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The connection between modern slavery and ecological disaster
- tkinom 11y agoReplace "advance on wages" with $200+K of educational loan in US Higher Ed system. Or Replace "advance on wages" with "Free Higher Ed system" EU but 50%-70% tax for life. Are we all slaves, one way or the others? :-) Minus a few 1% who become the masters with luck, family connections or intelligent.
- moistgorilla 11y agoNo, we aren't all slaves despite how many edgy kids like to think. We can choose our job or not to work. We can decide not to pay our debts. I guarantee you if these people chose to run away or not pay they would be beaten.
- diyseguy 11y agoYou can't really choose not to work though. Ask anyone to honestly answer if they would work if they didn't have to and the answer is obvious: No one wants to work, not really. In America there are basically two choices for the majority: work or suicide
- doctorcroc 11y ago| Are we all slaves, one way or the others? :-) Absolutely not. Our lives of relative luxury don't even come close to the misery experienced by bonded laborers. At the end of the day - you go home to your laptop, heated apartment and fresh food (and can get legal protection for bankruptcy/loss of wealth). Don't compare that to the suffering of the truly poor. I get your philosophical point, but it has no place here.
- dang 11y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11246628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11246628 and marked it off-topic.
- scoofy 11y ago>"Slavery in granite quarries is a family affair enforced by a tricky scheme based on debt. When a poor family comes looking for work, the quarry bosses are ready to help with an “advance” on wages to help the family settle in. The rice and beans they eat, the scrap stones they use to build a hut on the side of the quarry, the hammers and crowbars they need to do their work, all of it is provided by the boss and added to the family’s debt. Just when the family feels they may have finally found some security, they are being locked into hereditary slavery. This debt bondage is illegal, but illiterate workers don’t know this, and the bosses are keen to play on their sense of obligation, not alert them to the scam that’s sucking them under." This is very much not slavery. It's terrible, it's fraud, and it's arguably some form of servitude, but it's not slavery. Calling it slavery is an insult to people who are owned and chained. Edit: much, much later at the very end of the article there is a more in depth accounting of what's happening. It seems to be mostly fraud tied with corruption, but there are accounts of straight servitude and some of the men say they were not able to leave. If this testimony is accurate, i'd say it's slavery.
- danharaj 11y agoWhat's the material difference between being forced to work to pay off an unpayable debt and being forced to work because of a legal fiction of ownership of another human being? There isn't one. This article is about slavery as a real, physical condition, not a legal condition.
- gdsimoes 11y agoYou are absolutely right.
- scoofy 11y agoYou can leave. You can get up and walk away and deal with the law, and possibly go to jail. In this case, it'll 'free' them because they are being defrauded according to the author. A slave cannot leave. A slave will not be jailed, a slave will be returned to their master and forced to work again. It's fucked up, but it's not slavery.
- runn1ng 11y agoOne common solution to this problem is "close your eyes and pretend it doesn't happen". It's very effective.
- g4z 11y agoit also has a long and proven track record of success
- kafkaesq 11y agoSometimes I wonder how much, if anything, has really changed since this fellow ruled the day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_II_of_Belgium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_II_of_Belgium Other than that machinery for exploitation has been geographically dispersed and greatly optimized, such that these days, our slaves don't drop like flies quite so often, but instead are kept around in a state of minimal sustenance -- so that their skills can be most efficiently extracted without all the, you know, rotting corpses, piles of severed limbs & ensuing bad PR.
- moondowner 11y agoFor those interested in Leopold's rule: "The crime of the Congo" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle https://archive.org/details/crimeofcongo00doyliala https://archive.org/details/crimeofcongo00doyliala
- garysieling 11y ago"King Leopold's Ghost" is also very good
- tsunamifury 11y agoEthical supply chains will become a badge of honor in the future for the upper class who can afford it... but the masses consuming the majority of the products driving the price down to slave-labor proportions will require a cultural change. There is something deep in human nature that sees something it wants and narrows our thoughts to just getting that item. Maybe its a holdover from our Hunter/Gatherer instincts. But we seem to be using it to hack our minds to ignore the damage we do to our fellow humans in the process of acquiring. We may need to aspouse minimalist ideology at a mass scale (something I see in fellow Gen Yers.)
- jqm 11y agoI trust regulatory policy much more than badges of honor. I always laugh when I see "fair trade coffee". Is it really fair trade? Do most people care about it? Would the socially conscious hipster just as easily drink non-fair trade coffee if the budget got tight or they thought no one was looking? You can't depend on people to do the right thing. That's why we have laws. International labor laws will hopefully one day become a thing. In the meantime we have trade agreements. We shouldn't allow import of slave produced goods to western societies. IMHOP.
- djrogers 11y ago>I trust regulatory policy The same regulatory policy regularly subverted by small bribes in the article?
- jqm 11y agoYa well... nothing human is perfect. Doesn't mean it can't be better (and it will be). But regulation generally trumps people behaving ethically on their own. Sadly. Also, couldn't small bribes also be a problem in things like fair trade certification?
- clort 11y ago> Sadly well, except that in a way.. regulation comes from the government, which is the collective us. I prefer that the government spends some money to work out what regulation would be useful so that the collective us can spend our money on fairly traded goods (as an example) rather than every person in the collective having to do that research constantly to overcome the hard sell and marketing lies that are produced to facilitate somebody making a quick buck and externalising costs which I wouldn't otherwise wish to pay. As an example, if the government says that in truth, gravestones imported from India are largely produced by slave labor and then it refuses to admit them into the country. That means, that when my relative died and I am not really in a frame of mind to research the supply chain of the headstones and the sellers lay on the hard sell, I can still be assured that I am not funding this terrible system. I would welcome that..
- ommunist 11y agoTechnically, robots are slaves. But is that wrong? Phones production is made by robots snd only assisted by humans.
- dudul 11y agoRobot actually means "slave" in Czech language.
- stonogo 11y agoNo it doesn't. That's "otrok". "Robot" is derived from the Polish for "chore".
- dudul 11y agohttp://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/05/where-does-the-word-robot-come-from/ http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/05/where-does-t... "Josef suggested ‘roboti’, which gave rise to the English ‘robot’. ‘Roboti’ derives from the Old Church Slavanic ‘rabota’, meaning ‘servitude’, which in turn comes from ‘rabu’, meaning ‘slave’."
- ommunist 11y agoNo. Thy the term itself was invented by Czech author Chapek, it has no that meaning.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
- dang 11y agoWe replaced the baity title with the part of the subtitle that seems representative of the article. If someone can suggest a better (more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again. Submitters: the HN guidelines ask you not to use the original title when it is misleading or linkbait. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- TheGRS 11y agoThis isn't so much an article as it is an excerpt from a book that is linked at the bottom. If you are looking for a pithy expose on the link between slavery, iPhones and environmentalism, you won't find it here, but the book does seem like a good read on the subjects it brings up.
- twoodfin 11y agoI won't cut and paste my comment[1] from the last time the cobalt-from-the-Congo issue made the front page, but I do want to repeat that I think it's a mistake to generalize from a single horrible situation. Imagine we found a rich vein of cobalt ore in Tim Cook's backyard: The Congo would still be in an unimaginably terrible state, but at least that part of our phones would be humanely supplied. What's next on the list? My guess is that it would be substantially less upsetting, and probably much easier to address. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10930445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10930445
- namenotrequired 11y agoObligatory mention of Fairphone: http://fairphone.com/ http://fairphone.com/ who try to get rid of slavery in as much of their supply chain as possible (and detail exactly how far they get there transparently in their blog).
- tim333 11y agoWell, your phone probably wasn't actually built by slaves. However it probably uses the element tantalum some of which come from ore mined in Congo and some of that is probably mined by slaves. The reason slavery goes on there is armed thugs from neighbouring counties (Rwanda and Zaire) have invaded and are forcing the locals to hand over the ore which is not a good thing. Though the solution is not to feel guilty about using phones, it's to kick the thugs out.
- kafkaesq 11y agoThe reason slavery goes on there is armed thugs from neighbouring counties (Rwanda and Zaire) have invaded and are forcing the locals to hand over the ore which is not a good thing. I disagree with you, there. The reason slavery goes on there is because we choose to permit it. It may be a passive choice, rooted in (willful) ignorance for some, or a sense of powerlessness ("I can't help those people, what do my own decisions matter?") for others. But if we really wanted to, we could just stop buying (at least discretionary) products which, by this point, everyone knows to be sourced from conflict zones, and human suffering that are inseparable from them.
- tim333 11y agoWell, it goes on because no one stops it. The obvious people to stop it would be the government of the country but they are not very effective. Failing that maybe some international body could help, the UN perhaps. I've also got a start up idea along those lines...
- Joeboy 11y ago> neighbouring counties (Rwanda and Zaire) I don't claim much knowledge of the area, but I'm confused that you're saying Zaire borders Congo, when in fact Zaire became the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997.
- narrator 11y agoThe Congo probably has the most depressing history of any country on earth. First their was the horrific Belgian colonization. Then, more recently, the Congo war in the late 90s was the most violent conflict since World War II with an estimated 2.7 Million to 5.4 Million dead [1] and hardly anybody knows about it. It's even referred to as Africa's World War. There was one documentary about it: Kisangani Diary[2]. It's about the bleakest film I've ever seen. The war came about after the dictator Mobutu died and the chaos and aftermath of the Rwanda genocide spilled over the border. All the surrounding countries saw enormous natural resource wealth to be claimed and started funding and equipping their own proxy militias to seize power. The whole thing was a huge chaotic mess that destroyed what little infrastructure there was in the country. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbD76cWdBHc&list=PLDD34C9812AF2DB09 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbD76cWdBHc&list=PLDD34C9812...
- api 11y agoI've never even heard of this, and I definitely pay attention to the news. This is basically WWIII in terms of overall combined casualties and... I'm just speechless... I have never even heard of it. Absolutely incredible.
- 100timesthis 11y agoI'm not saying that it isn't a tragedy but it's an order of magnitude less than WWII[1], or am I missing something? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II
- boxy310 11y agoIt's the largest single armed conflict since World War II, and yet it has less visibility than the Korean War (2,859,574 casualties [1]), Vietnam War (1,450,000 casualties [2]), or the Iraq War (654,965 casualties [3]). It's even worse known that the deaths through famines induced during the Cultural Revolution in China (400,000, rough estimate [4]). [1] http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/28/world/asia/korean-war-fast-facts/ http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/28/world/asia/korean-war-fast-fac... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties [3] http://web.mit.edu/CIS/pdf/Human_Cost_of_War.pdf http://web.mit.edu/CIS/pdf/Human_Cost_of_War.pdf [4] https://books.google.com/books?id=YpV7vbvclfgC&pg=PA354#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=YpV7vbvclfgC&pg=PA354#v=on...
- theworstshill 11y agoLots of discussion but no simple solutions. If somebody really wanted to help, there is an elegant way to correct this problem - airdrop AK47s and ammunition and let democracy take its course. Something similar to what the brits did over France in WW2 with small crude pistols.
- schiffern 11y agoThis is the fundamental problem with the "but we can't price externalities because growth solves poverty" argument. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11228262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11228262 Many times what appears to be growth is really just inefficient forms of wealth transfer where we're seeing only one side, causing more poverty than it solves. The word "externalities" don't mean that no one pays. It means that powerless third parties pay (who are unable to consent) -- poor children and the elderly breathing diesel fumes because their family can't afford to live far from the dump, or the indigenous people displaced/exterminated to raise cattle in slashed-and-burned rainforests, or the slave laborer, or our grandchildren who will have to deal with the effects of climate change and species extinction. Externalities aren't on a ledger somewhere, but it makes them no less real. Environmental protection is actually just humanity's enlightened self-interest, a fact the human/"environment" distinction serves only to mask.
- frotak 11y ago> "It’s hard to understand this much chaos, but imagine a city where the police and government have simply run away and five or six mafia gangs are running everything, each based in a different neighborhood. The thugs have total control and can do whatever they please, so just crossing from one part of town to another means paying a tax or risking attack or even enslavement. It’s a kind of feudalism, but these feudal lords have no sense of responsibility toward the people on their turf and there is no overlord king to keep order. For the thugs the townspeople are more like stolen cattle; there’s no investment beyond the effort of capture and little reason to keep them alive. Now imagine that when the government sends in the National Guard to confront the mafia, the Guard just carves out its own territory, settles in, and becomes another mafia. That’s the Eastern Congo." I genuinely don't understand this. Inasmuch as while the history of humankind seems to be one rife with violent domination of one group of people by another there is usually some overriding order enforced. Or if not an overarching order then at the very least some general mindfulness to a larger picture. Even when comparing to organized crime in the States...there are rules and a set of "laws" that are generally followed. Not exactly and not without violation, but there is a group enforcement of a base set of standards that provides the stability required to find growth and development. But in so much of Africa is seems that there is nothing but senseless savagery and violence. The wealthier nations absolutely feed it...but if I'm recalling my history of the continent correctly there was plenty of violence and savagery long before the first European colonists invaded and exploited the indigenous peoples.
- tim333 11y agoIt was pretty much the human condition until the invention of laws, writing and so on. Europe used to be pretty bad a few centuries back. Progress is just taking a little longer to reach central Africa but it probably will with the spread of the internet.
- golergka 11y agoCorrelation between slavery and lack of care for environment laws is obviously correlated — but why does the author link them together as if one happens when and only when there is another? They just have the same cause (willingness to break the law/ethics for profits) and I assume that there's a LOT of businessmen acting outside of the law in terms of ecology who are not slavers.
- JoshCole 11y agoFor anyone who happens to actually be doing this or something like this, that is keeping back wages to enforce slavery, its worth noting that the rust of your wealth will burn like fire against you. Torture and torment await you without repentance and turning to Jesus Christ. For everyone pleading the cause of the poor and needy: God delights in you're doing that - expect reward.
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- ommunist 11y agoThe author probably does not know that 97% of rare metals necessary to produce phones is controlled by China, and China export quotas. And Chinese workers are by no means slaves. They are proud members of their society and enjoy benefits of it.