In the final part of our mini-series on slavery, we'll explore the unsettling reality of modern slavery, exploring its prevalence and forms in our world today.
From deceptive promises to exploitation and control, we uncover how slavery lurks in the shadows, but there are more slaves in the modern world than at any point in human history.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part three, our final part, of our three-part mini-series on the sensitive but important topic of slavery.
[00:00:29] In case you missed them, in part one we talked about slavery in the ancient world, ranging from Mesopotamia to Ancient Egypt.
[00:00:37] And in part two, we talked about the transatlantic slave trade, the 400 or so-year period where millions of slaves were transported from Africa to toil and suffer on plantations in the Americas.
[00:00:51] And in today’s episode, we are going to explore slavery in the modern world, slavery that still exists today. It is an uncomfortable subject, but it is important, and the scale of it might just surprise you.
[00:01:04] OK then, modern slavery.
[00:01:10] So far in this mini-series, we’ve talked about slavery in the ancient world and during the transatlantic slave trade.
[00:01:18] From the Ancient Egyptians to the plantations of Brazil, humans have enslaved one another and forced their fellows to give up their freedom and work for free, often doing the most backbreaking and soul-sucking labour until they drop dead.
[00:01:35] But then, as if by magic, this dark stain on humanity started to disappear. Starting in the late 18th century, countries around the world started to wake up to the horror and inhumanity of this trade.
[00:01:52] The independent republic of Vermont was the first state to ban it, in 1777.
[00:01:59] France followed in 1794, during the French Revolution, but it was then reinstated by Napoleon, only to be banned outright in 1848.
[00:02:11] By the start of the 21st century, it was illegal in almost every country, and when the Islamic Republic of Mauritania officially criminalised slavery in 2007, astonishingly, it was officially banned in every country in the world.
[00:02:29] And when we think about slaves, or if you were to stop someone on the street and ask them when they thought the historical period with the most slaves was, I would imagine many people might say the 17th or 18th century, the height of the transatlantic slave trade.
[00:02:49] We hear of the ships packed to the brim with people ripped from their villages in Africa and sent to toil away in the tobacco or sugar plantations of the Caribbean or Brazil.
[00:03:01] As you’ll know, this was a truly terrible period, with millions of people displaced and killed, the profits from their labour being turned into lavish houses in the Americas and back in Europe.
[00:03:16] However, the unfortunate reality is that this wasn’t the period of history with the most slaves.
[00:03:24] That ugly prize goes to right now, today, the 21st century.
[00:03:31] In 2021, according to the Global Slavery Index, there were an estimated 50 million people worldwide living in conditions of slavery.
[00:03:42] This has actually been increasing, it’s up by 10 million people since 2016.
[00:03:50] To put this in perspective, there were an estimated 12 to 15 million people in total who were transported during the transatlantic slave trade, and that was over almost 400 years.
[00:04:04] Now, of course, we need to add some context here. Modern slavery is different to the slavery of the 18th century. It does not involve state-sponsored slave traders and ships sailing across the oceans packed with people clapped in irons.
[00:04:20] To quote the Global Slavery Index again:
[00:04:23] “Modern slavery takes many forms and is known by many names. Essentially, it refers to situations of exploitation that a person cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, or deception.
[00:04:38] Modern slavery includes forced labour, forced or servile marriage, debt bondage, forced commercial sexual exploitation, human trafficking, slavery-like practices, and the sale and exploitation of children. In all its forms, it is the removal of a person’s freedom — their freedom to accept or refuse a job, their freedom to leave one employer for another, or their freedom to decide if, when, and whom they marry — in order to exploit them for personal or financial gain.”
[00:05:09] End quote.
[00:05:12] In other words, the definition of “slavery” is somewhat broader than the one used to refer to slaves in antiquity or during the transatlantic slave trade, so it is not a like-for-like comparison, but there are still an estimated 50 million people who are not free, who are controlled and exploited by someone else.
[00:05:35] It is a huge number, if this were a country, it would be the 30th largest country in the world, bigger than Spain.
[00:05:45] So, in this episode, we are going to try to unpack what's going on: how, when slavery is now banned globally, is it a bigger industry than ever before, generating profits of 150 billion dollars annually?
[00:06:01] Let’s start with some statistics about where this “modern slavery” is taking place.
[00:06:08] The easy answer to that is actually “everywhere”, it is far more widespread than slavery was during the transatlantic slave trade, where it was concentrated in the Americas.
[00:06:20] But as you might imagine, some countries are much worse than others.
[00:06:26] The ten countries with the highest prevalence of modern slavery are, in order: North Korea, Eritrea, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, Tajikistan, United Arab Emirates, Russia, Afghanistan, and Kuwait.
[00:06:44] By prevalence, this is calculated as the percentage of the total population that is enslaved in some way. In the case of North Korea, it is a staggering number, 104 out of every 1,000 people, so 10% of the population, which is so high because of the number of people imprisoned in forced labour camps.
[00:07:06] But even going to number four on the list, Saudi Arabia, there is an estimated 2% of the population that is living in modern slavery.
[00:07:17] You can probably already see some themes from that list: limited protections for civil liberties, high levels of human rights abuse, and countries in or close to volatile regions which are marred by political instability, war and authoritarianism.
[00:07:35] These countries are often home to large numbers of vulnerable people, people who might be fleeing war, persecution or famine and are most likely to be forced into slavery.
[00:07:48] Now, that was the list ordered by the percentage of the total population that is enslaved, as per the definition of modern slavery, but if we were to look at the total number of slaves, we get a slightly different list.
[00:08:04] Number one is India, followed by China, then North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey, Bangladesh and even the United States, where there are an estimated 1.1 million people living in “modern slavery”.
[00:08:24] Added together, the total global population of “modern slaves” gets to almost 50 million, and, as you can see, modern slavery exists in practically every country.
[00:08:38] In terms of the different categories of “modern slaves”, the definition is broader than it was a few hundred years ago, so what defines a modern slave?
[00:08:49] There are a few categories.
[00:08:51] First, bonded labour, so people who are forced into working for someone else to pay off a debt and have no option to leave. This is one of the most common forms of modern slavery.
[00:09:05] Secondly, so-called domestic servitude, which is when someone is employed in a house but is unable to leave.
[00:09:14] Thirdly, sexual exploitation, when people, typically women, are forced into prostitution.
[00:09:23] And finally forced marriage, when people, again typically women, and more often than not young girls, are forced into a marriage with someone that they did not consent to.
[00:09:36] Of course, these are somewhat loose categories, and have overlaps: bonded labour can take the form of sexual exploitation, forced marriage can result in domestic servitude, and so on, but these are useful categories to think about the different types of people who are classified as suffering modern slavery.
[00:09:57] Now, as to the question of why modern slavery is thriving, despite its illegality, let’s take a look at some of the root causes.
[00:10:07] Firstly, a combination of a global population boom and the persistence of poverty has meant that more people than ever before are living in extreme poverty.
[00:10:18] Yes, hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty in places like India and China, but hundreds of millions more are still left behind, and susceptible to falling into the trap of slavery.
[00:10:33] To be precise, according to the World Bank, 8.5% of the world’s population lives in extreme poverty, or over 680 million people.
[00:10:45] For these people, eager to find any way to escape from this dire situation, it's easy to understand how they might be tricked into an offer of a better future, only to find out that it ends up being one of lifetime bondage, where they are trapped in a country far away from their own, forced to work from dawn to dusk, with no way of leaving.
[00:11:09] Let me give you one example of this that you might not have heard of before.
[00:11:14] I’m currently recording this episode from the small Mediterranean island of Malta.
[00:11:20] Millions of people come here every year for sun, sand, and other hedonistic pleasures the island offers. Others come to learn English, while others for its low taxes.
[00:11:33] The country is also a hub for online gambling companies, it has long been a laundromat for organised criminals, and in 2014 the country started selling its passports to ultra-wealthy individuals who wanted a safe place to store their money.
[00:11:50] These slightly dubious activities have led to billions of Euros flooding into the tiny country, and a subsequent economic boom, which has brought prosperity to many citizens of Malta.
[00:12:05] Go into any cafe in Malta and eavesdrop on a conversation, listen to what the people next to you are talking about: you’ll find people talking about building and renting out apartments, how they are buying and selling garages, and so on.
[00:12:19] Many Maltese people have grown very wealthy in a very short period of time.
[00:12:25] The problem is that Malta is a very small country, with only 400,000 or so Maltese citizens.
[00:12:33] It doesn’t have enough people who are willing to do hard manual jobs, building apartment blocks, cleaning the streets, or working as delivery people, the kind of jobs that are necessary to sustain the country’s economic growth and appetite for greater profits but are typically hard and poorly paid.
[00:12:53] So the country has “imported” tens of thousands of people from developing countries, primarily Indian, Filipino and Nepalese.
[00:13:04] There has been much talk in the Maltese media over the past few years of “modern-day slavery” in Malta, where people from countries like India or Pakistan have paid an agent often thousands of Euros for a work permit to come to Malta, been promised a salary of two thousand Euros or so, and been told that they can live like a king, only to find that when they arrive here the salary is a fraction of what they were told, they are forced to live in an apartment with 40 other people, and work 18 hours a day only to pay off their debt to the agent that sold them the work permit.
[00:13:43] Now, for the absence of doubt, this is clearly not the same as the slavery endured by people captured in Africa and then transported to the plantations in the 17th century, but by the modern definition, it is slavery nonetheless.
[00:13:59] In some cases, the working conditions and the treatment of the vulnerable by the powerful really aren't so far from the slavery of the 17th century.
[00:14:10] In September of 2021, a woman going down a country road in the north of Malta stopped to help an injured man she saw on the side of the road.
[00:14:21] There was a Ghanaian man lying on the floor under the midday sun, in agony.
[00:14:27] When she approached him he was crying out for help, repeating, “I don't want to die, I don't want to go to prison”.
[00:14:35] She called an ambulance, and the man was whisked away to hospital.
[00:14:40] The man, whose name was Jaiteh Lamin, had a broken back, and two broken arms.
[00:14:46] He was unable to move, and had been trying to drag himself off the road using his broken arms.
[00:14:54] He initially told the police that he had been hit by a car, but later admitted that this wasn’t the truth.
[00:15:03] He had been working on a construction site and had fallen from the second floor.
[00:15:08] After he had fallen, and clearly suffered a horrific accident, his boss had told him that he was taking him to hospital.
[00:15:17] But, after driving a short distance, and finding a piece of countryside road with no passing cars, his boss stopped the van and threw his worker out of the door, leaving him to writhe around in agony in the scorching midday sun, and warning him not to tell anyone what had happened.
[00:15:38] Fortunately, the injured man was found by a passerby and brought to hospital, where he eventually revealed the truth.
[00:15:46] There was a criminal investigation into his boss, and all sorts of irregularities were found, such as he didn’t have any safety equipment, wasn’t being paid properly, and the work was illegal.
[00:16:00] Still, to date there is no evidence that any criminal proceedings have taken place against the boss or the company, the company is still in business and proudly boasting on social media about new developments and making handsome profits, its crooked boss still seemingly walking free and counting the zeros on his bank balance, while Jaiteh Lamin is left with chronic pain.
[00:16:27] And this is in the European Union.
[00:16:30] Sure, it might be different from the slavery of the past, but it is slavery nonetheless, as per the definition of modern slavery.
[00:16:40] As you would expect, there are all manner of legal frameworks and agreements that are aimed at combating modern slavery in all forms: EU laws, UN conventions, and national laws, but the grim reality is that it is an increasing problem in practically every country in the world.
[00:17:00] The economic incentives exist to keep marginalised people in conditions akin to slavery, and in too many countries, even countries you might not expect, there are not strong enough incentives to do anything about it.
[00:17:15] So, to wrap up this episode, this short exploration of modern slavery, and also this three-part mini-series, one thing is clear.
[00:17:25] The face of slavery has morphed over the centuries, from the shackles of ancient servitude to the brutal inhumanity of the transatlantic slave trade, and now to the different forms of modern slavery that lurk in the shadows of our global society.
[00:17:42] Despite the monumental shifts in laws and ethics, the scourge of slavery, so it seems, has adapted rather than vanished.
[00:17:52] As we've seen in this episode, modern slavery, though often less visible, is not less real.
[00:18:00] It's a global problem that transcends borders, cultures, and economies, a way to exploit the most vulnerable.
[00:18:08] From a construction worker in the EU to a child bride in a distant land, the chains may be metaphorical, but in many cases they are no less binding.
[00:18:22] OK then, that is it for today's episode on modern slavery, and with that comes an end to this sensitive but important mini-series.
[00:18:30] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new about this dark chapter on humanity, that unfortunately remains open to this very day.
[00:18:39] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:18:44] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part three, our final part, of our three-part mini-series on the sensitive but important topic of slavery.
[00:00:29] In case you missed them, in part one we talked about slavery in the ancient world, ranging from Mesopotamia to Ancient Egypt.
[00:00:37] And in part two, we talked about the transatlantic slave trade, the 400 or so-year period where millions of slaves were transported from Africa to toil and suffer on plantations in the Americas.
[00:00:51] And in today’s episode, we are going to explore slavery in the modern world, slavery that still exists today. It is an uncomfortable subject, but it is important, and the scale of it might just surprise you.
[00:01:04] OK then, modern slavery.
[00:01:10] So far in this mini-series, we’ve talked about slavery in the ancient world and during the transatlantic slave trade.
[00:01:18] From the Ancient Egyptians to the plantations of Brazil, humans have enslaved one another and forced their fellows to give up their freedom and work for free, often doing the most backbreaking and soul-sucking labour until they drop dead.
[00:01:35] But then, as if by magic, this dark stain on humanity started to disappear. Starting in the late 18th century, countries around the world started to wake up to the horror and inhumanity of this trade.
[00:01:52] The independent republic of Vermont was the first state to ban it, in 1777.
[00:01:59] France followed in 1794, during the French Revolution, but it was then reinstated by Napoleon, only to be banned outright in 1848.
[00:02:11] By the start of the 21st century, it was illegal in almost every country, and when the Islamic Republic of Mauritania officially criminalised slavery in 2007, astonishingly, it was officially banned in every country in the world.
[00:02:29] And when we think about slaves, or if you were to stop someone on the street and ask them when they thought the historical period with the most slaves was, I would imagine many people might say the 17th or 18th century, the height of the transatlantic slave trade.
[00:02:49] We hear of the ships packed to the brim with people ripped from their villages in Africa and sent to toil away in the tobacco or sugar plantations of the Caribbean or Brazil.
[00:03:01] As you’ll know, this was a truly terrible period, with millions of people displaced and killed, the profits from their labour being turned into lavish houses in the Americas and back in Europe.
[00:03:16] However, the unfortunate reality is that this wasn’t the period of history with the most slaves.
[00:03:24] That ugly prize goes to right now, today, the 21st century.
[00:03:31] In 2021, according to the Global Slavery Index, there were an estimated 50 million people worldwide living in conditions of slavery.
[00:03:42] This has actually been increasing, it’s up by 10 million people since 2016.
[00:03:50] To put this in perspective, there were an estimated 12 to 15 million people in total who were transported during the transatlantic slave trade, and that was over almost 400 years.
[00:04:04] Now, of course, we need to add some context here. Modern slavery is different to the slavery of the 18th century. It does not involve state-sponsored slave traders and ships sailing across the oceans packed with people clapped in irons.
[00:04:20] To quote the Global Slavery Index again:
[00:04:23] “Modern slavery takes many forms and is known by many names. Essentially, it refers to situations of exploitation that a person cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, or deception.
[00:04:38] Modern slavery includes forced labour, forced or servile marriage, debt bondage, forced commercial sexual exploitation, human trafficking, slavery-like practices, and the sale and exploitation of children. In all its forms, it is the removal of a person’s freedom — their freedom to accept or refuse a job, their freedom to leave one employer for another, or their freedom to decide if, when, and whom they marry — in order to exploit them for personal or financial gain.”
[00:05:09] End quote.
[00:05:12] In other words, the definition of “slavery” is somewhat broader than the one used to refer to slaves in antiquity or during the transatlantic slave trade, so it is not a like-for-like comparison, but there are still an estimated 50 million people who are not free, who are controlled and exploited by someone else.
[00:05:35] It is a huge number, if this were a country, it would be the 30th largest country in the world, bigger than Spain.
[00:05:45] So, in this episode, we are going to try to unpack what's going on: how, when slavery is now banned globally, is it a bigger industry than ever before, generating profits of 150 billion dollars annually?
[00:06:01] Let’s start with some statistics about where this “modern slavery” is taking place.
[00:06:08] The easy answer to that is actually “everywhere”, it is far more widespread than slavery was during the transatlantic slave trade, where it was concentrated in the Americas.
[00:06:20] But as you might imagine, some countries are much worse than others.
[00:06:26] The ten countries with the highest prevalence of modern slavery are, in order: North Korea, Eritrea, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, Tajikistan, United Arab Emirates, Russia, Afghanistan, and Kuwait.
[00:06:44] By prevalence, this is calculated as the percentage of the total population that is enslaved in some way. In the case of North Korea, it is a staggering number, 104 out of every 1,000 people, so 10% of the population, which is so high because of the number of people imprisoned in forced labour camps.
[00:07:06] But even going to number four on the list, Saudi Arabia, there is an estimated 2% of the population that is living in modern slavery.
[00:07:17] You can probably already see some themes from that list: limited protections for civil liberties, high levels of human rights abuse, and countries in or close to volatile regions which are marred by political instability, war and authoritarianism.
[00:07:35] These countries are often home to large numbers of vulnerable people, people who might be fleeing war, persecution or famine and are most likely to be forced into slavery.
[00:07:48] Now, that was the list ordered by the percentage of the total population that is enslaved, as per the definition of modern slavery, but if we were to look at the total number of slaves, we get a slightly different list.
[00:08:04] Number one is India, followed by China, then North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey, Bangladesh and even the United States, where there are an estimated 1.1 million people living in “modern slavery”.
[00:08:24] Added together, the total global population of “modern slaves” gets to almost 50 million, and, as you can see, modern slavery exists in practically every country.
[00:08:38] In terms of the different categories of “modern slaves”, the definition is broader than it was a few hundred years ago, so what defines a modern slave?
[00:08:49] There are a few categories.
[00:08:51] First, bonded labour, so people who are forced into working for someone else to pay off a debt and have no option to leave. This is one of the most common forms of modern slavery.
[00:09:05] Secondly, so-called domestic servitude, which is when someone is employed in a house but is unable to leave.
[00:09:14] Thirdly, sexual exploitation, when people, typically women, are forced into prostitution.
[00:09:23] And finally forced marriage, when people, again typically women, and more often than not young girls, are forced into a marriage with someone that they did not consent to.
[00:09:36] Of course, these are somewhat loose categories, and have overlaps: bonded labour can take the form of sexual exploitation, forced marriage can result in domestic servitude, and so on, but these are useful categories to think about the different types of people who are classified as suffering modern slavery.
[00:09:57] Now, as to the question of why modern slavery is thriving, despite its illegality, let’s take a look at some of the root causes.
[00:10:07] Firstly, a combination of a global population boom and the persistence of poverty has meant that more people than ever before are living in extreme poverty.
[00:10:18] Yes, hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty in places like India and China, but hundreds of millions more are still left behind, and susceptible to falling into the trap of slavery.
[00:10:33] To be precise, according to the World Bank, 8.5% of the world’s population lives in extreme poverty, or over 680 million people.
[00:10:45] For these people, eager to find any way to escape from this dire situation, it's easy to understand how they might be tricked into an offer of a better future, only to find out that it ends up being one of lifetime bondage, where they are trapped in a country far away from their own, forced to work from dawn to dusk, with no way of leaving.
[00:11:09] Let me give you one example of this that you might not have heard of before.
[00:11:14] I’m currently recording this episode from the small Mediterranean island of Malta.
[00:11:20] Millions of people come here every year for sun, sand, and other hedonistic pleasures the island offers. Others come to learn English, while others for its low taxes.
[00:11:33] The country is also a hub for online gambling companies, it has long been a laundromat for organised criminals, and in 2014 the country started selling its passports to ultra-wealthy individuals who wanted a safe place to store their money.
[00:11:50] These slightly dubious activities have led to billions of Euros flooding into the tiny country, and a subsequent economic boom, which has brought prosperity to many citizens of Malta.
[00:12:05] Go into any cafe in Malta and eavesdrop on a conversation, listen to what the people next to you are talking about: you’ll find people talking about building and renting out apartments, how they are buying and selling garages, and so on.
[00:12:19] Many Maltese people have grown very wealthy in a very short period of time.
[00:12:25] The problem is that Malta is a very small country, with only 400,000 or so Maltese citizens.
[00:12:33] It doesn’t have enough people who are willing to do hard manual jobs, building apartment blocks, cleaning the streets, or working as delivery people, the kind of jobs that are necessary to sustain the country’s economic growth and appetite for greater profits but are typically hard and poorly paid.
[00:12:53] So the country has “imported” tens of thousands of people from developing countries, primarily Indian, Filipino and Nepalese.
[00:13:04] There has been much talk in the Maltese media over the past few years of “modern-day slavery” in Malta, where people from countries like India or Pakistan have paid an agent often thousands of Euros for a work permit to come to Malta, been promised a salary of two thousand Euros or so, and been told that they can live like a king, only to find that when they arrive here the salary is a fraction of what they were told, they are forced to live in an apartment with 40 other people, and work 18 hours a day only to pay off their debt to the agent that sold them the work permit.
[00:13:43] Now, for the absence of doubt, this is clearly not the same as the slavery endured by people captured in Africa and then transported to the plantations in the 17th century, but by the modern definition, it is slavery nonetheless.
[00:13:59] In some cases, the working conditions and the treatment of the vulnerable by the powerful really aren't so far from the slavery of the 17th century.
[00:14:10] In September of 2021, a woman going down a country road in the north of Malta stopped to help an injured man she saw on the side of the road.
[00:14:21] There was a Ghanaian man lying on the floor under the midday sun, in agony.
[00:14:27] When she approached him he was crying out for help, repeating, “I don't want to die, I don't want to go to prison”.
[00:14:35] She called an ambulance, and the man was whisked away to hospital.
[00:14:40] The man, whose name was Jaiteh Lamin, had a broken back, and two broken arms.
[00:14:46] He was unable to move, and had been trying to drag himself off the road using his broken arms.
[00:14:54] He initially told the police that he had been hit by a car, but later admitted that this wasn’t the truth.
[00:15:03] He had been working on a construction site and had fallen from the second floor.
[00:15:08] After he had fallen, and clearly suffered a horrific accident, his boss had told him that he was taking him to hospital.
[00:15:17] But, after driving a short distance, and finding a piece of countryside road with no passing cars, his boss stopped the van and threw his worker out of the door, leaving him to writhe around in agony in the scorching midday sun, and warning him not to tell anyone what had happened.
[00:15:38] Fortunately, the injured man was found by a passerby and brought to hospital, where he eventually revealed the truth.
[00:15:46] There was a criminal investigation into his boss, and all sorts of irregularities were found, such as he didn’t have any safety equipment, wasn’t being paid properly, and the work was illegal.
[00:16:00] Still, to date there is no evidence that any criminal proceedings have taken place against the boss or the company, the company is still in business and proudly boasting on social media about new developments and making handsome profits, its crooked boss still seemingly walking free and counting the zeros on his bank balance, while Jaiteh Lamin is left with chronic pain.
[00:16:27] And this is in the European Union.
[00:16:30] Sure, it might be different from the slavery of the past, but it is slavery nonetheless, as per the definition of modern slavery.
[00:16:40] As you would expect, there are all manner of legal frameworks and agreements that are aimed at combating modern slavery in all forms: EU laws, UN conventions, and national laws, but the grim reality is that it is an increasing problem in practically every country in the world.
[00:17:00] The economic incentives exist to keep marginalised people in conditions akin to slavery, and in too many countries, even countries you might not expect, there are not strong enough incentives to do anything about it.
[00:17:15] So, to wrap up this episode, this short exploration of modern slavery, and also this three-part mini-series, one thing is clear.
[00:17:25] The face of slavery has morphed over the centuries, from the shackles of ancient servitude to the brutal inhumanity of the transatlantic slave trade, and now to the different forms of modern slavery that lurk in the shadows of our global society.
[00:17:42] Despite the monumental shifts in laws and ethics, the scourge of slavery, so it seems, has adapted rather than vanished.
[00:17:52] As we've seen in this episode, modern slavery, though often less visible, is not less real.
[00:18:00] It's a global problem that transcends borders, cultures, and economies, a way to exploit the most vulnerable.
[00:18:08] From a construction worker in the EU to a child bride in a distant land, the chains may be metaphorical, but in many cases they are no less binding.
[00:18:22] OK then, that is it for today's episode on modern slavery, and with that comes an end to this sensitive but important mini-series.
[00:18:30] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new about this dark chapter on humanity, that unfortunately remains open to this very day.
[00:18:39] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:18:44] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part three, our final part, of our three-part mini-series on the sensitive but important topic of slavery.
[00:00:29] In case you missed them, in part one we talked about slavery in the ancient world, ranging from Mesopotamia to Ancient Egypt.
[00:00:37] And in part two, we talked about the transatlantic slave trade, the 400 or so-year period where millions of slaves were transported from Africa to toil and suffer on plantations in the Americas.
[00:00:51] And in today’s episode, we are going to explore slavery in the modern world, slavery that still exists today. It is an uncomfortable subject, but it is important, and the scale of it might just surprise you.
[00:01:04] OK then, modern slavery.
[00:01:10] So far in this mini-series, we’ve talked about slavery in the ancient world and during the transatlantic slave trade.
[00:01:18] From the Ancient Egyptians to the plantations of Brazil, humans have enslaved one another and forced their fellows to give up their freedom and work for free, often doing the most backbreaking and soul-sucking labour until they drop dead.
[00:01:35] But then, as if by magic, this dark stain on humanity started to disappear. Starting in the late 18th century, countries around the world started to wake up to the horror and inhumanity of this trade.
[00:01:52] The independent republic of Vermont was the first state to ban it, in 1777.
[00:01:59] France followed in 1794, during the French Revolution, but it was then reinstated by Napoleon, only to be banned outright in 1848.
[00:02:11] By the start of the 21st century, it was illegal in almost every country, and when the Islamic Republic of Mauritania officially criminalised slavery in 2007, astonishingly, it was officially banned in every country in the world.
[00:02:29] And when we think about slaves, or if you were to stop someone on the street and ask them when they thought the historical period with the most slaves was, I would imagine many people might say the 17th or 18th century, the height of the transatlantic slave trade.
[00:02:49] We hear of the ships packed to the brim with people ripped from their villages in Africa and sent to toil away in the tobacco or sugar plantations of the Caribbean or Brazil.
[00:03:01] As you’ll know, this was a truly terrible period, with millions of people displaced and killed, the profits from their labour being turned into lavish houses in the Americas and back in Europe.
[00:03:16] However, the unfortunate reality is that this wasn’t the period of history with the most slaves.
[00:03:24] That ugly prize goes to right now, today, the 21st century.
[00:03:31] In 2021, according to the Global Slavery Index, there were an estimated 50 million people worldwide living in conditions of slavery.
[00:03:42] This has actually been increasing, it’s up by 10 million people since 2016.
[00:03:50] To put this in perspective, there were an estimated 12 to 15 million people in total who were transported during the transatlantic slave trade, and that was over almost 400 years.
[00:04:04] Now, of course, we need to add some context here. Modern slavery is different to the slavery of the 18th century. It does not involve state-sponsored slave traders and ships sailing across the oceans packed with people clapped in irons.
[00:04:20] To quote the Global Slavery Index again:
[00:04:23] “Modern slavery takes many forms and is known by many names. Essentially, it refers to situations of exploitation that a person cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, or deception.
[00:04:38] Modern slavery includes forced labour, forced or servile marriage, debt bondage, forced commercial sexual exploitation, human trafficking, slavery-like practices, and the sale and exploitation of children. In all its forms, it is the removal of a person’s freedom — their freedom to accept or refuse a job, their freedom to leave one employer for another, or their freedom to decide if, when, and whom they marry — in order to exploit them for personal or financial gain.”
[00:05:09] End quote.
[00:05:12] In other words, the definition of “slavery” is somewhat broader than the one used to refer to slaves in antiquity or during the transatlantic slave trade, so it is not a like-for-like comparison, but there are still an estimated 50 million people who are not free, who are controlled and exploited by someone else.
[00:05:35] It is a huge number, if this were a country, it would be the 30th largest country in the world, bigger than Spain.
[00:05:45] So, in this episode, we are going to try to unpack what's going on: how, when slavery is now banned globally, is it a bigger industry than ever before, generating profits of 150 billion dollars annually?
[00:06:01] Let’s start with some statistics about where this “modern slavery” is taking place.
[00:06:08] The easy answer to that is actually “everywhere”, it is far more widespread than slavery was during the transatlantic slave trade, where it was concentrated in the Americas.
[00:06:20] But as you might imagine, some countries are much worse than others.
[00:06:26] The ten countries with the highest prevalence of modern slavery are, in order: North Korea, Eritrea, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, Tajikistan, United Arab Emirates, Russia, Afghanistan, and Kuwait.
[00:06:44] By prevalence, this is calculated as the percentage of the total population that is enslaved in some way. In the case of North Korea, it is a staggering number, 104 out of every 1,000 people, so 10% of the population, which is so high because of the number of people imprisoned in forced labour camps.
[00:07:06] But even going to number four on the list, Saudi Arabia, there is an estimated 2% of the population that is living in modern slavery.
[00:07:17] You can probably already see some themes from that list: limited protections for civil liberties, high levels of human rights abuse, and countries in or close to volatile regions which are marred by political instability, war and authoritarianism.
[00:07:35] These countries are often home to large numbers of vulnerable people, people who might be fleeing war, persecution or famine and are most likely to be forced into slavery.
[00:07:48] Now, that was the list ordered by the percentage of the total population that is enslaved, as per the definition of modern slavery, but if we were to look at the total number of slaves, we get a slightly different list.
[00:08:04] Number one is India, followed by China, then North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey, Bangladesh and even the United States, where there are an estimated 1.1 million people living in “modern slavery”.
[00:08:24] Added together, the total global population of “modern slaves” gets to almost 50 million, and, as you can see, modern slavery exists in practically every country.
[00:08:38] In terms of the different categories of “modern slaves”, the definition is broader than it was a few hundred years ago, so what defines a modern slave?
[00:08:49] There are a few categories.
[00:08:51] First, bonded labour, so people who are forced into working for someone else to pay off a debt and have no option to leave. This is one of the most common forms of modern slavery.
[00:09:05] Secondly, so-called domestic servitude, which is when someone is employed in a house but is unable to leave.
[00:09:14] Thirdly, sexual exploitation, when people, typically women, are forced into prostitution.
[00:09:23] And finally forced marriage, when people, again typically women, and more often than not young girls, are forced into a marriage with someone that they did not consent to.
[00:09:36] Of course, these are somewhat loose categories, and have overlaps: bonded labour can take the form of sexual exploitation, forced marriage can result in domestic servitude, and so on, but these are useful categories to think about the different types of people who are classified as suffering modern slavery.
[00:09:57] Now, as to the question of why modern slavery is thriving, despite its illegality, let’s take a look at some of the root causes.
[00:10:07] Firstly, a combination of a global population boom and the persistence of poverty has meant that more people than ever before are living in extreme poverty.
[00:10:18] Yes, hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty in places like India and China, but hundreds of millions more are still left behind, and susceptible to falling into the trap of slavery.
[00:10:33] To be precise, according to the World Bank, 8.5% of the world’s population lives in extreme poverty, or over 680 million people.
[00:10:45] For these people, eager to find any way to escape from this dire situation, it's easy to understand how they might be tricked into an offer of a better future, only to find out that it ends up being one of lifetime bondage, where they are trapped in a country far away from their own, forced to work from dawn to dusk, with no way of leaving.
[00:11:09] Let me give you one example of this that you might not have heard of before.
[00:11:14] I’m currently recording this episode from the small Mediterranean island of Malta.
[00:11:20] Millions of people come here every year for sun, sand, and other hedonistic pleasures the island offers. Others come to learn English, while others for its low taxes.
[00:11:33] The country is also a hub for online gambling companies, it has long been a laundromat for organised criminals, and in 2014 the country started selling its passports to ultra-wealthy individuals who wanted a safe place to store their money.
[00:11:50] These slightly dubious activities have led to billions of Euros flooding into the tiny country, and a subsequent economic boom, which has brought prosperity to many citizens of Malta.
[00:12:05] Go into any cafe in Malta and eavesdrop on a conversation, listen to what the people next to you are talking about: you’ll find people talking about building and renting out apartments, how they are buying and selling garages, and so on.
[00:12:19] Many Maltese people have grown very wealthy in a very short period of time.
[00:12:25] The problem is that Malta is a very small country, with only 400,000 or so Maltese citizens.
[00:12:33] It doesn’t have enough people who are willing to do hard manual jobs, building apartment blocks, cleaning the streets, or working as delivery people, the kind of jobs that are necessary to sustain the country’s economic growth and appetite for greater profits but are typically hard and poorly paid.
[00:12:53] So the country has “imported” tens of thousands of people from developing countries, primarily Indian, Filipino and Nepalese.
[00:13:04] There has been much talk in the Maltese media over the past few years of “modern-day slavery” in Malta, where people from countries like India or Pakistan have paid an agent often thousands of Euros for a work permit to come to Malta, been promised a salary of two thousand Euros or so, and been told that they can live like a king, only to find that when they arrive here the salary is a fraction of what they were told, they are forced to live in an apartment with 40 other people, and work 18 hours a day only to pay off their debt to the agent that sold them the work permit.
[00:13:43] Now, for the absence of doubt, this is clearly not the same as the slavery endured by people captured in Africa and then transported to the plantations in the 17th century, but by the modern definition, it is slavery nonetheless.
[00:13:59] In some cases, the working conditions and the treatment of the vulnerable by the powerful really aren't so far from the slavery of the 17th century.
[00:14:10] In September of 2021, a woman going down a country road in the north of Malta stopped to help an injured man she saw on the side of the road.
[00:14:21] There was a Ghanaian man lying on the floor under the midday sun, in agony.
[00:14:27] When she approached him he was crying out for help, repeating, “I don't want to die, I don't want to go to prison”.
[00:14:35] She called an ambulance, and the man was whisked away to hospital.
[00:14:40] The man, whose name was Jaiteh Lamin, had a broken back, and two broken arms.
[00:14:46] He was unable to move, and had been trying to drag himself off the road using his broken arms.
[00:14:54] He initially told the police that he had been hit by a car, but later admitted that this wasn’t the truth.
[00:15:03] He had been working on a construction site and had fallen from the second floor.
[00:15:08] After he had fallen, and clearly suffered a horrific accident, his boss had told him that he was taking him to hospital.
[00:15:17] But, after driving a short distance, and finding a piece of countryside road with no passing cars, his boss stopped the van and threw his worker out of the door, leaving him to writhe around in agony in the scorching midday sun, and warning him not to tell anyone what had happened.
[00:15:38] Fortunately, the injured man was found by a passerby and brought to hospital, where he eventually revealed the truth.
[00:15:46] There was a criminal investigation into his boss, and all sorts of irregularities were found, such as he didn’t have any safety equipment, wasn’t being paid properly, and the work was illegal.
[00:16:00] Still, to date there is no evidence that any criminal proceedings have taken place against the boss or the company, the company is still in business and proudly boasting on social media about new developments and making handsome profits, its crooked boss still seemingly walking free and counting the zeros on his bank balance, while Jaiteh Lamin is left with chronic pain.
[00:16:27] And this is in the European Union.
[00:16:30] Sure, it might be different from the slavery of the past, but it is slavery nonetheless, as per the definition of modern slavery.
[00:16:40] As you would expect, there are all manner of legal frameworks and agreements that are aimed at combating modern slavery in all forms: EU laws, UN conventions, and national laws, but the grim reality is that it is an increasing problem in practically every country in the world.
[00:17:00] The economic incentives exist to keep marginalised people in conditions akin to slavery, and in too many countries, even countries you might not expect, there are not strong enough incentives to do anything about it.
[00:17:15] So, to wrap up this episode, this short exploration of modern slavery, and also this three-part mini-series, one thing is clear.
[00:17:25] The face of slavery has morphed over the centuries, from the shackles of ancient servitude to the brutal inhumanity of the transatlantic slave trade, and now to the different forms of modern slavery that lurk in the shadows of our global society.
[00:17:42] Despite the monumental shifts in laws and ethics, the scourge of slavery, so it seems, has adapted rather than vanished.
[00:17:52] As we've seen in this episode, modern slavery, though often less visible, is not less real.
[00:18:00] It's a global problem that transcends borders, cultures, and economies, a way to exploit the most vulnerable.
[00:18:08] From a construction worker in the EU to a child bride in a distant land, the chains may be metaphorical, but in many cases they are no less binding.
[00:18:22] OK then, that is it for today's episode on modern slavery, and with that comes an end to this sensitive but important mini-series.
[00:18:30] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new about this dark chapter on humanity, that unfortunately remains open to this very day.
[00:18:39] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:18:44] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
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