also not going to be talking about sex trafficking and sex slavery although that may be part of these numbers. It's a topic that deserves its own show and one that were not prepared to do at this time.

David Torcivia:

[7:32] Yeah, it's such a huge topic, that's something we will dedicate time to. First, we need just get this general idea of slavery that is such a huge thing to tackle out of the way at first. Okay, so the raw numbers here, and again, this is the most amount of slaves there have ever been in human history. Slaves By The Numbers [7:49] So despite these, like we mentioned in The Best of Times episode, despite how great people say everything is right now we are still at a point where there are more people enslaved than ever before and that number is over 40 million people of true absolute slaves. And at any moment there's another 600 million people who could become a slave at any single time. And this isn't limited to just places where we traditionally think about slavery: so developing nations, places that are notorious for the human rights abuse like Bangladesh, Qatar, whatever. This happens right here in the United States as well: we have over 57,000 traditional slaves in this nation at this moment.

Daniel Forkner:

[8:31] Around the world 71% of these slaves are women and girls, 25% are children and that doesn't include the 150 million children that are estimated to be used for labor outside of this very clear definition of slavery.

David Torcivia:

[8:46] Much of which are working in the fashion industry as we’ve discussed in the past. Most of these slaves are in Africa, the Asian Pacific, Europe and Central Asia. But like as we mentioned it's a problem that is universal and can be found in every single country on Earth.

Daniel Forkner:

[9:01] And we mentioned that acquiring people for slavery is cheaper than it's ever been. According to freetheslaves.net, in the American South in 1850 the cost of one slave averaged $40,000 in today's value and today worldwide the average cost of a slave is just $90 and that ranges from $0 for a slave in the Amazon rainforest, $30 for a child slave in Bangladeshi fish markets.

David Torcivia:

[9:30] And according to UNICEF, around 200,000 children are kidnapped every single year in Western Africa and sold on cocoa plantations for about 200 euros. In fact, 80% of the chocolate sold in European stores comes from these children slaves.

Daniel Forkner:

[9:47] In Libya a person trying to migrate to a better life can be converted to hard prison labor for no more than $500.

David Torcivia:

[9:56] Or for someone operating a business in the United States the price of a slave here, well that might be as high as $10,000, which, I mean, if you compare it back to those 1800s slave figures is quite the bargain.

Daniel Forkner:

[10:08] And definitely a bargain compared to the wages they would be required to pay under US law, and this cost overall has been driven down because the number of vulnerable people and access to them has exploded over the decades. Overpopulation has caused the growth of people to outpace the growth of many economies, and environmental destruction and conflict has displaced millions of people who find themselves without a home, without a job, without money or communities to support them.

David Torcivia:

[10:39] This explosion of vulnerability also means that in the eyes of many slaveholders people are disposable, people are often worked until they become sick or too weak to work. At which point they are simply replaced with someone else, in many cases after being killed or left to die.

Daniel Forkner:

[10:56] At the same time many local governments are complicit in the practice of slavery as we'll see. And, you know, the number of products that are produced by the hands of people in slavery is staggering and it encompasses so much of our global economy.

David Torcivia:

[11:12] And I really want to drive home this point that we just briefly mentioned, and that's the fact that much of the way that we live our current life, not even just talking about consumption and the products that these slaves end up ultimately building for us, but the very population of the Earth, the disparity and inequality we have in our economies, the destruction of climate from our huge amount of consumption and overproduction of energy, and the general pollution and war that spirals out of all of these ideas about geopolitics, about economic growth is what's fueling this very practice of slavery, it’s what made it bigger now than ever before. And at the same time all these systems that contribute to creating this problem, to making them a bigger than ever, they depend in large part on the labor of these slaves in a vicious cycle that continues to make the problem worse and not better. Diversity Of Products

Daniel Forkner:

[12:04] The number of products that are produced by the hands of people in slavery is staggering when you start to look at it. I mean, here’s just a short list: we have a range of seafood products like shrimp and tuna imported into the United States and Europe…

David Torcivia:

[12:19] Huge, huge amount of slaves.

Daniel Forkner:

[12:21] Bricks, one of the oldest slave operations in the world continues to be made at the hands of slaves today.

David Torcivia:

[12:28] And as we’ve mentioned in earlier episodes, the fashion industry of the world, the production of garments depends largely on slave labor.

Daniel Forkner:

[12:36] The vegetables, crops and countless other food commodities that we eat everyday: much of them are made by slaves. The carpet in our homes, the gold, the diamonds and other precious metals and minerals that we wear around their necks.

David Torcivia:

[12:50] The cobalt in our electric cars and batteries.

Daniel Forkner:

[12:53] Much of the iron that is found in our plumbing, our cars and the appliances in our homes were smelted down with charcoal that was produced by armies of slaves illegally chopping down swaths of the Amazon, forests in Africa and mangrove forests in Asia, and the list goes on and on.

David Torcivia:

[13:12] Actually one of my favorite examples, and maybe favorite is not the right word to use here, but one of most interesting things that might surprise you, because I know it surprised me, is that actually tombstones are one of these major products produced by slaves. India is one of the world's largest exporters of granite. So, I mean the countertops that go into your expensive American or European kitchens, the sandstone slabs that cities all around the world are used to pave their fancy plazas with, and of course the tombstones and monuments that we use to mark the dead: all of these often come from the developing world because of how cheap they can be acquired, largely because of this slave labor. And granite is hard to mine. I mean, part of the appeal is that it comes in the giant huge slabs and it is actually kind of cool to watch granite mining if you want to be YouTube that. But these can be cut into all sorts of different shapes that can be fit into whatever it is you need: whether it's a kitchen countertop or a particular graveyard. But if you’re using hand tools that means a lot of tedious chiseling and very careful handling of the finish material so it doesn't crack. So how can it be so cheap when these huge blocks of stone need to be literally cut out of mountain sides by hand? Well the answer of course is slaves, and in many cases these slaves are created through an insidious and illegal system of debt bondage which will get into in just a little bit.

Daniel Forkner:

[14:33] And we mentioned at the top of this show that 600 million people around the world are currently vulnerable to slavery and that number will rise as automation, as we talked about in episode 27, continues to displace workers all over. Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines over the next 20 years half of all workers in these countries will lose their jobs to automation. And that’s one hundred and forty million people. Those that lose their jobs will be vulnerable to criminal slave networks while those that keep jobs will be competing to maintain low-wage positions rife with workplace abuses. And the industries to be affected are those already at high-risk of modern slavery including fishing, construction, fashion, hospitality, retail and manufacturing. The "Third World" and the Environment [15:24] David, you’ve mentioned at the beginning of this show how a lot of this slavery is fueled by the economy and I think this is an important point to bring up and something we want to get across, which is so often you hear some these like quasi-racist notions about ‘third world’ and how people in the developing world, you know, they're not educated, they're having too many babies and they are the main reason why we have overpopulation and too much pollution in the world, and why can't they just be like our richer societies with our freedom, our rights, our environmental protections. And I think one thing we have to realize is that these people who are forced into slavery: it's not because their countries are backward, it is not because their culture is primitive, it's because they are explicitly serving the rich world, that's why they exist. They exist because we demand them. I mean, consider the fact that the Democratic Republic of the Congo is one of the poorest countries in the world. Yet it has some of the most valued resources globally: 80% of the global demand for coltan which goes into the incredibly expensive tech gadgets that are bought everywhere is found under the ground in the Congo. Now how is it that a country that has the richest resources can be the poorest country, it's only because this insatiable international demand for this wealth is driving armed conflicts, slavery, child labor and suffering. [16:52] The people mining this coltan, oftentimes especially when they're part of the slave operations, they don't even know what the resources for, they have no idea what it's going to be used for. This is not something that people are willingly taking part in. it's something that is forced upon them and that force comes from the top of this global demand that we drive from rich countries. But hopefully this is something that will become more clear as we go on. But you know, David, there's something else similar to this that I was actually surprised to learn which is: so much of the slavery that goes on around the world is not just a result of environmental destruction, but it's also a driver of environmental destruction. Going into this show I expected that slavery would be a necessary component of our industrial economy as part of this supply chain that the produces all the goods we need. But what I didn't expect was slavery itself to be this huge contributor to climate change and the wholesale destruction of the planet. And going back to this racist notion that people in the third world are just destroying their environment out of ignorance, we like to blame poachers for killing endangered species for exotic luxury goods, but missing from these discussions are the global forces driving these people to destroy the very land that they depend on.

David Torcivia:

[18:08] Earlier we mentioned that one of the major tasks that slavers are forcing people to do is cut down huge swaths of forest, of rainforest, of old-growth forests in order to generate charcoal to sell that to people who smelt iron ore or whatever it is. This, the agriculture, the fishing: many of these activities that are made economically possible solely through slavery and the very cheap labor that comes along with it add up to be the third largest emitter of carbon dioxide by industry. So if we group all these together, everyone doing slave labor is the third most polluting industry in terms of CO2 in the world.

Daniel Forkner:

[18:45] And that's not to mention, David, that a big international company that is logging trees is contributing to environmental destruction, no doubt, but there are also often at least in part responsible to some minimal form of regulation. But someone who's running a slave operation by definition is outside of the law: they care nothing about our standards for environmental protection, so when they go into a forest and they clear for charcoal, or they go in to clear some land to mine granite, they often leave so much destruction that whole ecosystems collapse in the wake. In the Congo gorillas, hippopotamus and other species are decimated by slavers marching through forests destroying everything in sight just to get out these precious metals that we’re demanding in our electronics.

David Torcivia:

[19:31] Exactly and many of these acts of environmental destruction that are committed by slaves, I don't want it assign the blame to them but ultimately they're the ones with the axe or with the shovel or whatever, so in the context of this, we’re going to say committed by these slaves, are done so to support the activities of these major multinational corporations who need somebody to be able to do this dirty work, to get the stuff to them and pass it down the chains of supply until it becomes clean of this slave labor that, ‘oh, who knows where this stuff came from, but all I know is now is that it's cheap’, and that it can be verified because it was passed off through some black market or whatever, wheels and deals that it wasn't perpetrated by slaves on paper, and so now I can have my production, my cheap price and I can ignore the environmental consequences of the actions and ultimately of us as consumers that demand the products that these multinationals are producing. [20:24] So when you hear startling facts about how much of the Amazon was cut down or some other rainforest was shredded, when you see photos of some environmental destruction from a strip mine somewhere try and separate this action from the very likely slaves that committed it and remember that these atrocities are committed ultimately in your name to fulfill your drive to consume and maybe it's not you individually because you’ve decided to, ‘I've seen the error of my ways and I'm going to reform myself,’ but by and large this consumption is driven by Americans and Europeans, and we are responsible for these environmental crimes and the labor crimes that enable them. Vicious Cycle

Daniel Forkner:

[21:04] David, it's really a vicious cycle that's going on that reinforces itself. You know, at the very beginning of the cycle we have the consumption of rich countries, this is the Global North, fuels climate change: our industrial practices, our outputting of CO2, our deforestation, we are fueling climate change through our consumption. And that adversely impacts the poor: desertification swallows villages, hurricanes and violent storms flood coasts, forest fires destroy places that people live. [21:35] And those at the greatest risk for these environmental catastrophes are often the poor who don't have the option to go anywhere else, they're often in places at greater risk for these events in the first place. So it results in the displacing of millions of people, and from these displaced people come millions of people vulnerable to exploitation: this is where the slaves come from. And what's so sad about this is that these people who become slaves because they were displaced from their homes due to this environmental destruction, well, they are then forced to work manually destroying the environment even more: cutting down the trees in their homes one by one, strip mining, illegal fishing, draining their rivers for those sand mafias that we talked about to ultimately produce these commodities that we demand by our consumption here in the Global North. Which again fuels this climate change even more. it's an endless cycle of destruction and exploitation. And, of course, it’s not just catastrophic weather events but, you know, environmental erosion in general which makes these people vulnerable by taking away their livelihood, this is the collapse of lake and river ecosystem or the poisoning of soils. A lot of mining operations leave behind them a wake of mercury poisoning which poisons the water that people drink and the food that they eat. [22:55] And in his book, “Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World”, Kevin Bales offers a framework for understanding how this vicious cycle can play out in conflict locally within countries where we find the raw resources for our commodities. Global Demand; Local Conflict

David Torcivia:

[23:12] So first, in the wealthy part of the world a company somewhere announces some new product that everyone goes crazy for: we all need this product. This could be an iPad or some other gadget, it's fun to play with and we all want it. Step 2 is that somewhere in the world and usually in the developing world a natural resource that people live among and that goes into making this product suddenly becomes extremely valuable. Violence and corruption follow this in a desperate grab to acquire this resource. Much of the profit of this process goes into purchasing weapons to maintain territorial control and then civil war is at a high risk of outbreak.

Daniel Forkner:

[23:50] Next, David, these territories and factions began to stabilize, and sort of unspoken agreement settles among the players in this region where they know that they can make more money when they stop fighting each other. And that’s when they start turning these weapons that they’ve been firing at each other onto their workers to keep them inline, their slaves. And finally, once these systems stabilize and these territories established, then a variety of legal structures can emerge that work to maintain the system of slavery and exploitation, the most tried-and-true method of course being convict labor like we here in the United States all immediately following emancipation. And this continues to a large extent all over the world today. Conflict Mineral Supply Chain

David Torcivia:

[24:34] So let’s look at an actual example that plays out quite a bit. For this we're going to turn to The Democratic Republic of Congo where there is a wide amount of slavery abuse, of labor abuse and a vast amount of minerals that we need to support much of our high-tech society. So we're going to look at this not sort of step-by-step but at the different levels of this process, this would give us an understanding of how we move from slave to you or me. So the bottom level of course are the slaves themselves and oftentimes, especially in a place like Democratic Republic of Congo, these aren't necessarily bought like in an open air market like you could find in Libya, but rather through various local conflicts, these are people who are forced quite literally at gunpoint oftentimes but often as well through debt or peonage and held down to work in these mines. And an order is maintained through the threat of violence and also especially with women the threat of sexual abuse. And many of these people are very young and there's a lot of child laborers in this process, so this is the bottom level and really the people that we need to focus on and remember all the way to the end of this chain that made this chain impossible.

Daniel Forkner:

[25:45] The next level of this supply chain, getting us closer to that end product that we consume, are the soldiers, the officials, the local businessman, traffickers, police and other people directly involved in capturing, profiting from, and abusing people for slavery.

David Torcivia:

[26:02] Above that are the businessmen who make this all profitable, these are the merchants and middleman whom convert this dirty raw product gathered by slave labor, smuggle this into a system, whether it's by paperwork or by quite literal smuggling, into something that can be purchased by the legitimate business people and make its way down the product chain with a nice logo on it says ‘no slavery involved.’

Daniel Forkner:

[26:25] Using the Congo for an example, a lot of the raw materials that are mined illegally in the Congo are smuggled by these middlemen into Rwanda and the trading houses there where it is then repackaged and sold as a Rwandan raw material. And this creates an interesting situation where Rwanda has been known to export more raw materials than they have a record of mining and it's because a lot of it is being smuggled across the border.

David Torcivia:

[26:51] I think there's even some instances of exports from Rwanda of materials that they don't even really have in any economically viable mines because it came from, of course, one of these neighboring nations.

Daniel Forkner:

[27:04] Once you get about these trading houses where those materials are relabeled, repackaged and mixed with other goods you have the businesses in Europe, US and Asia who purchase these raw materials and process them.

David Torcivia:

[27:16] And from there we enter what is the traditional supply route when we think of the process of creating a phone or iPad or something. It goes from these raw materials to a company that makes tiny bits of electronics to somebody else that assembles these into circuit boards, they are ultimately assembled into final products, then packaged, shipped across the world and then finally find their way to the retailer that we enter, purchase from and take home to enjoy our new toy.

Daniel Forkner:

[27:43] And so for a certain raw material there could be 11 steps in the supply chain wear this one mineral changes hands, is repackaged and transferred across borders, and these large companies, this is Apple, this is IBM, when they are criticized for the slave labor that goes into their products, they point at the supply chain, they say, ‘look, it is so difficult to figure out where these things come from that we can't possibly be responsible.’ But of course, they’re a little bit disingenuous when they say that they do their best to avoid conflict minerals because there are organizations that have figured out systems for inspecting mines for their labor and environmental practices and then tagging and tracking the raw material that comes out of those mines. But the corporations competing for the largest slice of electronics and other goods, they're not backing these organizations and part of it is because of the cost that would be associated with using better sourced materials but also, it's because in a way it's a way to avoid culpability. For many corporations the idea of supporting an organization that would ensure that they're not purchasing slave labor materials is an admission that they have been doing this already and some companies just don't want to open themselves up to that liability. Debt Path to Slavery

David Torcivia:

[28:56] Okay, Daniel, so we’ve discussed quite a bit the topic of what exactly is going and what processes and enable this practice in the first place, but maybe we should talk about how some of these people end up as slaves in the first place. I mean, it's not just, you know, you are on a walk down the street, somebody like black bags you, puts you in a van and pulls you off as is, ‘now you’re a slave.’

Daniel Forkner: [29:15] Unless you're a victim of Shanghai Kelly, David.
David Torcivia: [29:18] Exactly, but I mean for most of it, it’s less obvious way and maybe more insidious because of that.
Daniel Forkner: [29:24] That's right, David, the most common way to capture a slave is through debt. In almost every type of slave operation it seems you can find stories of debt bondage, whether it's fishing, brick making, mining, it's a familiar story: desperate people looking for work are told that they can find it with recruiter who offers advanced wages upfront and a promise of payment after a set period like 3 months. And during this period they might be beaten, they endure dangerous conditions, they’re denied medical care and at the end of the initial period, when it's time to collect their payment, they are instead informed that they owe more money than they earned and they never leave. And what’s especially sad is how many slaves caught in this debt trap believe that it's their own fault, they believe their bosses when they are told they haven't worked hard enough to pay their debts, and they continue to toil sometimes for years. If they figure out the true nature of their work and try to resist or try to escape, they’re met with violence.
David Torcivia:

[30:24] This idea is actually one of the major reasons why we devoted entire show just to the concept of debt. And most of our conversations about debt, at least in terms of collapse, or here in America or the European Union, or about Nation debts, or about maybe student loan debts, or things that forces to work us jobs that we don't want to, or to make hard choices when it comes to budgets of our countries. But for the vast majority of the world debt has become a life-or-death situation where you are forced to take on loans to survive. And people take advantage of this, they take advantage of your weakness in this situation and you end up, next thing you know, working for the rest of your life, oftentimes to the death. Because a rapidly developing economy around you left you behind, because you couldn't afford with a suddenly dramatically higher cost of living, because of statistics that normally would be celebrated by places like the IMF, like the World Bank about how much more money interest in economy, but oftentimes at money is unequally distributed. And the side effect of this unequal distribution, unfortunately, slavery.

Daniel Forkner:

[31:31] Taking advantage of people who are desperate for a little bit of income, that's why there are 600 million people around the world vulnerable and at-risk to slavery today. Because slavery is made possible by the desperation of people to make a wage in order to survive and the lure of some form of job promised to them by a charismatic recruiter or a persuasive boss. In many mines in the Congo for example, a would be labor must pay to enter the camp but then if they ever want to leave, they have to pay any debt they have accrued inside the camp, but everything is taxed, if they eat food it's taxed, if they drink water it's taxed, if they sleep on a bed it’s taxed. The very tools they use to do the work comes at a price, the system is rigged to make sure that debt can never be repaid and this is work infamous for terrible conditions. In coltan mines for example laborers are exposed to carbonic gas, there are frequent collapses that bury people alive. In gold and other mines around the world laborers who work day and night chiseling at rock inhale small particles of rock and metal that scar their lung tissue which the results in something called silicosis that ultimately ends in a very painful death. [32:47] You know I have to stop here for a second, David, because there's something that perplexes me, which is you every now and then we find global coverage in our media some tragic event where maybe it's miners in Chile that get trapped or children in Thailand to get stuck in a cave, and these are terrible events, I'm not disputing that, but we also are completely ignoring the fact that people are buried in mines every single day and not a soul even tries to find them because they can just be replaced by another desperate person. And going along with this debt bondage when these slaves die very often the debt that they have accrued is passed down to their family, many children grow up knowing nothing but slavery.

David Torcivia:

[33:28] Well, let’s look at another example here to turn this into a very real thing and a great example especially of debt bondage and people who are enslaved by their debt is Malaysia. Malaysia

Daniel Forkner:

[33:39] And Malaysia is very important to the global economy, let me read you real quick, David, what the World Bank says about Malaysia, okay? Are you ready?

Daniel Forkner: [33:50] ‘Since gaining independence in 1957, Malaysia has successfully diversified its economy from one that was initially agriculture and commodity-based, to one that now plays host to robust manufacturing and services sectors, that have propelled it to become a leading exporter of electrical appliances. Malaysia is one of the most open economies in the world, Openness to trade and investment have been instrumental in employment creation and income growth, with about 40 percent of jobs in Malaysia linked to export activities, less than 1 percent of Malaysian households living in extreme poverty. Malaysia's near-term economic outlook remains favorable reflecting a well-diversified and open economy that has successfully weathered the impact of external shocks.’
David Torcivia:

[34:35] That’s a beautiful quote from the World Bank, Daniel, but instead let's look at what the US State Department has to say about Malaysia. In 2014 at the US State Department Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, that's a mouthful, that's the name of this department, they ranked Malaysia among the worst countries in the world for human trafficking, ‘Countries whose governments do not fully meet the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so,’ that's the bar that they're using to measure. And in 2017 the ranking for Malaysia have been upgraded slightly to ‘still does not mean that minimum standards’ for human trafficking but the government is sort of kind of trying. And even that upgrade angered many human rights activists who claimed actually, when you look at what's really been done on the ground, well it's nothing at all.

Daniel Forkner:

[35:28] There are an estimated 2 million documented foreign workers in Malaysia with an additional 2 million estimated to be undocumented. Forced labor, debt bondage, human trafficking and slavery are found in many sectors of the economy. Domestic work and service jobs like hospitality, agriculture, construction, electronics assembly, fishing boats and more. To say nothing of the women who are trafficked into sex slavery on the promise of a decent job. Before even leaving their country of origin many foreign workers, up to 92% of them that are coming to Malaysia, pay recruiters large fees to secure a job. This means that an entire family can go into massive debt before a single person has even left home.

David Torcivia:

[36:13] And the emphasis on family here is important. Because when the fee is so high, like you mentioned Daniel, an entire family might go into debt be forced to mortgage their home so that one person can afford the fee with the hope that eventually that worker will send a share of their wages back home and make up the difference. Of course, what happens so often is when they arrive in Malaysia, they barely make enough money to even feed themselves, much less than money back to their children, parents and the rest of their families.

Daniel Forkner:

[36:42] In addition, because people often find themselves in enormous debt by the time they arrive in the big city after they have paid one recruiter, then another recruiter, then their visa fees and their employment fees and their housing fees. They can easily be forced to accept contracts different than the ones they were promised. According to the US State Department, ‘some Malaysian employers reportedly withheld 3 to 9 months wages from foreign domestic workers in order to recoup recruitment agency fees and other debt bonds.’ And some employers illegally confiscate workers visas so that in the event they leave the job, they become undocumented and at risk of violent deportation.

David Torcivia:

[37:24] It's easy to see here how debt, which again if we go back to the original origins of it was intended to tie communities together, to build a strong bond between people who live together, supported each other and were encouraged to do this by this debt, now it's tearing families apart, destroying lives and it's dooming people to life of servitude and ultimately death. This is how debt has been weaponized on both the individual scale like we're seeing right here, as well as nation-states and beyond. Vulnerability Through Migration

Daniel Forkner:

[37:53] And what is also clear in all these examples and more is that people are vulnerable, of course, when they lack an income but they're also most vulnerable when they're moving from one place to another. These are people who are trying to migrate to better lives, these are where they’re most vulnerable because they don't exist in a community, they don't have people that they can easily contact and rely on for support, they may not have good documents that even allow them to be in the country they're trying to get through. And they become very easy to exploit. So many people living in Sub-Saharan Africa, they're seeking better lives in routes through Libya to Europe. But they end up on open-air slave markets before crossing the Mediterranean. Human traffickers take advantage of people with little money by selling them to private prisons in Libya where they work as slaves until they either die or sold off to another slaver. Some are rescued by the International Organization for Migration which can really only send them back to the same life they were trying to escape from and these individuals that wind up in these Libya slave markets are sold for between $200 and $500.

David Torcivia:

[39:01] And remember that a lot of these people that end up as migrants are fleeing something. Sometimes it is conditions brought on by climate change, sometimes it's local economic collapse because of groups like the IMF, the World Bank that levy these debts or sanctions that nations like the United States like to deploy as a tool in order to get whatever concessions that they necessarily want from a group or from a block or whatever it is. Sometimes it's combat, often over these resources that we need off of the geopolitical conflicts that we see spinning up because of the large games and machinations of these developed countries utilizing their influence on the developing world in order to increase the wealth of their citizens at the expense of the rest of the world. These migrants don't happen in a bubble. They don't just appear out of nowhere for no reason, they are created by the actions of the nations around the world and of the multinationals and NGOs that operate in between their borders. Seafood

Daniel Forkner:

[39:56] We haven't talked a lot about the actual products that we consume that are made by these slaves and some of the conditions they are exposed to, so I think it's a good place to just take a really important example that we're probably all part of in some way and that's the seafood industry. In Bangladesh a 19-year-old man told his story working as a slave processing fish when he was a kid. A job recruiter came to his village and offered his parents $30 to allow their boy to come work cutting and drying fish. The recruiter promised that the work was easy, the workers were well-fed and that they would send a share of the boy’s wages home to his parents. The family thought about it and they all agreed and the boy left. Of course, he was taken to an island where he was forced into hard labor along several other boys where they had to make their own shelter, they work non-stop in cold and wet conditions often for 24 hours at a time. they were fed a meal once each day that consisted of a cup and a half of lentils that they split between 12 of them. And boys that were injured or could not keep up simply died, their bodies tossed in the local forest. Escape was unthinkable because on the other side of this fishing camp were tigers.

David Torcivia:

[41:11] Fishing is actually one of the major industries where we see this slavery occur. So the slave labor that is now abundant in fishing operations around the world are a direct result of this rise in the global fish trade. So in the past fish markets in places like Southeast Asia were supplied by families, independent fishers, small communities, you know, a sustainable practice. But today the global demand for fish that’s made possible by advances in logistics technology, so this is things like freezers on cargo ships, the ability to quickly fly fresh food anywhere in the world, this has fueled the rise of factory-like fishing operations off the coast of Bangladesh, India, Thailand or the Pacific islands or other countries all around the world. And while this has led to a rapidly exhausting fish supply which is its own episode that we’ll get to, it has also given rise to the practice of clearing valuable mangrove forest to make way for vast monoculture shrimp farms. These operations, whether it’s on boat or on land, or an action of clearing this land: it all needs labor. And to be economically viable it needs cheap labor. In 1950s America shrimp and other seafood practices were often luxurious and special occasion meals but today they are cheap and plentiful.

Daniel Forkner:

[42:25] And in the same way that the garment manufacturers that supply the bulk of our fashion demands full their buyers by showing off model factories while subcontracting out the bulk of their orders to let scrupulous one, the shrimp industry works the same way: once the shrimp is farmed by workers and slaves living on dykes and patches of cleared forest that borders the territories of tigers, women slaves labor up to 80 hours a week in processing plants where they are beaten and denied pay. These ship processing factories are often subcontractors that avoid that scrupulous investigation by larger companies that end up buying these products. And as we talking about fishing, we mentioned at the beginning of the show that you can buy a slave in the United States, and that seems unheard of, right? but this is something that continues to go on despite being given a lot of tension in 2016 and that's in the fishing trade just outside the border of Hawaii.

David Torcivia:

[43:23] This is for whatever reason one of the stories that hits me hardest when I read about it, for one maybe it's because these are off the coast of Hawaii, so I mean this is international waters, but technically I think it falls under at least in the way I think about it: this is the responsibility of the United States which likes to talk big talk about equality and freedom and stuff. And two, there's something heartbreaking about the stories, which we’ll get to in a second, about these people and the fact that you're caught on this tiny boat and you have no choice, you can't leave cause you're in the middle of an ocean and this boats never pull into docks, they don't let these people off: this is your world. This wide world that we live in, the beauty of it is lost and you're trapped in these confines of this small fishing boat in the middle of this vast ocean and that's all you know. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Daniel Forkner:

[44:11] Talking about whose responsibility it is: these are American companies that own American fishing boats and they're looking for some cheap labor. There's just one problem: how do they get this cheap labor? The workers that they end up hiring are not legally allowed to enter the United States so what they end up doing is this kind of very confusing legal loophole that is kind of hard to understand but essentially it is: because the workers they want to hire cannot be flown into the United States because they wouldn't be allowed on a plane, these ship captains pay around $10000 for the whole process to fly a migrant worker to a nearby country and then this migrant worker is delivered to a boat somewhere that then crosses international waters and delivers this person to United States fishing boats. Then the captain pulls into the port and because anybody entering the United States on these ports has to be inspected by customs and the Border Patrol, well, these foreign workers then presented to an officer of the United States who then rejects this person, because you are not allowed to come into the United States and here's a document saying that you're not allowed to come into the United States. Then the boat captain takes that document to Hawaiian state officials, it says, ‘can you please grant this worker a commercial fishing license, he has documentation, here it is.’ And the Hawaiian state official will then grant this commercial fishing license to the boat captain to allow this migrant worker to fish on the United States commercial vessel while still admitting that he's not allowed to come into United States. So, like you said, he is force unto this boat where he works to fish for tuna, for premium sort fish which then make it back into the hotels and premium restaurants all over the United Stated. And obviously these workers are paid well below American standards and they're often subject to abuse. Some captains have been known to refuse fisherman on their boat the ability to speak their own language, sometimes they are physically abused, obviously sometimes they lack adequate food and medical care. And another irony, the federal agent that blocks this worker from coming into the United States initially demands that the captain confiscate this person's passport so not only are they stuck on this boat, they don't have their passport anymore, they literally have nowhere to go.

David Torcivia:

[46:42] Yeah, that's so common in these stories too where even if somebody is legally allowed to enter or leave countries and has a passport, oftentimes they are seized so that you will effectively lose the ability to exist in this country, and if you're threaten anything they can pick you up, lock you, deport you, whatever it is they need to do. And they use this subtle piece of paper and the fact that this person no longer controls it as a threat of violence, as a threat of calling in the state to execute this violence in a legal bureaucratic way.

Daniel Forkner:

[47:11] It really is kind of messed up, one of these boats actually pulled into port one time, the fishermen are supposed to stay on the boat but they ventured a little bit into the port in order to use the restroom. I think one man tried to get a drink at a local bar, and they were all deported immediately by immigration because they step too close to land.

David Torcivia:

[47:32] Yeah, I mean we're totally okay exploiting them for their labor but should you come into our land and ‘sorry bud, you got to go home, that's not legal here,’ but of course this slavery is occurring in international waters, we’ll just look the other way.

Daniel Forkner:

[47:47] And as minimal as some of the wages are that are paid to these fishermen, some captains actually withhold these for years and just don't pay them at all totally violating their contract. But of course, what is a contract worth in this situation in the first place? it's all messed up. What Are Rights?

David Torcivia:

[48:01] And the talk of passports and of the permissions of nations, of the bureaucratic processes that enable and protect these slavers and punish the enslaved, I think it's really important here and we need to drive home this idea of the conception of, well, of rights. Cause when we think about a nation, a place like the United States or Malaysia or the Democratic Republic of Congo and we talk a lot what is a nation-state, you know, and then some people will say it's a group of people that come together, we believe in certain things, we've approved a constitution, a rule of law together and that protects us, it enables us to control our destiny collectively: that's what a nation is. And others might look at this and say, well you know, that's sort of true but ultimately what a nation is it’s about the expression of violence, the fact that a nation is the sole proprietor of righteous violence, that we can deploy police in certain ways to restrict your rights, so we can deploy our military to be aggressive against people within our nation and those beyond our borders and that we can deny people rights throughout a bureaucratic process or maybe even the application of this violence directly. [49:07] But for me what a nation ultimately is, and with all these other things evolve out of, is the fact that a nation is about rights. In the end that is the core piece of what makes a nation a nation. The fact that it can guarantee rights, that it can defend those right and it can apply them. And the discussion of rights is a very complicated one, it's very philosophical, there's lots of different ideas of what a right is, how it’s applied to nations themselves and most will either fall to the camp that we have these divine rights that the very act of existing as a human grants us these rights. [49:41] I mean we see this in the United States Declaration of Independence which is one of the first documents to establish really this idea of divine natural rights, the famous phrase ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness’. Other nations, other philosophers took this idea, they carried it and developed it, we saw the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen appear during the French Revolution and these things are carried over into the constitutions of many nations around the world, into our ideas of political philosophy, into the very way that we interact with the world as individuals. The way that the UN deploys its ideas of certain human rights, this very concept is evolved from this original idea. But I'm not so sure how true it is because it sounds nice on paper that we are born with these rights and they can be the only taken away by the actions of others, but in fact I think rights actually are about denying the rights of others. When nation is formed it can guarantee rights to its citizens but only by denying those rights to the rest of the world. And that's what separates one nation from another.

Daniel Forkner:

[50:58] What do you mean, David?

David Torcivia:

[50:59] Look at it this way: I'm the United States, I guarantee all these rights to the individuals of my country, I mean we have the Bill of Rights.

Daniel Forkner:

[51:07] Thank you Uncle Sam.

David Torcivia:

[51:09] Yeah, thank you founding fathers, you gave us all these things, the Bill of Rights, these things that spell out exactly is what I'm entitled to as an American citizen. But the unsaid implication of the application of these rights to me as a citizen is that no one else in the world gets these rights. If these rights are unique to the citizens of this nation and if these were true, if these were actually unalienable divine rights bestowed by our creator to use their own language, then it shouldn't matter what nation you come from, every nation should respect these rights. And yes, we have treaties among each other that say, ‘oh, we’ll extradite you and you could then deal with their rights over own citizens over here blah blah blah,’ but that is just bureaucratic mess disguising the fact that rights are about denying this idea of divine rights of everyone else on the world. Or more frequently, to even our own citizens who we don't want to apply these rights to. For the founding fathers this was the slaves, for the ancient Greeks it was the voting rights to anybody except the propertied men. And that same idea carried very recently throughout the political history of the world. I mean women have been voting in much of the world for less than a hundred years, some places they still can't. Rights have always been about bestowing these ideas onto a selected group of people. They're not universal as much as the UN, as much as the human rights organizations might attempt to push this idea, it's in their name. But it's a falsity, it’s not true. [52:32] Rights are innately about denying these protections from everyone else. And no one gets this deal shorter than those of us who have no states. So a migrant who was forced from their home, whose passport is taken away, withheld by employer who exploits their labor, this person is effectively stripped of all their rights because they have no state to back them up anymore and their divine Creator who supposedly bestows them with these rights to Freedom or Liberty, well, they are nowhere to be found. Because rights are about denying those very things and for the millions of slaves around the world, the millions of migrants who are forced from their homes by the actions of others, whether it's climate change, whether it's conflict, whether it’s economic destruction, they are thrust into a world with no rights, they are at the mercy of others and their benevolence, and so frequently people take advantage of this. They take advantage of their vulnerability. They enslave them, they abuse them, they capture them and force them into lives that do not reflect these divine rights that we supposedly all share. Because no one is there to protect them, no state will step in to defend them. No one is there to actually give them rights. [53:46] There is this famous phrase, ‘the right to have rights,’ it's the idea that we all ultimately, when our rights are stripped from us, have only one right left, the ability to have rights. And this is the right where all other rights emerge from. It's a nice story, it's a nice idea and it's a big motivator for the various human rights organizations of the world that we should all innately be allowed to step into these rights, to be protected by them. But as long as our economic systems, as long as the states of the world are not interested in granting these rights to the individuals who need them more than anyone this is just a nice story, the fantasy, maybe something to aspire to in a better world. That's not the world we face today. Because of the systems that we built we depend on this stripping of rights. We’ll get into this in part two of this show with specific examples of how the enslaved around the world are building our world, building events that we all celebrate, things that are supposed to unify us like the next World Cup that's coming in Qatar enabled in large part by slave labor. [54:48] We all benefit from the stripping of rights of others, it's what enables us to live our lives in our decadence that we enjoy. So many of the governments around the world justify their existence, they very ability to guarantee these rights because of this language of protecting these divine rights. But when push actually comes to shove, when it comes to actually accepting these migrants, granting them the rights that exist already in the documents that founded these nations, there’s silence. And if rights truly do spring from something divine or spring from our collective will then maybe we need to individually do something about that and grant these protections to each other so we can build a better world collectively. Benevolence Of Jobs?

Daniel Forkner:

[55:29] Those are such great points, David, and really good questions that I think we don't spend enough time thinking about or realizing the implications of. And this is something I hope we can expand more on in part two especially as we talk about the way we enforce these supply chains around the world not just in the manufacturing of these goods but the actual systems that are used to transport them around the world. And you bring up a really good point about the hypocrisy of these inalienable rights, and you really see this a lot in articles about the slavery around the world, like in so many of them, including this Hawaii fishing boat story that is so revealing, you find the occasional argument, ‘well, you know, some workers enjoy this work and it's not so bad for them, they make more money than they could earn back home, so in reality we're providing them with a great opportunity for raising them out of poverty.’ We see this argument evoked time and time again in defense of increased globalization and free trade, it's, ‘so what if American companies cause Bangladeshi women to work for pennies in cramped factories with no bathrooms to make our t-shirts? that's still a better option than they otherwise would have, we're doing them a service and providing jobs.’ And it really clear when you start looking at these arguments along the lines of what you're talking about, David, that first of all, these arguments are inherently racist. I mean, there is just no doubt about that. But number two, they admit that we in richer societies cannot fundamentally have the things we want without denying people from other places the same rights we demand for our own. I mean, that is the whole reason we outsource factory work to other places, because they don't have the same labor requirements that we do. And we see this even more egregious just when we start looking at flags of convenience which we’ll get into next week. And number three, this argument is by nature a logic that depends on relatives. It says, ‘look, if a person's best option is one meal a day then we are justified, no, we are benevolent for providing them one and a half meals a day to clean our dirty laundry’. When we are talking about inalienable rights, we either have standards of what a human being should have access to or we don't. Having this type of relativity and stratification of classes of peoples is the exact opposite of what we claim our freedom is founded on. Thinking In Aggregates [57:50] And so these topics have really made me shift my thinking when it comes to the goods that we purchased. In episode 22 we talked about the fashion industry, and we had this section in that show where we talked about the importance of looking at the aggregate impacts of an industry. It’s one thing to support a fair trade garment, but if at the end of the day the aggregate production of clothing is going up in tandem with the environmental and labor destruction and exploitation, then it doesn't really matter what fair trade things we’re supporting, because the destruction is still increasing. I think we're making similar mistakes with these products that are made by slaves. Another way to think about the danger of global scale mass production is to remember Edward Bernays, like we talked about in episode 11, and the way that marketers persuade us to consume products through misdirection, they want us to buy pianos so they convince architect to design houses with music rooms. Buying a single product is never an isolated event. If we as a society simply cannot live without diamonds and we find a way to guarantee that every diamond is produced humanely and environmentally sustainably, might we overlook the fact that the gold bands that the diamonds are set in are produced with slave labor or the silver chains that they hang from? [59:09] But more importantly, as long as we had this global industrial economy, we could never achieve these guarantees in the first place, because of the swiftness by which our global commodities machine can switch out one product for another. If we truly got to a point where consumers around the world refused to buy a diamond or chocolate bar because of the labor that is involved, well, marketers would simply shift our consumption paradigms, you would no longer be fashionable to propose marriage with a diamond: it's all about rubies now, and no one needs chocolate anymore: vanilla wafers go great with breakfast. The point I'm trying to make here, David, is that we can't have it both ways: we cannot have universal products at our fingertips everywhere we go, New York, Paris, London, Singapore, Hong Kong and Cape Town without slavery unless we are willing to accept a reality where it's not possible to buy a banana in Alaska or a diamond somewhere other than the place that they're produced, then we cannot have a world where slaves don't form the backbone of our global supply chains. And one of the great ironies here is that in many cases illegal activities like mining that use slave labor are fueled by the rise in legal operations, because any economic activity that is extractive is likely to disrupt the environment and the ability for people to sustain themselves which drives displacement adding to the pool of exploitable labor that can be converted to slaves. And in addition, large mining corporations, local governments and small-scale slave owners often have interdependent love-hate relationships with each other. If you take Ghana for example, the government's Precious Minerals Marketing Company makes money on the gold and diamonds mined in the country and it offers guaranteed prices to any small-scale miner for their gold, for their diamonds no questions asked. And large multinational companies complain about small illegal miners who use their slaves to steal from large company mines. But there is an interdependence here because large companies also allow illegal miners to roam their land and search up new veins to exploit and using their slave labor to do that and these large companies choose to drive them off only after new deposits are found. [1:01:25] Everyone abuses these slaves: the government does by incentivizing the acquisition and sale of resources by any means necessary and by directing police to beat and capture slaves caught, you know, “illegally” mining and then imprisoning them in jails that are often more dangerous than the mining conditions themselves. Large legal corporations abuse these slaves by sending their security patrols out to beat and murder any slaves on their property. And the slave owners themselves who of course avoid this conflict, well, their abuse goes without saying. And these dynamics play out in so many industries, we could probably find similar relationships in the businesses that produce the coffee and the chocolate that we consume every single day. Ultimately what we need in the short term as consumers is awareness and choice. Much has been said about how indifference and apathy contribute to evil in more eloquent ways than I could ever match. And one area of our lives at apathy can play a role is in our consumption. In wealthy societies it is too easy to consume, it is literally too easy: we want something, we buy it, and often our purchases can be impulsive. [1:02:38] Perhaps we need a return to more intentional and thoughtful method of consuming. We need to think about what is the labor that went into this product that I want to buy? We need to recognize that just because something is available does not mean that we should consume it. I know that personally I could not go cold turkey on all the products I consume that are made by slaves but I can strive to be more responsible with my consumption and do my best to shift away from those types of products, consume less, reuse more in my life. So that I'm not fueling as much this consuming culture that is driving us abuse worldwide. As long as we accept the premise that we should be able to consume any product anywhere in the world anytime we want, we are going to have slaves, because the demand for production of commodities at that scale requires producers to race to the bottom in terms of cost and responsibility.

David Torcivia:

[1:03:31] So normally right here we would be getting into that detailed, ‘what can we do to help with this problem?’ but again because this is such a big topic and we don't want to just drop a three-hour show on everyone, we're breaking it up into part 1 part 2 and we'll get into more depth next week especially with examples of things going on today.

Daniel Forkner:

[1:03:49] In part 2 we’ll have a couple more examples of some of these slave operations going on around the world, but it'll be more of a discussion about the transformation our economy has gone through in the past decades that has added a new dimension to the way we view labor and some things that put us at even greater risk going forward for exploitation that is disguised as a more legitimate structure. And at the end of the two weeks I think we're still only going to be scratching the surface, but it’s a good first step in trying to understand why the slavery exists and maybe, just maybe some things we can do in the face of this evil.

David Torcivia:

[1:04:28] As always that's a lot to think about especially on these heavy topics. We know we were light last week and next week's going to get dark again but we hope you'll tune in nonetheless. If you want to learn more about any of the topics we covered today read some of these individuals’ stories from people currently in servitude. You can do all that as well as to read a full transcript of this show on our website at ashesashes.org.

Daniel Forkner:

[1:04:55] A lot of time and research goes into making these shows possible and we will never use ads to support this show, so if you like it and would like us to keep going you, our listener, can support us by giving us a review and sharing this with a friend. Also, we have an email address, it's contact at ashesashes.org. We encourage you to send us your thoughts, positive or negative, we’ll read them and we appreciate them.

David Torcivia:

[1:05:20] You can also find us on your favorite social network app at ashesashescast.

Daniel Forkner:

[1:05:25] Until next week.

David Torcivia:

[1:05:26] This is Ashes Ashes.

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