6 ms·

Global Slavery Index 2014

70 points by elleferrer 12y ago

josu 12y ago
The definition of slavery according to them: Modern slavery involves one person possessing or controlling a person in such as a way as to significantly deprive that person of their individual liberty, with the intention of exploiting that person through their use, management, profit, transfer or disposal. I would like to know what significantly means. Were African slaves in America "significantly deprived" or just "deprived".
- smutticus 12y ago
  I think your question is fair and don't understand why you were downvoted. I also question their definition of slavery. Are US prison inmates forced into labor also slaves? Slavery is not an easy thing to define.
  - jobu 12y ago
    > Slavery is not an easy thing to define. People also do a good job of rationalizing slavery into something else. The Swiss verdingkinder (child contracting) program existed until into the 1970's and some people still don't believe it was child slavery: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/opinion/slaverys-shadow-on-switzerland.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/opinion/slaverys-shadow-on...
  - nickff 12y ago
    It appears that inmates in modern US prisons are forced to work, though they are often incentivized to do work.[1] Your question is still a good one though, and I would be interested to know whether penal labor would qualify as 'slavery', and whether the conditions of the facility, or the reason for incarceration would be taken into account in this judgement. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labour#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labour#United_States
    - VLM 12y ago
      Something I don't understand about FPI is my sister in law's public school is FULL of FPI stuff although technically they can only sell to the feds. I believe there's a lot of "pass thru" and "non-surplus surplus sales" going on in the prison industrial complex. I suspect there's a lot of "Well, sorry about no federal funds cash this quarter, budget crunch and all that, but here's some nice FPI desks made by prison slave labor". The quality level of the carpentry work, both labor and materials, is usually pretty high compared to Chinese slave labor which always kinda surprises me. I wonder if folks closer to public schools than I am, see as much FPI as I do.
  - Abraln 12y ago
    Agreed, what about communities where marriage is extremely strict or are arranged? -they essentially cannot leave -they must work or can be beaten -they cannot go out alone -money is often exchanged in the marriage process This meets all the listed criteria for slavery. No black and white (pun not intended, but it works) definition that can be used, so any quantification is subjective. On the subject of prison labor, just after the civil war many southern states used trumped up charges to essentially enslave the newly "free."
- brixon 12y ago
  Significant to me would include: - inability to change employers - inability to travel off site - inability to make more money than the employer charges for fees/housing/... - inability to quit - fear of harm from employer Similar to the workers in Abu Dhabi http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/22/abu-dhabi-migrant-workers-conditions-shame-west http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/22/abu-dhabi-migra...
  - vixen99 12y ago
    You should qualify 'inability'. I would have thought that 'inability to change employers'. applies to millions of people particularly older ones where if they are sacked the chance of getting another job may be non-existent.
    - VLM 12y ago
      A somewhat more controversial 'inability' would be a visa where you must leave the country within 72 hours of your job terminating, although its impossible to sell your house in 72 hours and close the transaction without any preparation and the typical workplace hiring cycle is perhaps two months long. So technically you could quit or get fired and stay in country, if you had preexisting arrangements, but in practice... This would be an interesting, strange, startup idea for a jobs website. I'll work for you part time, for 1/10th pay or minimum wage whichever is higher, although I donno when, and only until I get a real job. I suppose this is basically the temp industry, in a nutshell, unless a startup could do it much better, somehow.
  - api 12y ago
    "inability to make more money than the employer charges for fees/housing/..." You could argue that America has this as a de facto result of real estate speculation. In any given region, real estate has a tendency to inflate until it sops up all excess earnings. Getting "above" real estate is only possible if you can save up a large down payment, etc., and get ahead of it... essentially like how old Roman slaves could purchase their freedom if they could save enough. The announcement of feudalism's demise was premature.
- recycleme 12y ago
  http://www.globalslaveryindex.org/terminology/ http://www.globalslaveryindex.org/terminology/ Just in case people are wondering where you got that from.
- DanBC 12y ago
  African slaves count as slaves under this definition. I'm not sure why you brought that up - that's not controversial. They include significant to cover cases of bonded labour or trafficked workers. In theory a woman traffiked from one country to another and forced to work as a prostitute is free to go the that country's police forces to report the crime but we know that they don't actually have that freedom. See also people who are transported to another country and have heir passports taken from them. Here's a gruesome article about bonded labour in India. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27486450 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27486450
- vacri 12y ago
  Were African slaves in America "significantly deprived" or just "deprived". Taken away from their homelands by force to a different continent, using a technology that they couldn't replicate to get back? Forced to work in specific locations, and if they ran away, they were hunted down and brought back? Sold as objects for labour? Is this a serious question? How much more 'significant' does it need to be before it reaches your theoretical bar? What's the gray area that you see that means they might not be defined as slaves?
  - josu 12y ago
    Oh, no, I guess I didn’t express myself properly. It is obvious that they were slaves. I was asking if the significant would actually be necessary in that case. And if it wouldn't be, what is significant implying in this definition? Does current slavery allow for more personal liberties that old fashion slavery.
random_pr 12y ago
An issue with problems like this, that are obviously bad, is that only positive examples are tested, or only examples that would increase the estimate of the scope of the problem. I doubt the 'Walk Free Foundation' has tested equally for negative examples, and would look for ways to lower their estimates (as one has to do to fit reality).
WiggleYourIndex 12y ago
The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially declared, "now I am my own master", upon taking a paying job. But later in life, he concluded to the contrary, "experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
- naturalethic 12y ago
  But taxes aren't right?
  - zenogais 12y ago
    Taxes are a bit different from wage slavery or even slavery, and shouldn't be confused with them. Taxes and wage slavery, however, do have a mutually re-enforcing relationship. Wage slavery is a system in which a person can only subsist by exchanging their labor for money - essentially forcing them to work for others for a living in exchange for means of subsistence. Taxes, in a democracy at least, are intended to be merely a yearly collection to pay for products/services used in common with a state managed agency typically overseeing the apportionment of those funds. However, if taxes are extracted through coercive means (as they are in most present-day states), then they can be viewed as coercing individuals into a choice between either wage slavery or poverty. In that way taxes and wage-slavery are two ends a coercive system.
    - nickff 12y ago
      If one takes the trouble to define a modern tax system, you will see that there is no significant difference between it and the exactions imposed on a slave. One might distinguish between a democratically enacted tax and a slave's duties by the opportunity to vote, but Nozick made a strong case against that being a significant difference.[1] If we are discussing situations similar or equivalent to slavery, I would be remiss if I failed to mention conscription. I have never been able to find a principled difference between conscription and slavery; if you can, please explain it to me. [1] https://web.duke.edu/philsociety/taleofslave.html https://web.duke.edu/philsociety/taleofslave.html
lukasm 12y ago
I'm sceptical of the score. How did they calculate that?
- notahacker 12y ago
  Methodology here: http://d3mj66ag90b5fy.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/GSI2014_full_methodology.pdf http://d3mj66ag90b5fy.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2014... The TLDR is: they surveyed broadly representative demographics of nine countries on whether any family members had ever been forced to work, and kept in that position by coercion. They also used some secondary sources for ten other countries. They extrapolated the figures for the rest of the 167 countries based on averages of countries considered to have similar characteristics, with some largely subjective country-specific adjustments. As an example, the score for China, which they note has few confirmed reports of widespread slavery was (average proportion of slaves in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan).9 + (average proportion of Qatar, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia).1 Worthy as the objective behind the research may be, it's difficult to understate how speculative these estimates and the percentages reported to a ludicrous number of decimal places actually are.
happyscrappy 12y ago
I find it hard to believe that close to one percent of Russians are slaves.
- sgt 12y ago
  I think there's a reason why they use the term enslavement rather than people being slaves. Enslavement implies modern slavery - which is far off from the chains and whips of a by-gone era. However it's still a form of slavery and quite a serious problem globally.
sgt 12y ago
Today I learned there are 23 enslaved people in Iceland.
- spacefight 12y ago
  So it's about damn time to free them. Then the next country, until we're done.
- alex_h 12y ago
  Figures for Iceland were actually extrapolated from figures for Britain. In all the index is pretty seriously flawed. Some countries are being ranked in the complete absence of any slavery data to justify a ranking. http://www.economist.com/news/international/21631039-international-comparisons-are-popular-influentialand-sometimes-flawed-ranking-rankings http://www.economist.com/news/international/21631039-interna...
- mseebach 12y ago
  It's mindblowing that something so statistically illiterate gets published. There is no way they can have the data to distinguish 23 from 0 (or 50) to any degree of confidence without actually enumerating the victims.
- RivieraKid 12y ago
  Nice, we have 37k slaves in the Czech Republic.
- WildUtah 12y ago
  Twenty-three slaves in the country? They should publish their names.
mseebach 12y ago
The Economist had a pretty scathing tear-down of indicies in the issue week before last. One article specifically criticises the Global Slavery Index, another is more satirical, but still well worth a read: http://www.economist.com/news/international/21631039-international-comparisons-are-popular-influentialand-sometimes-flawed-ranking-rankings http://www.economist.com/news/international/21631039-interna... http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21631025-learn-ruses-international-country-rankings-how-lie-indices http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21631025-learn-ruses-i...
- lifeisstillgood 12y ago
  Also worth listening to the More Or Less podcast on BBC r4 where they interview the Economist journalist involved. Specifically they found that the NGO behind the slavery index had taken some countries where there was no data and simply assumed that country had as much slavery as a similar country (nearby, similar population etc) Then they ranked countries. And named and shamed. It was not good statistics.
  - backprojection 12y ago
    got a link?
    - lifeisstillgood 12y ago
      https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/more-or-less-behind-the-stats/id267300884?mt=2&i=325350622 https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/more-or-less-behind-the-...
- WildUtah 12y ago
  I'm disappointed that the USA didn't get credit for the vast world historical illegal/undocumented immigration levels the government has been inviting for decades. Millions work for less than survival wages with no legal rights and the government does nothing to discourage migration or employers. Simple employer sanctions have proven effective in ending this kind of migration but US gov't imposes almost none. Heck, even legal professional immigrants (H/L visas) don't have the right to change employers or resign. If we had credit for all those millions, we'd be at the top of the league table here. Time for a recount. (We're number one.)
shawabawa3 12y ago
This claims 60,000 "enslaved" in the US, however many people would argue it's much more thanks to forced prison labor http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-united-states-big-business-or-a-new-form-of-slavery/8289 http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-unit...
- gaius 12y ago
  Men, tho'. So no one cares.

70 points by elleferrer 12y ago

josu 12y ago

The definition of slavery according to them: Modern slavery involves one person possessing or controlling a person in such as a way as to significantly deprive that person of their individual liberty, with the intention of exploiting that person through their use, management, profit, transfer or disposal. I would like to know what significantly means. Were African slaves in America "significantly deprived" or just "deprived".

smutticus 12y ago
I think your question is fair and don't understand why you were downvoted. I also question their definition of slavery. Are US prison inmates forced into labor also slaves? Slavery is not an easy thing to define.
- jobu 12y ago
  > Slavery is not an easy thing to define. People also do a good job of rationalizing slavery into something else. The Swiss verdingkinder (child contracting) program existed until into the 1970's and some people still don't believe it was child slavery: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/opinion/slaverys-shadow-on-switzerland.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/opinion/slaverys-shadow-on...
- nickff 12y ago
  It appears that inmates in modern US prisons are forced to work, though they are often incentivized to do work.[1] Your question is still a good one though, and I would be interested to know whether penal labor would qualify as 'slavery', and whether the conditions of the facility, or the reason for incarceration would be taken into account in this judgement. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labour#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labour#United_States
  - VLM 12y ago
    Something I don't understand about FPI is my sister in law's public school is FULL of FPI stuff although technically they can only sell to the feds. I believe there's a lot of "pass thru" and "non-surplus surplus sales" going on in the prison industrial complex. I suspect there's a lot of "Well, sorry about no federal funds cash this quarter, budget crunch and all that, but here's some nice FPI desks made by prison slave labor". The quality level of the carpentry work, both labor and materials, is usually pretty high compared to Chinese slave labor which always kinda surprises me. I wonder if folks closer to public schools than I am, see as much FPI as I do.
- Abraln 12y ago
  Agreed, what about communities where marriage is extremely strict or are arranged? -they essentially cannot leave -they must work or can be beaten -they cannot go out alone -money is often exchanged in the marriage process This meets all the listed criteria for slavery. No black and white (pun not intended, but it works) definition that can be used, so any quantification is subjective. On the subject of prison labor, just after the civil war many southern states used trumped up charges to essentially enslave the newly "free."
brixon 12y ago
Significant to me would include: - inability to change employers - inability to travel off site - inability to make more money than the employer charges for fees/housing/... - inability to quit - fear of harm from employer Similar to the workers in Abu Dhabi http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/22/abu-dhabi-migrant-workers-conditions-shame-west http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/22/abu-dhabi-migra...
- vixen99 12y ago
  You should qualify 'inability'. I would have thought that 'inability to change employers'. applies to millions of people particularly older ones where if they are sacked the chance of getting another job may be non-existent.
  - VLM 12y ago
    A somewhat more controversial 'inability' would be a visa where you must leave the country within 72 hours of your job terminating, although its impossible to sell your house in 72 hours and close the transaction without any preparation and the typical workplace hiring cycle is perhaps two months long. So technically you could quit or get fired and stay in country, if you had preexisting arrangements, but in practice... This would be an interesting, strange, startup idea for a jobs website. I'll work for you part time, for 1/10th pay or minimum wage whichever is higher, although I donno when, and only until I get a real job. I suppose this is basically the temp industry, in a nutshell, unless a startup could do it much better, somehow.
- api 12y ago
  "inability to make more money than the employer charges for fees/housing/..." You could argue that America has this as a de facto result of real estate speculation. In any given region, real estate has a tendency to inflate until it sops up all excess earnings. Getting "above" real estate is only possible if you can save up a large down payment, etc., and get ahead of it... essentially like how old Roman slaves could purchase their freedom if they could save enough. The announcement of feudalism's demise was premature.
recycleme 12y ago
http://www.globalslaveryindex.org/terminology/ http://www.globalslaveryindex.org/terminology/ Just in case people are wondering where you got that from.
DanBC 12y ago
African slaves count as slaves under this definition. I'm not sure why you brought that up - that's not controversial. They include significant to cover cases of bonded labour or trafficked workers. In theory a woman traffiked from one country to another and forced to work as a prostitute is free to go the that country's police forces to report the crime but we know that they don't actually have that freedom. See also people who are transported to another country and have heir passports taken from them. Here's a gruesome article about bonded labour in India. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27486450 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27486450
vacri 12y ago
Were African slaves in America "significantly deprived" or just "deprived". Taken away from their homelands by force to a different continent, using a technology that they couldn't replicate to get back? Forced to work in specific locations, and if they ran away, they were hunted down and brought back? Sold as objects for labour? Is this a serious question? How much more 'significant' does it need to be before it reaches your theoretical bar? What's the gray area that you see that means they might not be defined as slaves?
- josu 12y ago
  Oh, no, I guess I didn’t express myself properly. It is obvious that they were slaves. I was asking if the significant would actually be necessary in that case. And if it wouldn't be, what is significant implying in this definition? Does current slavery allow for more personal liberties that old fashion slavery.

random_pr 12y ago

An issue with problems like this, that are obviously bad, is that only positive examples are tested, or only examples that would increase the estimate of the scope of the problem. I doubt the 'Walk Free Foundation' has tested equally for negative examples, and would look for ways to lower their estimates (as one has to do to fit reality).

WiggleYourIndex 12y ago

The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially declared, "now I am my own master", upon taking a paying job. But later in life, he concluded to the contrary, "experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

naturalethic 12y ago
But taxes aren't right?
- zenogais 12y ago
  Taxes are a bit different from wage slavery or even slavery, and shouldn't be confused with them. Taxes and wage slavery, however, do have a mutually re-enforcing relationship. Wage slavery is a system in which a person can only subsist by exchanging their labor for money - essentially forcing them to work for others for a living in exchange for means of subsistence. Taxes, in a democracy at least, are intended to be merely a yearly collection to pay for products/services used in common with a state managed agency typically overseeing the apportionment of those funds. However, if taxes are extracted through coercive means (as they are in most present-day states), then they can be viewed as coercing individuals into a choice between either wage slavery or poverty. In that way taxes and wage-slavery are two ends a coercive system.
  - nickff 12y ago
    If one takes the trouble to define a modern tax system, you will see that there is no significant difference between it and the exactions imposed on a slave. One might distinguish between a democratically enacted tax and a slave's duties by the opportunity to vote, but Nozick made a strong case against that being a significant difference.[1] If we are discussing situations similar or equivalent to slavery, I would be remiss if I failed to mention conscription. I have never been able to find a principled difference between conscription and slavery; if you can, please explain it to me. [1] https://web.duke.edu/philsociety/taleofslave.html https://web.duke.edu/philsociety/taleofslave.html

lukasm 12y ago

I'm sceptical of the score. How did they calculate that?

notahacker 12y ago
Methodology here: http://d3mj66ag90b5fy.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/GSI2014_full_methodology.pdf http://d3mj66ag90b5fy.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2014... The TLDR is: they surveyed broadly representative demographics of nine countries on whether any family members had ever been forced to work, and kept in that position by coercion. They also used some secondary sources for ten other countries. They extrapolated the figures for the rest of the 167 countries based on averages of countries considered to have similar characteristics, with some largely subjective country-specific adjustments. As an example, the score for China, which they note has few confirmed reports of widespread slavery was (average proportion of slaves in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan).9 + (average proportion of Qatar, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia).1 Worthy as the objective behind the research may be, it's difficult to understate how speculative these estimates and the percentages reported to a ludicrous number of decimal places actually are.

happyscrappy 12y ago

I find it hard to believe that close to one percent of Russians are slaves.

sgt 12y ago
I think there's a reason why they use the term enslavement rather than people being slaves. Enslavement implies modern slavery - which is far off from the chains and whips of a by-gone era. However it's still a form of slavery and quite a serious problem globally.

sgt 12y ago

Today I learned there are 23 enslaved people in Iceland.

spacefight 12y ago
So it's about damn time to free them. Then the next country, until we're done.
alex_h 12y ago
Figures for Iceland were actually extrapolated from figures for Britain. In all the index is pretty seriously flawed. Some countries are being ranked in the complete absence of any slavery data to justify a ranking. http://www.economist.com/news/international/21631039-international-comparisons-are-popular-influentialand-sometimes-flawed-ranking-rankings http://www.economist.com/news/international/21631039-interna...
mseebach 12y ago
It's mindblowing that something so statistically illiterate gets published. There is no way they can have the data to distinguish 23 from 0 (or 50) to any degree of confidence without actually enumerating the victims.
RivieraKid 12y ago
Nice, we have 37k slaves in the Czech Republic.
WildUtah 12y ago
Twenty-three slaves in the country? They should publish their names.

mseebach 12y ago

The Economist had a pretty scathing tear-down of indicies in the issue week before last. One article specifically criticises the Global Slavery Index, another is more satirical, but still well worth a read: http://www.economist.com/news/international/21631039-international-comparisons-are-popular-influentialand-sometimes-flawed-ranking-rankings http://www.economist.com/news/international/21631039-interna... http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21631025-learn-ruses-international-country-rankings-how-lie-indices http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21631025-learn-ruses-i...

lifeisstillgood 12y ago
Also worth listening to the More Or Less podcast on BBC r4 where they interview the Economist journalist involved. Specifically they found that the NGO behind the slavery index had taken some countries where there was no data and simply assumed that country had as much slavery as a similar country (nearby, similar population etc) Then they ranked countries. And named and shamed. It was not good statistics.
- backprojection 12y ago
  got a link?
  - lifeisstillgood 12y ago
    https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/more-or-less-behind-the-stats/id267300884?mt=2&i=325350622 https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/more-or-less-behind-the-...
WildUtah 12y ago
I'm disappointed that the USA didn't get credit for the vast world historical illegal/undocumented immigration levels the government has been inviting for decades. Millions work for less than survival wages with no legal rights and the government does nothing to discourage migration or employers. Simple employer sanctions have proven effective in ending this kind of migration but US gov't imposes almost none. Heck, even legal professional immigrants (H/L visas) don't have the right to change employers or resign. If we had credit for all those millions, we'd be at the top of the league table here. Time for a recount. (We're number one.)

shawabawa3 12y ago

This claims 60,000 "enslaved" in the US, however many people would argue it's much more thanks to forced prison labor http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-united-states-big-business-or-a-new-form-of-slavery/8289 http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-unit...

gaius 12y ago
Men, tho'. So no one cares.