Slavery/Antislavery Today

By Robert E. Wright, Nef Family Chair of Political Economy for the Rokeby Museum, Ferrisburgh, Vermont, 10 September 2017

            The student who has had the most effect on my career was, hands down, also the most annoying student I have ever had in a career that now spans two full decades and every type of school imaginable, from elite public to elite private to not-so-elite public to whatever DeVry is. The term was Fall 2010, the course the first half of the American history survey, and the student an education major with what to her was a major problem, the fact that I kept using words and ideas that she had never heard of before. Struggling in the class, she decided that she would try to score some points by asserting, repeatedly and quite vocally, that she would have been an abolitionist had she lived in the nineteenth century. I could not help but express my doubts, noting that only a small portion of the population were activists. Oh no, she insisted, she would have been right there next to Frederick Tubman and Harriet Douglass carrying slaves across the Rio Grande River to freedom in Vermont every night, rain or shine. Okay, maybe I am exaggerating the extent of this student’s ignorance but as I said she was the most annoying student to ever cross my path.

After her third attempt at armchair abolitionism, I recalled meeting Jim Stewart at the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic conference in my hometown of Rochester, New York that summer. Jim told me that slavery had made a comeback, a fact that I whipped out right there in class to embarrass my tormentor. She was stunned but starting asking questions that I didn’t have answers to, like where were all these slaves and what work did they perform? I mumbled something about this being a history class and the need to move on, which thankfully the other members of the class were by then quite willing to do.

From my initial state of ignorance, I started reading books about modern slavery and paying attention to news stories about sex trafficking and decided that I had to act. So I joined Jim Stewart’s NGO Historians Against Slavery, developed and delivered courses on modern slavery and antislavery, and even wrote a book about the economic aspects of global slavery called The Poverty of Slavery: How Unfree Labor Pollutes the Economy, which Palgrave published this spring. While I am no Harriet Tubman, I aspire to be a modern day Hinton Helper, the North Carolinian who exposed the economic destructiveness of antebellum chattel slavery. To that end, I became treasurer of Historians Against Slavery when Jim retired and I give talks about modern slavery whenever anyone will have me speak, even if I have to drive from South Dakota to do it.

The ugly truth is that slavery never ended, not in the United States and not anywhere, it simply transmogrified into new forms with new labels more palatable than slavery. Slavery has become such an ugly word that people regularly apply it, willy-nilly, to any reprehensible situation. That is bad because when a word can mean anything, it comes to mean nothing. None but God above are free from external constraints, so the mere presence of constraints cannot define slavery. Gravity does not enslave us to flightlessness. Slavery means a very specific set of constraints imposed by specific individuals for specific purposes. So a good part of my research concerns defining slavery, which I ultimately do as the absence of freedom on twenty key questions regarding the relationship between owners slash employers and their workers. CEOs and college professors score 20, or nearly so, on my freedom scale, so we are not slaves even if our department chairs tell us we have to teach at 8 a.m. on occasion or stockholders tell us that we can’t pay ourselves $200 million a year after cutting dividends to naught.

Antebellum slaves worked in gangs on a large Southern plantation would have scored 0 on my scale and nobody doubts they were slaves. Likewise, nobody doubts that slaves in the upper South who were able to hire out their own time, and who might score a 3 or 4 on my freedom scale, were also slaves. So I have no problem applying the word slave to anyone who scores near the bottom of my freedom index but I also don’t object when people call them unfree or bound laborers instead. The key fact is that none of them can voluntarily leave their place of work in search of something better. Most are physically beaten and psychologically manipulated, receive payment in kind rather than in cash, and have little or no control over sexual access to their own bodies, where they live, what they wear, what they eat, or even their own names. Call such persons what you will, but their condition is far below that of the stereotypical sweatshop worker, who receives his or her pittance in cash and can leave when he or she wishes with names and reproductive parts intact.

People who score 4 or below on my freedom index, call them what you will, number between 30 and 50 million worldwide today. Whatever the exact figure, which is difficult to determine because modern slavery largely takes place behind closed doors, it is absolutely staggering. At an average height of 4 feet, which is not far from the mark given that many slaves are malnourished children, 40 million people laid end to end would stretch over 30,000 miles, or around the earth at the equator and then from Burlington to Los Angeles and a good ways back.

That’s a lot of destroyed lives and for what? Nothing good economically. Yes, slavery is profitable for enslavers, which is why it has been around as long as humans have been and why it was not destroyed by the Civil War or any of the other Great Emancipations of the nineteenth century. Profits are only half the economic equation though. On the other side lay the costs, and they swamp slavery’s profitability. Slaveholders are adroit at getting society to foot most of those costs, rendering them what economists call negative externalities, the most common example of which is pollution.

On the other hand, 40 million is but a small portion of the total global population, which as of May of this year now tops 7.5 billion. In fact, slavery as a percentage of the total global population is the lowest it has ever been, at least during recorded history, which, unfortunately, begins when slavery was already widespread.

What do those 40 million slaves do? About half are the victims of sex trafficking. About a quarter toil at mundane tasks ranging from bidi rolling and carpet weaving to quarrying and fishing. India’s brick kilns alone enslave millions, most kept at the hot, dangerous work under ancient customs of debt bondage. The final quarter of today’s slaves are domestic drudges in places like Haiti and Tibet where it remains much cheaper to own a child slave than to buy and operate a dishwasher, a washer and dryer, a refrigerator, and so forth.

Yes, slavery is illegal throughout most of the globe today but that doesn’t mean much. Murder, rape, and methamphetamine production are also illegal but they still occur with disturbing regularity. The illegality of slavery has made it much harder to identify and fight and has also rendered it much more noxious for those enslaved. Today’s slaves, antislavery activist and author Kevin Bales points out, are in some ways much worse off than legal slaves were, not in terms of their degree of freedom but in terms of their day-to-day treatment. Legal slaves commanded high prices, as high as $100,000 in today’s dollars, and hence it was in the masters’ interest to provide them with basic human necessities. Slaves today, by contrast, are dirt cheap, selling for as little as $10 and rarely for more than $1,000. Hence, they are disposable people. Enslavers work them to death and have been known to murder them when the season’s work is done because that is safer and cheaper than maintaining them all year or letting them go. The bodies of small boys do not naturally end up in the bellies of Great White sharks and Bengal tigers, they are found in such places after enslavers kill them and leave their little, innocent corpses to be scavenged.

   And they might be the lucky ones. Ex-slaves today almost invariably suffer from PTSD, or post traumatic stress disorder. Child soldiers in Africa suffer from PTSD because they actually engaged in combat but so too, in a sense, do prepubescent girls forced to sexually service scores of adult men every day, week, month, and year until their bodies give out or they contract AIDs or some other STD that is more costly to cure than the girl is to simply replace.

You might now well wonder where all these slaves come from and the answer, generally, is from the lowest caste or class in every country in the world. Yes, occassionally Liam Neeson’s daughter is abducted and prostituted overseas but the vast majority of trafficked persons were tricked into going abroad with a stranger posing as a friend, boyfriend, or employer. Once in a foreign country where they don’t know the language, they are stripped of their passports and seasoned by being raped or beaten, often by corrupt police officers. With no way, or where, to run, the young girls and boys become ashamed of their actions and many sink into a torpor that helps them to survive the ordeal. If they emerge alive, though, many need years of therapy and education to have any hope of leading a normal life. A valiant few, like reincarnations of Henry Highland Garnet or Harriet Jacobs, join the modern antislavery movement but many more end up back in some sort of servitude, often in conditions worse than those in which they originally suffered.

Slaves are one of the few goods that get more valuable as they move away from their place of origin. That is because every mile they move themselves away from their homes makes them that much easier to control. It wasn’t that American Indians were unproductive slaves, as sometimes claimed, they simply found it too easy to escape. Scholars like Andres Resendez are now discovering that large numbers of Indians were trafficked to the West Indies, often in exchange for African slaves. The demise of the indigenous peoples of North and South America is looking less like largely accidental germ-warfare and more like outright genocide. Today, the Dalits of India, the Tharu of Nepal, the Karen of southeast Asia, and countless other downtrodden groups are experiencing a similar genocide as they send away their children with traffickers in scant hope that they will have a better life abroad.

Many enslavers are forcing their minions to destroy the earth’s most fragile ecosystems. Satellite images documenting the destruction of the Brazilian rainforests can be overlaid with maps showing an almost one to one correlation with known slave labor camps. In Bangladesh, children enslaved as fishers are quickly destroying the precious mangrove swamps with acre upon acre of drying racks hacked by scads of tiny hands.

The United States is home to a small percentage of those enslaved globally but that is still thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, of individuals. Most are trafficked for sex but some literally slave away cleaning hotels or picking fruits and vegetables in places like Florida. Slavery is more prevalent in some states than others. South Dakota is one of the worst offenders because of its tourism industry, specifically pheasant season and the Sturgis motorcycle rally, both of which bring hundreds of thousands of horny men into the state for a week of shooting off their guns and shining up their hogs.

If government-owned slaves are included, the states with the largest slave populations are certainly Florida, Texas, and California.Yes, government-owned slaves. I sometimes imagine U.S. law enforcement officials confronting enslavers by asking where they learned to steal the labor of others. The enslavers turn and say, indignantly, as in that drug commercial from the 1980s, “you, okay, I learned it from you.” It is no coincidence that America has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, save for a few brutal dictatorships like North Korea. Simply put, imprisoning people pays. Politicians get to look tough on crime; police departments get more personnel and equipment; most insidiously, private corporations earn big profits running jails or hiring prison labor at a small fraction of the going market rate.

It would help if the 13^th Amendment were itself amended so that those duly convicted of a crime were no longer exposed to enslavement by the state. For too many decades, governments have used the convict loophole to arrest, prosecute, and enslave Americans, mostly African-Americans but Indians, poor whites, and members of other downtrodden groups as well. Doug Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name and David Oshinsky’s Worse than Slavery opened the floodgates to reams of studies describing the horrors of what has come to be known as the carceral state, from the coal mines of Alabama to the chain gangs of Mississippi to the panty-sewing gals of Orange Is the New Black. Two of the best recent studies are Dennis Childs’ Slaves of the State and Talithia LeFlouria’s Chained in Silence. They make clear that state-sanctioned slavery is still slavery. We as a society have to figure out how to induce people to follow the law without killing them, mutilating their minds and bodies, enslaving them, or merely warehousing them for arbitrary periods because clearly the current system isn’t functionally properly and perhaps never did.

Hopefully by now you are appalled that something as morally reprehensible as slavery still exists and disgusted by the enormous negative consequences of slavery’s continuance. Members of the modern antislavery movement are trying to reduce slavery by not just raising awareness but by leveraging awareness into action. We know that we simply cannot buy slaves and free them because that practice reinforces the notion that humans are for sale while also increasing demand for new slaves. We also know that the supply of slaves is so vast and so vulnerable, basically any of the several billion people who somehow survive on $2 or less per day, that we can’t cut off supply either. What we try to do, then, is to reduce demand by one, introducing new technologies that can do the work more cheaply than slaves can, two, scaring multinational corporations with threats of boycotts into policing their own supply chains, and three, inducing governments worldwide to pass more stringent antislavery laws and enforce them. Basically, we need to make the expected cost of enslaving others so high that no one will dare to put to work anyone near the bottom of my freedom scale for fear of being caught, outed, prosecuted, and stripped of their assets.

If Carol Faulkner had been able to come today, she would have discussed the pros and cons of boycotting slave goods. I’ll make no sweeping claims about the matter as I have studied only one historical example in detail but it is one that has regional if not local connections. In the late 1830s, the sugar beet bug struck New England’s farmers. Soon, yet another agricultural bubble, like previous ones in Merino sheep, super chickens, mulberry trees, and other commodities, puffed into existence and spread into the Middle Atlantic states, Ohio, Illinois, and even Arkansas and Virginia. Realizing that the sugar made from beets was chemically identical to that made from cane, abolitionists jumped on the bandwagon too, pledging to buy only free sugar made by free laborers in the North. This was real sugar, after all, not maple sugar made from trees.
            So everybody soon bought sugar from sugar beets and soon sugar cane plantations went out of business and slavery ended without bloodshed forever. Not quite. Not even close, actually. For starters, because cane and beet sugar were identical chemically, and because America’s intellectual property laws had not achieved the state of perfection they currently enjoy, there was no way to tell the difference between slave and free sugar, except price. The latter cost more, not due to differences in slave versus free worker productivity but because of the laws of physics and chemistry. It simply took more energy to get the good stuff out of a beet until improved machinery came along decades later, by which time sugar beet production had largely moved to the western U.S. The main product that kept the early beet sugar factories going was the sale of the remnants of the beet, post-processing, as livestock fodder. Hogs will eat about anything.

Incidentally, three of the incorporated beet sugar manufactories to crop up in the late 1830s were in New Hampshire and one was in Vermont, in Enosburgh, Franklin County, about 65 miles northeast of here. Its incorporators were Austin Fuller, William N. Smith, and Charles B. Maynard, on the off chance those names mean anything to anyone here. You can follow up by downloading my database of over 20,000 U.S. for-profit corporations chartered before the Civil War at MEAD, or the Magazine of Early American Data, which is hosted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Van Pelt library.

Of course this discussion of boycotts, modern slavery, and so forth is just the tip of a very large, very ugly iceberg. If you want to know more, read my book Poverty of Slavery, any book by Kevin Bales, or any of the books recommended by Historians Against Slavery on its website, http://historiansagainstslavery.org/, that is h t t p historiansagainstslavery all one word dot o r g.

And as for that very annoying student I mentioned in the beginning of this talk, I eventually married her and we’ve had three children together. Not! She’s half my age and I’m not kidding about how annoying she was. In fact, if she ever learns about her influence on my career path into neo-abolitionism I’m sure she’ll claim that God works in mysterious ways or something equally annoying.

Thank you for your time! Any comments or questions before I head to Toronto to discuss bank governance?

P.S. to readers: If you find yourself in Vermont looking at leaves or hunting from Champ, stop by the Rokeby. It's permanent antislavery exhibit is phenomenal!!! Pick up some maple syrup when in town too.