Human Goods

Yesterday marked the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade, and UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura used the opportunity to remind the world how critical it is to remember that the slave trade is indeed still happening.

The UN News Centre quoted him saying,

While we should never forget the atrocities committed in the past, we should be equally vigilant in seeking to abolish the contemporary forms of slavery that affect millions of men, women and children around the world.

The Day commemorates the 1791 uprising when Caribbean slaves rebelled and sparked a revolution in Haiti.

Few Americans will likely make human trafficking a deciding issue when they go to the polls this November. But nevertheless, the topic pops up now and then in speeches and interviews of the candidates. Paul Bernish, of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center’s Freedom Blog, broke down the candidates’ stances on slavery in a post titled, “Human Trafficking: What are McCain and Obama saying?”

“Most likely,” Bernish writes, “Trafficking will remain a secondary issue unless something happens to bring the matter into the public realm and prompt the political news media to raise questions with the candidates.”

Bernish highlights some of McCain and Obama’s references to human trafficking, including a May speech by McCain on defending the rights of the powerless worldwide:

While the past few years have seen increased efforts on the part of the State and Justice Departments and the FBI to combat the human slave trade, we must do more. As President, I’ll increase cooperation and communication between all agencies of the federal government by establishing an Inter-Agency Task Force on Human Trafficking, whose purpose will be to focus exclusively on the prosecution of human traffickers and the rescue of their victims.

During last weekend’s Saddleback conference, mediator and megachurch pastor Rick Warren questioned Obama on how he plans to address the problem:

RICK WARREN: OK. Another issue, the third largest and the fastest growing criminal industry in the world is human trafficking. $32 billion a year. A lot of people don’t know that there are about 27 million people living in slavery right now. Many of them in sex trafficking than any others. How do we speak out and how do you plan to do something about that?

BARACK OBAMA: This has to be a top priority and this is an area where we’ve already seen bipartisan agreement on this issue. What we have to do is to create better, more effective tools for prosecuting those who are engaging in human trafficking and we have to do that within our country. Sadly, there are thousands who are trapped in various forms of enslavement, here in our country.

Oftentimes young women who are caught up in prostitution. So we’ve got to give prosecutors the tools to crack down on these human trafficking networks. Internationally, we’ve got to speak out and we’ve got to forge alliances with other countries to share intelligence, to roll up the financing networks that are involved in them. It is a debasement of our common humanity, whenever we see something like that taking place.

(click here for full transcript)

Dubai, by most accounts, is something of a fantasyland. Exploding with new money that begets uninhibited , almost Dr. Seussian, architecture and draws affluent business and pleasure-seekers from around the world, it has also, much like Las Vegas or Amsterdam, become what I like to call an exception zone. A playground of privilege, if you will, where things you might not do elsewhere become acceptable. Because, hey, it’s Dubai. The rules don’t apply in this surreal metropolis.

Except wherever money and power accumulate, exploitation almost always follows, flying under the radar and making both business and pleasure attainable. Night clubs pulse with military contractors, tourists, and Arab businessmen seeking easy sex with Iragi refugees. Filipina maids, obtaining jobs abroad so they can send money home to their children, are often abused (sometimes quite sadistically). There have been numerous cases of maids being thrown out the windows of lavish, otherworldly skyscrapers that peak up, Jetson-like, above the clouds on a foggy day.

But it makes a kind of sense– where there is excess, people become increasingly expendable. And easy to replace.

Glen Carey, for The Asian Sex Gazette, published an article on the trafficking of persons to Dubai:

Dubai has transformed itself from a trading village to the Persian Gulf’s financial and tourist hub with lower taxes and a more vibrant nightlife than other Gulf states. Bars heave with men drinking $10 beers and women in short skirts.

That’s attracted rich Saudis, US oil workers flush with cash after stints in Iraq, and bankers who are paid as much as 40 percent more than those in London or New York.

Affluence has increased the demand for laborers and housemaids, and the development of laws to protect them from exploitation hasn’t kept pace, the International Labor Organization said in an e-mailed response to questions.

Women from Asia and Africa often sign contracts to work as maids, waitresses, hairdressers and secretaries, only to have employers confiscate their passports and force them to work as prostitutes, the US report said. Others work excessive hours under the threat of mental, physical or sexual abuse until they can pay off recruitment costs.

According to the article, Dubai, which is ranked on the Tier 2 Watch List of the U.S. Trafficking in Persons report, is making an effort to curb the problem. Carey writes, “In July (2007), the UAE formed a committee of senior officials to combat human trafficking, and it has opened a shelter for abused women. In the past year it has closed 40 hotels and clubs that allowed prostitution, said Anwar Gargash, minister of state for Federal National Council Affairs in Dubai.”

Such efforts are well and good. But you have to wonder, as you do with Vegas, about how much the problem really can be eradicated when the whole culture of the place, the essence of it, what makes it saleable, what makes its market value shine, is precisely the fact that it assuages the guilt of the haves by promoting their entitlement to the labor and bodies of the have-nots and building on the delusion of the Western right to pleasure at all costs. Costs which usually remain invisible to most of us who can’t even imagine having to surrender the autonomy of our bodies and souls.

In the end, Dubai is an exception zone, yes. But only more obviously than the rest of the world we occupy.

A feature length documentary called Call and Response will be released this fall to rally action around modern-day slavery. Musician Justin Dillon decided to form a collective of musicians, including Imogen Heap, Moby, and Talib Kweli, to head this musical abolitionist movement. Also interviewed in the documentary are longtime anti-slavery activists Nicholas Kristof to Madeleine Albright to Julia Ormond.

According to the documentary’s website,

CALL+RESPONSE goes deep undercover where slavery is thriving from the child brothels of Cambodia to the slave brick kilns of rural India to reveal that in 2007, Slave Traders made more money than Google, Nike and Starbucks combined.

You can check out the film’s blog and even share your response to increasing slavery awareness on the site’s interactive “respond” tab.

The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center’s blog recently posted commentary on the stalling of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act in the Senate, which Human Goods reported on earlier, with a focus on Chicago.

John Miller, former ambassador on slavery for the State Department and leader of the Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Human Trafficking, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times. He boldly challenged the Bush Administration to account for the Justice Department’s opposition to new clauses in the bill that would intensify anti-slavery laws in the U.S.  Although the bill passed the House with weak opposition, the Senate stalling has been so pronounced that Sen. Joseph Biden reintroduced it with some of the controversial provisions eliminated.

Miller writes,

A culture clash, I suspect, is the real reason for the Justice Department’s opposition. This isn’t the usual culture clash of right and left, religious and secular. In this case, the feminist, religious and secular groups that help sex-trafficking survivors are on one side. And on the other are the department’s lawyers (most of them male), the Erotic Service Providers Union and the American Civil Liberties Union — this side believes that vast numbers of women engage in prostitution as a “profession,” by choice.

As one Justice Department lawyer put it at a meeting I attended, there is “hard pimping and soft pimping.” The department’s letter hints at this view. Adult prostitutes who are transported across state lines, in violation of the Mann Act, should not receive grants under the Victims of Crime Act of 1984 because they “do not meet the legal definition of ‘victim,’” the letter states.

…….
Put me on the side of those who have worked with the victims. I have talked with survivors all over the world, including the United States, and I share the view that these women and girls — the average age of entry into prostitution is 14 — are not participating in the “oldest profession” but in the oldest form of abuse. They are slaves.

…..

And Senator Joseph R. Biden, Democrat of Delaware, has introduced a bill that largely complies with the department’s views.

The president may never have seen the Justice Department’s letter. But Representatives Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York, and Deborah Pryce, Republican of Ohio, two of the leaders of the Congressional Caucus on Human Trafficking, have been unable to arrange a meeting with the president to express their concerns to him.

President Bush should meet with them — and his own Justice Department — before he loses his legacy and his leadership on the abolition of modern slavery.

(photo source: IKEA)

Robert Young Pelton’s bestselling guide to getting into, out of, and staying alive in the world’s most dangerous places does not include IKEA on a Sunday afternoon. Most people don’t stumble on minefields or receive ransom demands, but you still have to take a deep breath before going inside. Even from the parking lot, your skin starts to prick with the pressurized bustle of crowds and accumulation. Escalators criss-cross through the air above, carrying young couples in summer shorts with crabapple toddlers in tow through a maze of bedroom enclaves with fake books, fake televisions, clothing that is weirdly not for sale but seems shrewdly selected by a stylist for the room’s inhabitants that actually don’t exist.
Most of us are here for two reasons, the first being that there is something we want or think we need, and the second that, as first-world consumers, we have every right to get it. I woke up this morning bemoaning the lack of counter space in my kitchen. I had been intending to get into cooking, just as I had wanted to get into exercising a few months before and so had splurged on a gym that was ritzier than necessary, hoping the airy vibe would inspire me to hit the machines more often. As I attempted to slice bananas into my cereal on a meager plot of linoleum wedged between the microwave and the stove, I figured I’d be much more inspired to chop vegetables that evening if I had a little more space. Maybe a smooth wooden countertop, room to spread out, something comfortable. So I grabbed my keys to go fulfill that vision, a vision made possible by IKEA.
IKEA’s proclaimed mission is to bring aesthetically pleasing, well-designed furniture to everyday people at affordable prices — eye-popping prices, in many cases. I bump along through the shoppers strewn among displays of bathroom mats and living room sets, amassing ideas of how to brighten up a room here and there, or even totally overhaul it on the cheap. I have to make my way through dozens of versions of living space before I reach the faux kitchen sets, and not without feeling an onslaught of materialism ripple through me. That is indeed a neat idea for creating more sitting space in the living room. Maybe I would be happier with desk space like that. And it’s not an astronomical reach, of course. I mean, I’m an everyday person, right?
But there’s a small, sneaky conundrum that creeps into my heart. How come it’s all so cheap, after all? What really makes that possible? I pay extra for fair trade coffee because marketers have made it easy for me to choose a brand that’s fair. So what’s the deal with furniture?

There’s nowhere people like to point accusing fingers more than at corporate America when it comes to catch phrases like “social responsibility.” This shift in consumer values has forced U.S. companies to better account for what happens along their supply chains, and companies like Nike and Wal-Mart have both faced customer boycotts for sketchy labor conditions among the lowest echelons of their production chain.

Robert Strand, a teacher of business ethics at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, researched the Scandinavian approach to corporate responsibility as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Norway. One of his initial mistakes when first exploring the issue was that he was digging around for responsibility clauses as add-ons to already existing corporate policy. American companies seemed to be tacking these gimmicky “extras” on like mad, so he wondered why he wasn’t seeing the same things happen in Norway.

What Strand found was that Scandinavian companies, including IKEA, were committed to a “triple bottom line,” a way of framing success that is not measured by next quarter’s profits alone, but a balance between economic, social, and environmental factors. Strand credits much of this to more entrenched values of social justice in Scandinavian cultures that benefit stakeholders – including employees, communities, and production workers, to name a few – as much as they do shareholders.

With stores in 24 countries throughout the world, IKEA reported $29 billion in revenue last year. Anyone who’s ever been anywhere near Scandinavia knows that that the affluent countries that make it up are anything but cheap. Salaries are high and labor laws generous, so IKEA moved its production to lower-cost regions to produce lower-cost goods. Makes sense.

Except the developing world taps an entirely new well of nightmarish problems when it comes to monitoring human rights and environmental safety. Take, for starters, the “carpet belt” of Uttar Pradesh.
There are 27 million slaves in the world today, and at least half of them live in India. Many are children, and in states like Northern India’s Uttar Pradesh, it’s almost impossible to monitor labor conditions. This is partly due to the fragmentation of production. UNICEF figures identify as many as 525,000 weavers across the belt.

“The production of carpets in India is spread over large geographical areas and divided into many small units,” IKEA spokeswoman Marianne Barner writes. “Sometimes right down to individual looms in villages scattered across the countryside.”

The nature of the beast, then, is that it’s impossible for IKEA to fully monitor the working conditions of those at the bottom of the supply chain. But what’s unique about the blue-and-yellow giant is that it has partnered with organizations like UNICEF to work out strategies to tackle rights violations as best it can, rather than throwing its hands up with the defense that the problem is just too big.
It’s common, when sweatshops and child labor are exposed somewhere in the supply chain of U.S. companies, to reflexively cut off those suppliers like gangrenous appendages that threaten the grail of positive branding. But all too often, this actually further jeapordizes the welfare of children, who are considered stakeholders. They are scuttled from sweatshop to sweatshop, or, if production in the area is completely shut down, some children find themselves involved in survival sex.
IKEA’s corporate social responsibility code is unique in the way it recognizes this complexity – how poverty, exploitation, and lack of education are all interwoven. When IKEA inspectors unearth instances of child labor, instead of severing the connection in a flush of PR anxiety, IKEA works with suppliers to reshape their treatment of children and labor conditions, and even sends the kids to school. It’s about reforming, improving, making good on a genuine value of accountability. Not carefully maintaining a corporate image with hedge-clippers.
Great, I think. Now I don’t feel bad about wanting that new kitchen counter, and being able to get it with a swipe of the card.
Being green and having a social conscience are all too often temporary fads that you can frivolously clip on like earrings, and as I weave through conversations among other IKEA shoppers who sound like they’re toying with greenness as the season’s new accessory, it strikes me, in a sheepish, sinking way, that maybe the corporations are a lot more responsible than we are. Maybe we point fingers at “big this” and “big that” simply because it’s easy.

I sit on the wide hardwood floors of my apartment – beautiful floors that stretch across four rooms for one person – and furrow my eyebrows at the Swedish cartoon instructions on how to assemble my pretty new counter amid an explosion of nuts and bolts, and I realize something. The conundrum, even after assurances of broad-based, sincere and effective corporate efforts that are surely paving goodness in the world, hasn’t resolved itself. It flaps its wings instead of settling, because the whole point is still missing, and my heart knows it. It knows my concern about social responsibility is outwardly focused, that responsible policy provides relief because it requires me to give up nothing. I have license to carry on the way I do with the assurance that I’m not harming anyone. Not really, anyway.
So I do carry on. I set up my counter. I give myself more space and convenience. I don’t learn to brook discomfort, because comfort remains so attainable. I slice those bananas with all the elbow space I need.

(Click here to watch a WCCO interview with Robert Strand)

Arthur Fournier, on the Huffington Post, responded to Dan Harris’ investigation into child slavery in Haiti in a recent Nightline special (see previous post on Human Goods).

Slavery, he says, is only the “tip of the ‘consequences-of-poverty’ iceberg”:

Given how little most Americans understand about Haiti and how this lack of understanding during the early years of AIDS led to stigmatization of Haitians that persists to this day, this is no small point - exploitation of vulnerable people has nothing to do with ethnicity or culture and everything to do with poverty and the survival choices poor people are forced to make …

Solutions, therefore must address conditions that make rural life insufferable - poor agricultural productivity, lack of education, high maternal and child mortality and lack of health care. Such models do exist.

Fournier is correct in identifying the scope of the problem (a scope so large that it’s questionable that Harris could have covered it in that much depth in a brief episode about Haiti).

The Not for Sale Campaign launched a tool they’re calling a Slavery Map, which allows people to report incidents of slavery around the United States and the world.  You can click on any area and see where cases of human trafficking have been reported, including who reported them and what happened.

It’s a clever way to make learning about modern-day slavery interactive, since you can create an account and publish an incident if you encounter one.

(source: The Economist)

The Economist published a nice concise response to the release of the 2008 Trafficking in Persons report released by the State Department. It gives a good overview of what the global situation is and a very brief definition of what the report is supposed to do.

The State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons released its 8th annual Trafficking in Persons report last week.

Since the 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act was passed and the TIP office was created, it has annually ranked all the countries in the world (besides the U.S., quite conspicuously) on a four-tier system that works like this:
TIER 1
Countries whose governments fully comply with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s (TVPA) minimum standards
TIER 2
Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the TVPA’s minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards
TIER 2 WATCH LIST
Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the TVPA’s minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards
AND:
a) The absolute number of victims of severe forms of trafficking is very significant or is significantly increasing; or
b) There is a failure to provide evidence of increasing efforts to combat severe forms of trafficking in persons from the previous year; or
c) The determination that a country is making significant efforts to bring themselves into
compliance with minimum standards was based on commitments by the country to
take additional future steps over the next year
TIER 3
Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so

The report is worth reading, to get a sense of how the U.S. government frames the fight against human trafficking. But keep in mind that it’s a tool, and a controversial one. Some critics argue that methods for gathering the information from country to country are not clear, and we don’t necessarily know how accurate a reflection the report is on a country by country basis.

Moreover, its purpose gets a little shoved around by other geopolitical motivations. For example, check out some of the Tier 3 list (countries that face potential sanctions). Many of them have been on there for years:

ALGERIA, BURMA, CUBA, IRAN, NORTH KOREA, SUDAN, SYRIA.

Undoubtedly, these countries do have terrible problems when it comes to trafficking. But we’re not really burning any bridges with them when we threaten them with sanctions on slavery grounds.

Meanwhile, India, which has more slaves than the rest of the world combined, remains on a “watch list,” where we can shake our finger a bit at them but all other diplomatic causes basically trump slavery. Which is not the TIP office’s fault, it’s just the way things go, I guess.

Click below to listen to Condaleezza Rice’s remarks on the 2008 report: