Is This Modern Slavery?
Is This Modern Slavery?
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Throughout history there have been those with wealth and power and those without it. The desire to gain or maintain power often leads to the disenfranchisement and exploitation of the vulnerable. Today, those practices are found in the global supply chains that feed our capitalist system.
Many of the things you own are born from exploitation. The sneakers you wear. The tea you drink. The toys you play with. From the initial ingredients to the final product, many hands around the world labor to supply you with what you want at a price you like. But the desire for profits and power by owners and the demand for value by consumers results in the extreme and unchecked exploitation of the vulnerable, the displaced, and the desperate.
Migrant workers, far from home, lacking support systems, cut-off from society, and unable to speak local languages are particularly vulnerable to exploitative practices. According to the non-profit organization KnowTheChain, “an estimated 24.9 million people around the world are victims of forced labor, generating $150 billion in illegal profits in the private economy.”
The items here are made under barbaric structures of oppression; debt bondage, forced labor, human-trafficking, child slavery, brutal working and living conditions, non-existing sanitation facilities, starvation, physical and emotional abuse, captivity, and death.
This raises the question, do you get the products you want at the prices you like thanks to modern slavery? Will the desire by some for power and profits and the desire by many for bargains forever enslave others? Will human nature, opaque power structures, and invisible global supply chains forever imprison those who are vulnerable? Or will our collective humanity triumph over our inhumanity?
Assam Tea
It is estimated that 25,000 cups of tea are consumed every second worldwide, or approximately 2.16 billion cups per day. Tea consumption is second only to that of water. A large portion of tea comes from India, where the industry employs more than 3.5 million workers.
Unfortunately, their reality is brutal and exploitation is rampant. In 2018, a report by the University of Sheffield officially categorized the plight of Assam plantation workers as akin to “forced labor.” These workers are systematically discriminated against and subjected to underpayment, nonpayment, violent discipline and control, debt bondage, and inhumane living conditions.
Artificial Flowers, Bricks, Holiday Decorations and Cards Made in China
The Chinese prison system currently has 2.3 million prisoners. It is the largest prison population outside of the United States, and the largest penal labour system in the world
According to Chinese law, forced prison labor is part of the punishment process. Conditions within prisons are brutal. Testimony by a former prisoner claims that at the beginning of work each day prisoners sit in a line and chant communist slogans, including “make the motherland strong” and “hail to the party,” followed by ten-hour workdays in their cells. Inmates are subject to whippings and are known to receive beatings with the same Christmas light cords that they must string together as part of their work. Earning somewhere between $13 and $85 a month, living conditions are defined by bug infestations and unsanitary living quarters.
These conditions are prevalent during the production of items including artificial flowers, bricks, and holiday decorations. However, it is almost impossible for foreign companies to identify whether their products are built using prison labor. Not only are global supply chains and distribution channels extremely opaque, but Chinese prisons devote resources to building false facades so that they can appear as legitimate production facilities.
Do you get the products you want at the prices you like thanks to modern slavery? Will the desire by some for power and profits and the desire by many for bargains forever enslave others?
Chocolate Bars
Approximately two-thirds of the world’s cocoa supply comes from cocoa-growing regions in West Africa, including the Ivory Coast. Across hundreds of thousands of small farms, it is estimated that more than 2 million children are forced into unpaid labor under dangerous conditions. According to a report by Washington Post, “the odds are substantial that a chocolate bar bought in the United States is the product of child labor.”
Children are sold to farmers by their parents, trafficked from homes and put to work on plantations. Once on a farm, children are subjected to grueling manual labor that includes clearing land, splitting cocoa pods with machetes, spraying pesticides, and carrying sacks that weigh upwards of 100 pounds. Workers have described being whipped, beaten, and forced to work 14 hour days. Many children who are promised the opportunity to attend school never get inside a classroom.
Cigarettes
Child workers in tobacco fields face impossible living conditions. Children are exposed to nicotine poisoning from regular contact with tobacco plants and leaves, in addition to toxic pesticides and other chemicals. Parents send their children to the fields to pay off their debts, contributing to a cycle of rampant generational poverty and communities ravaged by disease and deprivation.
Mutti Tomatoes
In Italy, produce pickers harvest by season, from one slum town to the next, through different regions of the country. Grapes are harvested in the fall, oranges and kiwis in the winter, strawberries and melons in the spring. Tomatoes in the summer. The produce ends up in colorful packaging on the shelves of supermarkets worldwide.
The Italian mafia’s kingpins control the supply of these seasonal produce pickers, immigrants primarily from Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria, Sudan, and Somalia. With no other means to make a living, produce pickers accept the inhumane working and living conditions. They work twelve hour shifts in burning heat, using malfunctioning and unsafe hardware, holed up in isolated shanty towns.
In 2014, the Italian mafioso Salvatore Buzzi was taped on a police wiretap saying: “Have you got any idea how much I earn through immigrants? I make more from immigrants than I do from drugs.”
Canned Tuna
In 2014, restaurants and consumers around the world spent 42 billion dollars on skipjack, albacore, bigeye, yellowfin, atlantic bluefin, Pacific bluefin and southern bluefin tuna.
More than half of this tuna came from the Pacific Ocean, where fishing is consistently accused of particularly gruesome human rights violations. Migrants are bought, sold, and held captive at sea. Injured workers are thrown overboard and left to drown.
Thirty-five companies sell 80% of the world’s canned tuna. Only four of them reported having any due diligence policies to address potential human rights violations. Not one has admitted a single case of modern slavery in their supply chain.
Tesco Cute Cat Cards 20 Pack
In December 2019, Florence Widdicombe, a six-year old in London, opened a box of Christmas cards purchased at Tesco, the popular British supermarket chain. Instead of a blank card, she discovered a handwritten plea for help. The note was allegedly written by a prisoner in Shanghai’s Qingpu prison, a facility with a history of Chinese human rights violations where prisoners are provided rusty beds and no heating, are subject to punishment, and are often wrongly imprisoned.
A Tesco spokesman for Tesco said: “We abhor the use of prison labour and would never allow it in our supply chain.” The supermarket subsequently withdrew the line of Christmas cards from sale pending further investigation.
Toys and Games
American toy consumption is worth $22.2 billion dollars. One thousand manufacturing companies in China are responsible for manufacturing an estimated 75% of the world’s toys. China produces 85% of America’s toys, for companies such as Fisher Price, McDonalds, and Disney.
In the face of increasing competition, corporations demand the best quality and the fastest production time at the lowest costs possible. The burden of these demands falls on the workers in Chinese toy factories, where illegal and unfair employment practices are common. State ID cards are held by employers. People work sixty to eighty hour weeks in unsafe conditions. Some workers only see their family once a year. In 2007, more than 300 children under the age of sixteen were discovered working eleven-hour days. It is not uncommon for factory workers to die in factories. Between 2010 and 2011, more than one hundred workers were poisoned by benzene at a toy factory that produced toys for companies including Disney, Mattel, and Hasbro. At one factory, when workers protested unpaid wages, the government sent riot police with dogs to suppress the protests and compel workers to accept partial compensation. Workers are housed in crowded, unsanitary, and unsafe facilities. Some employees in these factories earn 1/2000th of the value of each finished toy product.
L’Oréal Glotion
L’Oréal Glotion “delivers an illuminating color tint for healthy, radiant skin.” This “illuminating tint” comes from a substance called “mica,” or “potassium aluminium silicate,” or CI 77019. It is a shimmery mineral substance found in many beauty products marketed today.
60% of mica used in cosmetics comes from India, where child labor and worker exploitation is common. Average pay is approximately $0.29 to $0.43 a day. Miners breath in mica dust that causes infections, disease and permanent damage to lungs.
It is reported that deaths are so common that the traders who control this particular cluster of mines have a set rate of $432 that they pay to families who lose loved ones.
Prada / Luxury Items
Consumers may assume that extraordinarily high prices allow brands to produce extraordinarily high quality products whose supply chains and production facilities are treated with the same care and consideration as branding and marketing.
To keep companies accountable and assist in the eradication of forced labor from global supply chains, the non-profit organization KnowTheChain assesses companies. It gave low scores to many luxury apparel brands, including multibillion-dollar Prada,. which failed to report on the labor conditions of the majority of their workers. The company also defied efforts by international fair-labor watchdog groups to monitor conditions. Prada, headquartered in Milan, Italy, received one of the lowest scores.
Corcraft Products
Most of the approximately 75,000 prisoners in New York State are required to work a six-hour day five days a week, earning on average $1 a day. The City of New York Department of Correction Inmate Incentive Pay Plan lays out various hourly wages based on skill levels, ranging from (class “A”) Skilled workers, earning 28 to 39 cents an hour to (class “C”) Unskilled workers, earning as low as 17 to 27 cents an hour. A 2013 report stated the lowest hourly wage was 10 cents while the highest was $1.25. The items in this exhibition—the underwear, handkerchief, t-shirt and button-up shirt—are made by inmates working for Corcraft Products, an inmate-operated manufacturing company with 17 plants in prisons across New York State. According to Corcraft Products, programs such as theirs “help prevent disruptions, help offset the cost of incarceration, teach work disciplines and job skills, and address taxpayer expectations that inmates do something productive while incarcerated.” The 2,100 incarcerated workers at Corcraft Products produce apparel and textiles, emergency and janitorial supplies, office and school accessories, outdoor products, and shelving—all of which are sold to other government agencies.
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Mmuseumm is a non-profit project dedicated to helping people see the world we are living in through physical evidence. Support Mmuseumm by making a tax-deductible donation at Fractured Atlas 501(c)(3)