Forced labor

"Unfree" or forced labour are collective terms for a variety of work relations in which people are employed against their will, often under threat of destitution, detention, violence (including death), or other extreme hardship to themselves or family members. Unfree/forced labor includes serfdom, debt bondage, prisoners of war, and convict labor, as well as all forms of slavery. "Free labor" is any situation where a worker is free to leave if they see fit. In practice, however, "free" and "unfree/forced" labor are often viewed as extreme points on a continuum, due to numerous situations where nominally free laborers face significant constraints on their ability to leave their jobs, and may not recieve payment above the level of subsistence.

Convict labourers in Australia in the early 19th century.

Types of Forced Labor

Slavery

"Chattel slavery", the legal ownership of a human being, is one of the most well known forms of forced labor. Individual workers may be bought, sold, or otherwise exchanged by their owners, and rarely recieve any personal benefit from their labor. The concept of slavery predates recorded history; mention is made of slavery in the ancient Babylonian "Code of Hammurabi" and biblical texts, and slaves were used in the construction of the Egyptian pyramids. Slavery was also a large part of ancient Roman society; scholars estimate that as much as one third of Rome's population was enslaved. Roman slaves were employed in households and the civil service, and many had been enslaved after they were conquered by the Romans.

While many claim slavery originated from war and the subjugation and enslavement of one people by another, there are also early examples of slavery due to debt. In areas of Africa, for instance, a man would put up a wife or children as collateral for an obligation; if the obligation went unfulfilled, the wife or children became permanent slaves. Others purport that slavery was a result of the development of an agricultural economy, but numerous instances of slavery in nomadic or hunter/gatherer societies exsist: domestic and concubine slavery exsisted among the Vikings, Native Americans, and nomadic Arabs.

One of the most prominent examples of chattel slavery was the capture and enslavement of millions of Africans, who were forcefully transported under inhumane conditions to the Americas, Asia, and Europe during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. The economic success of the United States, particularly the southern states, was largely dependent on the labor provided by slaves in the fields, who were often mistreated, separated from their families, and degraded. It was not until the mid 1800's that legislation was passed abolishing slavery in the United States.

Slavery, often referred to as "human trafficking", remains a major problem in the modern world. In addition to forced labor in sweatshops, domestic situations, and farms, many victims are trafficked in the sex industry. According to Kevin Bales, in Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (1999), there are now an estimated 27 million slaves in the world. It is estimated that 17,500 foreign nationals are trafficked anually in the United States alone, and even more are trafficked internally. Human trafficking is particularly problematic in Asian and South American countries, but the problem exsists in nearly every country in the world. Victims are often lured by the promise of a better life; many are transported illegally across borders to find themselves forced to work under threat of violence or other retribution. Young girls are recruited, lied to, raped, and forced into prostitution rings; children forced to labor as beggars are sometimes intentionally disfigured to increase donations. Victims of human trafficking are often kept in inhumane conditions, threatened with violence to themselves or their families or exposure to local authorities. They are allowed little or no freedoms, and told they must work off to pay a theoretical "debt"; often the fee for their original transportation, combined with added "debts"; in prostitution rings, involuntary abortions are added to a girl's "debt". Organizations like the Polaris Project, Anti Slavery International, the United Nations, and individual governmental agencies are working worldwide to confront the issue and spread awareness of the problem. Despite the fight against human trafficking and slavery, the International Labour Organization has estimated that 12.3 million people are victims of forced labor worldwide, more than 2.4 million of which have been trafficked. The profits from forced trafficked labor are estimated to be in excess of $30 billion dollars.

Debt Bondage

"Debt bondage", or "bonded labor", is a practice where workers willingly contract to enslave themselves for a specific period of time in order to repay a debt. Also called "indentured servants", workers would receive food, clothing, and shelter, and labor for their master until the allotted time was over. In many ways, debt bondage and indentured servitude are similar to apprenticeship, where one agrees to serve a master for a set amount of time in order to learn a trade. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a large portion of laborers in colonial America entered into debt bondage in exchange for passage to the New World. In 1925, the League of Nations showed evidence of bonded labor in all of South America, and stated that the practice was widespread throughout Africa and Asia.

The "truck system" is often used in conjunction with debt bondage. Associated with small, isolated, and/or rural communities, a truck system is a system where workers or self-employed small producers are paid with a private form of currency redeemable only at a "company store" that is owned by their employers. In debt bondage situations, credit for the purchase of food and other necessities is provided in exchange for future labor. When operated ethically, the truck system has many benifits for isolated areas, but this system is easily exploited by the employer, who can require workers to pay exorbitant fees for basic necessities, creating a cycle in which they will never be able to pay off their debt. Many governments have enacted legislation to outlaw truck systems and require cash payment.

In its idealized form, debt bondage is entered into willingly and freely, workers are treated humanely, and the bondage is ended after the specified amount of time. The option of debt bondage, much like apprenticeship, allowed workers who possessed little or no assets to trade their labor for passage to a new life or freedom from debt. However, this form of indentured servitude is easily abused and manipulated, and often becomes nothing more than slavery. Laborers are overworked, poorly treated, forced to live in inhumane conditions, and unethical masters find continual ways of adding to a worker's debt so that the debt is never paid off. In many instances, a husband enters his wife and children into bondage to repay a debt, with or without their agreement. Children of bonded servants often inherit their parents' debt, and are often overworked, mistreated, and threatened with violence for the rest of their life. As mentioned previously, the concept of debt bondage is often used to manipulate and traffic people into a situation where they have no rights, suffer inhumane conditions, and are forced into hard or demeaning labor with little or no hope of becoming free. In this situation, the term "debt bondage" is used to describe a situation that is, in reality, nothing more than slavery and human trafficking.

In 1956, the United Nations Supplementary Convention of the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery banned debt bondage, as well as serfdom, servile marriage, and child servitude. Many individual countries have additional laws forbidding the practice of debt bondage, but enforcement of these laws continues to be a major problem.

Penal Labour and Penal Colonies

Convict or prison labour is another classic form of unfree labour. The forced labour of convicts has often been regarded with lack of sympathy, because of the social stigma attached to people regarded as "common criminals". In some countries and historical periods, however, harsh forms of prison labour have been forced upon people whose crimes may not have warranted such a severe form of punishment: victims of prejudice, those convicted of political crimes, and those who commited theft of desparation. In individual prisons, chain gangs, work details, and penal colonies, prisoners have historically been a significant source of labor.

Penal colonies were institutions to which prisoners were exiled, usually with a geographic location that made escape difficult or impossible, and often to an economically underdeveloped area or territory. One of the largest and best known penal colonies were the British colonies in Australia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Approximately 165,000 convict laborers were sent to Australia from the British Isles between 1788 and 1868, eighty percent of whom had been convicted for larceny. After a grueling and sometimes fatal eight month journey, surviving convicts served either a seven year, ten year, or life sentence. Convicts were assigned to either the government works program, which performed such tasks as road building, or individual farmers or merchants to work.

Beginning in 1919, the Soviet Union established a system of forced labor camps called the Gulag, or Main Directorate for Corrective Labor Camps. By 1934, the Gulag had several million inmates in camps throughout remote Siberia and the Far North. The inmates of the Gulag, many of whom were political and religious dissenters, suffered harsh conditions; inadequate food and clothing made it difficult to endure the harsh Russian winters, prisoners were often abused by the guards, and the death rate from exhaustion and disease was high. With the construction of canals, railroad lines, roads, and hydroelectric stations, the work of Gulag prisoners made a significant contribution to the Soviet economy. The White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal was the Gulag's first massive construction project; in a mere twenty months, over 100,000 prisoners used pickaxes, shovels, and wheelbarrows to dig a 141 mile canal, many of whom died during construction. The labor and death of the prisoners turned out to be futile; after its completion, the canal was determined to be too narrow and shallow to carry most sea vessels.

File:Belomorkanal.png

Prisoner labour at the construction of Belomorkanal (the White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal), 1931-1933

Another infamous system of forced labor camps can be found in Nazi Germany's concentration camps. During World War II, the Nazis constructed a huge series of camps, many of which were designed to utilize the labor of "enemies of the state", including Jews, Roma, and prisoners of war, for the economic gain of the German state. Prisoners were subjected to harsh and inhumane conditions and forced to labor at quarries, brickworks, rubber factories, and rail construction. Jews were often detained in walled off "ghettos", within which the Nazis opened hundreds of factories to utilize Jewish labor. Laborers were given little in the way of food, clothing, and other basic necessities, and suffered demeaning and abusive treatment at the hands of the Germans. Workers, especially the Jews, were considered to be expendable and often worked to death. Once a worker became unproductive, he/she was often shot. Ebensee, located in Austria, was one camp designed to use prisoners' labor to construct a series of underground tunnels to house armament works. A great number of prisoners died from overexposure, starvation, illness, and overwork, and many others were tortured or killed outright at the whim of the Germans. One commandant of Ebensee openly offered extra cigarettes and leave to sentries who could boast the largest number of deaths in their section, and many prisoners were killed simply to help boost a sentry's numbers. Towards the close of the war in 1945, the death rate in Ebensee exceeded 350 per day.

Serfdom

Serfdom, a system in which peasant laborers are bound to the land they work and subject to the lord of the manor, is associated primarily with feudalism and the Middle Ages in Europe, though examples also appear during feudalistic times in China, Japan, India, and pre-Columbian Mexico. Serfs required permission to move, as they were bound to the land, and were also obligated to give tributes to the manor lord. Marriages could be arranged by the lord, although these sort of practices followed generally agreed upon customs. Serfs cusomarily had a body of rights, and were considered to be servile as a group, rather than individually. Serfs had the advantage of possessing the exclusive use of some land and/or means of production, legal or strongly traditional human rights, economic security, and free time to a much greater extent than slaves, indenturees, and many wage labourers.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• George W. Hilton, The Truck System, including a History of the British Truck Acts, 1465-1960. Cambridge, UK: W. Heffer & Sons Ltd, 1960.

• Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848. London: Verso, 1988.

• Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race (2 vol.) New York: Verso Books.
  • Vol. I: Racial Oppression and Social Control, 1994.
  • Vol. II: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America, 1997.

• Tom Brass, Marcel van der Linden, and Jan Lucassen, Free and Unfree Labour. Amsterdam: International Institute for Social History, 1993.

• Tom Brass, Towards a Comparative Political Economy of Unfree Labour: Case Studies and Debates, London: Frank Cass Publishers, 1999.

• Tom Brass and Marcel Van Der Linden (eds.), Free and Unfree Labour: The Debate Continues (International and Comparative Social History, 5). New York: Peter Lang AG, 1997.

• Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800, London: Verso, 1997.

• Kevin Bales. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. UC Berkeley Press, 1999

External links

• Slavery in the 21st century - BBC
• Sex trade's reliance on forced labour - BBC

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