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>"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 rea
by 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.
- sigmar 11y ago>It's fucked up, but it's not slavery. I'm not an expert on this subject, but have learned in the past minute of looking at the bonded labor links in this thread that the UN and other international organizations agree that bonded labor is within the modern definition of slavery. Do you have any sources that say otherwise?
- danharaj 11y agoDo you understand what debt bondage is? If you walk away from debt bondage in a society that enforces it, you get dragged back to working in debt bondage. Honestly this is such a pedantic distinction to make for anybody but a human rights lawyer in court.
- mdpopescu 11y agoTrue. That, however, has nothing to do with the people in the article. The author makes it clear that this WOULD NOT HAPPEN to them.
- jjoonathan 11y agoThe right to choose is only ever as good as your BATNA, it does not confer power in and of itself. Also, are you sure they're aware of their ability to leave without government-enforced intervention?
- scoofy 11y agoIt's not an issue of whether they are aware or not. By the author's own admission, they are only staying because of their own sense of duty, that the debt is illegal, that they are being defrauded. It's one thing to say, workers are being shorted, cheated, etc, but if your headline is "your iphone is being built by slaves" then you should be referring to, at least, people who are being held against their will. Not simply people who are confused about the law and are working for free because of this confusion.
- SerLava 11y ago
- deelowe 11y agoThe difference is that a slave is the legal property of the owner to do as he or she pleases (including destruction of said property, if they deem it necessary). That's a pretty critical difference. Things can still be characterized as being pretty messed up without resorting to misrepresentation.
- danharaj 11y agoI mean, you're wrong. The sibling comment to mine that links to wikipedia is a starting point from which one can discover that the United Nations and basically everyone agrees that debt bondage is slavery. Because people think of slavery in terms of its material conditions, not the vagaries of its legal procedures.
- scoofy 11y agoMy original point is the article very explicitly points out that the people are not actually being held in debt bondage. That they are simply staying out a sense of duty. This is a fundamental distinction. It's still fucked up, but it's not slavery.
- filoeleven 11y ago> My original point is the article very explicitly points out that the people are not actually being held in debt bondage. Actually, your original point referenced people being "owned and chained" as being distinct from what was described in the quote you pasted from the article, which has this right in it: "This debt bondage is illegal". Do you also take issue with the article's use of the term debt bondage? From Wikipedia: > Debt bondage (also known as debt slavery or bonded labor) is a person's pledge of their labor or services as security for the repayment for a debt or other obligation. How is debt bondage different from "staying out [of] a sense of duty"? Keep in mind that these people aren't free to just walk away--if they are to escape, it has to be just that: an escape. I saw a documentary on this a year or two ago, probably by Vice. The family wanting to leave had to run under the cover of night and rendezvous with someone with a car--only possible with existing outside connections.
- mturmon 11y agoYou have been down voted, but I think your point is a good one. To rephrase what you said, the actual, on-the-ground difference between chattel slavery (say, as practiced in the American South) vs. this kind of open-ended debt bondage, which is apparently being winked at by the state and by society at large, may be small.
- throwaway_231 11y ago> forced to work because of a legal fiction of ownership of another human being The same can be said of any piece of paper that assigns ownership to a piece of land, or anything else on this earth.
- danharaj 11y agoNo argument from me here: i don't support ownership of the means of production, state or private.
- talles 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery#Bonded_labor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery#Bonded_labor
- wmeredith 11y agoIsn't this the classic company store scam?
- Swizec 11y agoOne of the best ads I've seen on this topic is a picture of big rubber gloves near the SF Ferry Building. Under the gloves it says "Could these be shackles? Ask your janitor." I thought it was powerful. My girlfriend who grew up here didn't get it. Faux slavery of this kind is very widespread. Very.
- id 11y agoI searched for it and this is part of a campaign from a workgroup called "No Traffick Ahead": http://www.notraffickahead.com/campaigns/ http://www.notraffickahead.com/campaigns/ Powerful indeed.
- tdaltonc 11y agoChattel slavery is the most sever and inhuman form of slavery, but it's not the only one.
- maxerickson 11y agoIndeed. This discussion would work better if it had started with some defined terms and people stuck to them. I think if humans could handle it, matching concepts with made up words would even be useful (rather than each side insisting that a word with a lot of baggage be attached to this or that concept).
- kafkaesq 11y agoThere is a technical legal distinction between the status of these people those referred to as "slaves" during the colonial era. But at the end of the day (and from the point of view of those directly affected), it's a fairly picayune one. And to deny, from the safety of the comfortable and protected position where we sit, that it isn't basically the modern, moral equivalent of slavery is to dodge the key issue at hand, and seems quite callous to the suffering of those affected.
- hitekker 11y agoIf I could give ten upvotes to this comment, I would. To be a slave is to be the formal or informal property of another. It is to be considered subhuman, and all the dark implications that go with that status. Pretending that the lowest pits of wage-slavery, as described in this article, does not qualify as slavery is the mark of the cruel and misshapen.
- scoofy 11y agoI never intended for this to be an argument about "who has is worse" or something like that. What's being described in the article is obviously terrible. However, by the author's own admission, the people here could get up and walk away at any time, and that they are staying merely because of a sense of duty tied to a legal fiction. This is terrible, i repeat, it's an illegal, shameful, terrible act, but it is not slavery. I'm not in anyway trying to trivialize what's happening, i'm upset because the author is clickbaiting something that doesn't need it.
- jolux 11y ago>However, by the author's own admission, the people here could get up and walk away at any time, and that they are staying merely because of a sense of duty tied to a legal fiction. Where the hell does it say they could just get up and walk away? Do you seriously think that the people in this situation wouldn't have done so if it were possible?
- 11y ago
- coldtea 11y ago>This is very much not slavery. It's terrible, it's fraud, and it's arguably indentured servitude, but it's not slavery. Calling it slavery is an insult to people who are owned and chained. Actually trivializing it because it doesn't meet some ideal of what slavery should be is the actual insult to people who have to live through that hell life. And the people indeed are or have been "owned and chained" would have no problem with calling such an injustice slavery too. That would be actually petty of them... Not to mention that historically and globally there have been many forms and traditions of slavery and servitude -- including similar debt schemes, used even back in ancient Greece and Rome.
- scoofy 11y agoThis is exactly why i'm so infuriated with clickbaity titles. I'm not trivializing what is happening at all. It's the author who has a perfectly good article to write, about horrific, illegal, dangerous, and downright immoral business practices throughout a major supply chain, and then he has to go and say that it's something it's not to get a few more clicks.
- Chathamization 11y agoIt's also problematic since it seems like many people only read the title and not the article itself, and then assumed that the article is about iPhone production in Foxconn factories (which it isn't).
- ascorbic 11y agoAuthors rarely write the titles.
- DanBC 11y agoAnyone working to reduce indentured servitude calls it modern slavery. So I can believe alll those workers in many multinational agencies who all call this modern slavery, or I can believe you.
- patsplat 11y agoAnd if such debts were sold between quarry bosses? What would you call that?
- api 11y agoOur financial system?
- beat 11y agoMany years ago, I was arrested for something annoying and dumb. I was separated from the group (several friends) and questioned before we were formally arrested, getting a coerced confession from me. In court, the confession was thrown out - the police argued that I was not under arrest at the time, but when the judge asked if I was free to go, the police had to say no. That meant I was under arrest, whether or not I was cuffed, whether or not they had read me my rights. It's not slavery because it's legally called slavery. It's slavery because those people are not in any way free to leave.
- nl 11y agoYes(ish) This is Debt Slavery (or Debt Bondage)[1], and you are correct that it is a different thing to chattel slavery. However, it is still considered slavery. In particular, it is outlawed under international law under the "Convention on the Abolition of Slavery"[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_bondage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_bondage [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplementary_Convention_on_the_Abolition_of_Slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplementary_Convention_on_th...