Slavery is illegal throughout the world, yet more than twenty-seven
million people are still trapped in one of history's oldest social
institutions. Kevin Bales's disturbing story of slavery today reaches
from brick kilns in Pakistan and brothels in Thailand to the offices of
multinational corporations. His investigation of conditions in
Mauritania, Brazil, Thailand, Pakistan, and India reveals the tragic
emergence of a "new slavery," one intricately linked to the global
economy. The new slaves are not a long-term investment as was true with
older forms of slavery, explains Bales. Instead, they are cheap,
require little care, and are disposable.
Three interrelated factors have helped create the new slavery. The
enormous population explosion over the past three decades has flooded
the world's labor markets with millions of impoverished, desperate
people. The revolution of economic globalization and modernized
agriculture has dispossessed poor farmers, making them and their
families ready targets for enslavement. And rapid economic change in
developing countries has bred corruption and violence, destroying
social rules that might once have protected the most vulnerable
individuals.
Bales's vivid case studies present actual slaves, slaveholders, and
public officials in well-drawn historical, geographical, and cultural
contexts. He observes the complex economic relationships of modern
slavery and is aware that liberation is a bitter victory for a child
prostitute or a bondaged miner if the result is starvation.
Bales offers suggestions for combating the new slavery and provides
examples of very positive results from organizations such as
Anti-Slavery International, the Pastoral Land Commission in Brazil, and
the Human Rights Commission in Pakistan. He also calls for researchers
to follow the flow of raw materials and products from slave to
marketplace in order to effectively target campaigns of "naming and
shaming" corporations linked to slavery. Disposable People is the first
book to point the way to abolishing slavery in today's global economy.