Viet Nam Human Rights
Slavery Modernises
12/3/20
"Slave labour is not declining; it has taken on new forms and is growing; it expanded to new sectors where it did not previously exist," said Ivanete da Silva Sousa, an activist in the fight against modern-day slavery in northern Brazil.
This scourge expanded from livestock farming, charcoal and sugar production and other rural activities to urban areas: the construction and textile industries, among other sectors, she told IPS.
As one of the founders of the Centre for the Defence of Life and Human Rights (CDVDH), created in 1996, Sousa has monitored the evolution of contemporary slavery, characterised by forced labour, excessive working hours, degrading conditions, and restrictions on freedom of movement, as typified by the Brazilian Penal Code.
The Centre was born in Açailandia, in the west of the state of Maranhão, because this municipality of 112,000 inhabitants was a hub of slave labour to produce the charcoal consumed by the local iron and steel industry, which exports pig iron, a product of smelting iron ore that is used in the production of steel.
It was also a hotbed of trafficking of virtually captive workers, as it was located on the border of Maranhão, the largest supplier of labour for degrading and illegal work, together with Pará, the Amazon jungle state where slavery conditions are rife.
For these reasons Carmen Bascarán, a Catholic lay missionary from Spain, chose Açailandia as the headquarters of the CDVDH, to put into practice her ideas to help the poor. She was the soul and leader of the Centre, which added her name to its own when she returned to her home country in 2011.
Street vendors of hammocks made in Ceará, another neighbouring state to the east, are recent examples of workers in slavery-like conditions identified in Maranhão, Sousa said from Açailandia in her dialogue with IPS.
Stores are also taking advantage of the new facilities provided by the use of the "hour bank", adopted in the 2017 reform of the labour laws, to force their employees to work many extra hours and give up their weekly day off, without the obligatory compensation.
"Hours worked accumulate," but the compensation in hours off in later days, as stipulated by the law, "never arrives," said the activist, the administrative secretary of the CDVDH for the past six years.
The 2017 reform, defended as an adaptation to the current conditions in the economy and labour relations, offered new opportunities for the "modernisation" of slave labour: "It became more difficult for people to detect slave labour," Sousa said.
The statistics collected by different government agencies engaged in the fight against slave labour also point to a complex picture which has evolved over time.
The Catholic Church's Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) processed the data gathered from 1995 - when Brazil acknowledged the problem and began to combat it systematically - to 2019.
In the past 25 years, a total of 54,778 workers were rescued from slavery or degrading conditions by the authorities, especially the Mobile Inspection Team, which brings together people from the ministry of labour, the labour prosecutors office, and the police.
The crackdown on modern-day slavery intensified in the 2003-2010 period, when more than 3,000 workers were freed each year, with a record 6,001 rescued in 2007. Since then the number has dropped steadily, to 1,050 last year.
In this process, the rescue operations that were concentrated in the agricultural frontiers of the Amazon jungle states of Pará, Mato Grosso and Maranhão spread throughout the country, to the wealthier and more industrialised southern and southeastern regions as well.
Since 2006, the phenomenon has been expanding in urban areas, especially the construction and textile industries.
"The discovery of slave labour in new parts of Brazil and new branches of activity revealed situations that probably existed already, but which until then no one had reported or which had not been sufficiently or properly investigated," Xavier Plassat, who coordinates the CPT's campaign against contemporary slavery, told IPS.
"These statistics have to be analysed carefully", because they can lead to misleading conclusions, Plassat, a Dominican friar, warned in an interview.
The large number of workers rescued in the first decade of this century, for example, was due to inspections in the sugar industry, which identified in one fell swoop hundreds of workers subjected to abusive conditions during the sugarcane harvest, he pointed out.
That situation changed quickly with the mechanisation of cane cutting, imposed by local governments in response to air pollution in nearby cities, created by the practice of pre-harvest sugar cane field burning.
In the sectors of cattle breeding and farming, where some employers are abusive, there was a similar attempt to reduce the workforce by means of mechanisation, and to reduce the use of agrochemicals as well, said Plassat, who is from France and has lived in Brazil for 31 years.
In the charcoal industry, modern-day slavery was reduced by the heavy scrutiny and inspections triggered by multiple complaints, as well as by the loss of a large part of its market due to the crisis in the pig iron trade.
Finally, Plassat added, the economic recession in Brazil, which began in 2015, led to high unemployment, which made it less likely for workers afraid of losing their incomes - even when earned in terrible conditions in poor-paying jobs - to report abuses.
Complaints, and thus inspections and rescue operations, also fell off, possibly because employers resorted to different tactics to circumvent the crackdown on this form of trafficking in persons.
"They started to use smaller groups of workers, in short-term tasks, to avoid the risk" of being caught, said the friar, who also explained that employers abandoned the practice of transporting workers in large groups over long distances, to escape detection.
In the Amazon, "there is ‘surgical' deforestation, which is on a smaller-scale and takes place in protected areas, where satellite images reveal nothing," he said.
The result is that fewer workers in slavery conditions are detected, even though inspection operations have not been reduced.
Efforts to combat the phenomenon now require "more intelligence in the inspections, examining the companies' books," for example, he said.
The central government reduced the budget for the agencies fighting slave labour. However, the rescue operations continue because local authorities in some states are making a great effort, albeit with limited resources, to fight the problem.
Minas Gerais, Bahia, São Paulo and Goiás are the states that presented the best results in recent years, said Plassat from Araguaina, the city of 180,000 inhabitants where he lives in the central state of Tocantins, near Maranhão and Pará, the areas where the most numerous rescue operations were carried out in the first decade of the century.
The CPT and the CDVDH, which form part of the Integrated Action Network to Combat Slavery (Raice) that promotes initiatives aimed at "breaking the cycle of slave labour" in the heavily affected states of Maranhão, Pará, Tocantins and Piauí, stress the need for prevention rather than merely repression.
Addressing the vulnerabilities and lack of local alternatives that drive people into migration and forced labour, and training rescued victims to keep them from falling back into the trap, are necessary measures to effectively eradicate the new types of slavery.
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All comments [ 20 ]
Slavery did not end with abolition in the 19th century. Instead, it changed its forms and continues to harm people in every country in the world.
Today slavery is less about people literally owning other people – although that still exists – but more about being exploited and completely controlled by someone else, without being able to leave.
Any work or services which people are forced to do against their will under the threat of some form of punishment.
The world’s most widespread form of slavery, when people borrow money they cannot repay and are required to work to pay off the debt, then losing control over the conditions of both their employment and the debt.
Where people are born into slavery because their ancestors were captured and enslaved; they remain in slavery by descent.
Many people often confuse child slavery with child labour, but it is much worse. Whilst child labour is harmful for children and hinders their education and development, child slavery occurs when a child is exploited for someone else’s gain. It can include child trafficking, child soldiers, child marriage and child domestic slavery.
We believe that all people have a right to live in freedom and we work all over the world to achieve that
Modern slavery can affect people of any age, gender or race. However, most commonly, slavery affects people and communities who are vulnerable to being taken advantage of.
Slavery is also more likely to occur where the rule of law is weaker and corruption is rife. It can also happen to groups of people who are not protected by the law, for example migrants whose visa status is irregular are easy to blackmail with deportation.
Many people think that slavery happens only overseas, in developing countries. In fact, no country is free from modern slavery
Slavery is not merely a historical relic.
Although modern slavery is not defined in law, it is used as an umbrella term covering practices such as forced labour, debt bondage, forced marriage, and human trafficking.
it refers to situations of exploitation that a person cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, deception, and/or abuse of power.
An estimated 40.3 million people are in modern slavery, including 24.9 in forced labour and 15.4 million in forced marriage. There are 5.4 victims of modern slavery for every 1,000 people in the world.
Slavery existed for thousands of years, in all sorts of societies and all parts of the world.
From time to time, eccentrics emerged to oppose it, most of them arguing that slavery is a moral monstrosity and therefore people should get rid of it.
Slavery is natural. People differ, and we must expect that those who are superior in a certain way will make themselves the masters of those who are inferior in this regard.
Slavery has always existed. This reason exemplifies the logical fallacy argumentum ad antiquitatem (the argument to antiquity or tradition).
Every society on earth has slavery. The unspoken corollary is that every society must have slavery.
Without masters, the slaves will die off. This idea is the preceding one pushed to its extreme.
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