Slavery

[Rod Hay <rodhay@xxxxxxxxxx>]

>From today's London Times


              Inhuman league
               THE NEW SLAVERY
                 Ed. Ursula Owen
        Index on Censorship, £8.99 (Non-fiction)
               ISBN 0 904 28677 0
  Special offer: Order from The Times Bookshop for £7.99
     (free p&p in the UK). Telephone 0870 160 80 80

  This first edition of the 21st century from Index on
  Censorship is devoted to a subject that we associate more
  properly with the 19th. The New Slavery is a collection of
  essays from around the world which assert that not only is
  slavery alive and well but that it is, in many ways, more
  iniquitous and certainly more profitable than ever.

  According to the reports printed, 27 million people still
  live in a condition of slavery, in that their lives are
  completely controlled by others and they earn nothing for
  their work. It is not as though the 300-odd international
  treaties and conventions that have been signed against
  slavery count for nothing; the system has, instead, evolved
  around them. The key to bondage is now no longer
  ownership of a person; it is control of that person through
  violence.

  In Thailand, the going rate for a young girl sold by her
  family into prostitution is $2,000. The country has 35,000
  female prostitutes, earning around $50,000 a year for their
  owners but nothing for themselves. Debt bondage - when
  a family member is handed over instead of money, but his
  labour can never cancel that debt - still flourishes in India
  and Pakistan. A million girls under 18 are working as
  unpaid domestics in the Philippines.

  And there is not, in this book, much optimism. With the
  trafficking of women from eastern Europe to work for
  organised criminals as prostitutes, the new slavery is
  operating in most western European capitals. As Kevin
  Bales writes in his overview, slavery is like tuberculosis:
  "let down your guard, and up pop new drug-resistant
  varieties in unexpected places". Only if we are constantly
  vigilant will it die down.

--
Rod Hay
rodhay@xxxxxxxxxx
The History of Economic Thought Archive
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