For many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolitionists, slavery was easily defined as the ownership of one human being by another. But any technical definition of enslavement is problematic, given the messy realities of coercion in practice. Forced labour exists on a spectrum from slavery to freedom, with debt labour often very similar to slavery.
The BBC reports that Anti-Slavery International and Liberty are hoping the House of Lords will pass an amendment on indentured servitude later today, with the support of Lib Dem peers:
The campaign groups argue existing employment laws and legislation covering offences such as false imprisonment are inadequate.
They hope to see two new offences created – one of holding someone in servitude, punishable by up to 14 years in prison, and a second offence of forced labour, punishable by a maximum of seven years in prison.
A proposed amendment to the Coroners and Justice Bill has the support of the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, as well as the Unite union and the Gangmasters Licensing Authority.
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12 Comments
Oh, the irony of a state legislature outlawing slavery. They presumably want a monopoly on forcing us all to work for them!
🙂
To many people the word slavery means the brutal capture of millions of Africans, keeping and transporting them in horrific conditions, killing those who rebelled, throwing hundreds of thousands overboard who died enroute. I labour on these points for one simple reason; to equate the African Holocaust with domestic servitude in Britain today is simply ridiculous.
I believe passionately that such servitude needs to be outlawed, but to call this slavery is an insult to all those who died and suffered.
Lester – so you agree with the proposal then?
Strictly speaking, slavery to me is a legal framework that enables one person to own the other as property, to dispose of as they wish. In this sense, slavery is already illegal in (I think) the whole world.
Having said that, I have seen a powerful presentation by Cllr Pete Patterson about the realities of de facto slavery.
I’m not sure I understand why a new law is needed in the UK to prohibit “holding someone in servitude… and a… forced labour…” To my mind, these are already covered by laws against kidnap and coercion.
Yes, forced labour is something that needs regulation. As I said: “I believe passionately that such servitude needs to be outlawed”
With respect, Lester, your own position does little justice to the tens of millions who have been enslaved just as brutally at other times and places in human history.
To define “slevery” itself as solely the transatlantic slave trade of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries belies the reality that slavery is as old as human history, has been outlawed many times and repeatedly resurfaced in different forms and in different places, from Hamurabi to the Sudanese civil war, via Spain, Central Europe and the Ottoman Empire.
There are an estimated 29 million slaves, right now – people who have been traded for a price or simply kidnapped and held in forced labour of some kind – an estimated 200,000 just in the Sudanese civil war.
For most of its history, slavery has been not merely sanctioned by the state, but been one of the purposes of statehood – to conquer and enslave a people to give the conquering state additional human resources and territory – is not this even acknowledged explicitly in The Republic, that the state will always need to conquer just in order to supply enough human resources for the state.
The important definition of slavery between the sexes as stated by J.S. Mill that women were treated, as being unequal before men in the `Subjection of Women’ 1869 he said,
`Marraige is the only actual bondage known in our law.There remains no legal slaves exept the mistress of every house-the family is the school of despotism,in which the virtues of despotism but also its vices are chiefly nourished’.
It had been Thomas Fowell Buxton Liberal M.P. who had read the final peroration in Parliament on the abolition of the evil of the trading of international slavery in 1833, on the high seas in the commonwealth and he is buried,in the Buxton family tomb, at St John`s Church in Leytonstone,in Waltham Forest.
This great antislavery Liberal M.P. is also commemorated in Westminster Abbey.
On the subject of de facto slavery, Parliament should be paying more attention to the exploitation caused by our immigration laws. If you ban someone from working (itself an act that is surely inadmissible in a free society – even prisoners can learn a trade) you don’t necessarily stop someone from working; if you also give them little or no benefits you essentially force them to join the illegal labour market. If someone has no right to work they can be paid below the minimum wage, their employers can pay them late or not at all, they can be worked for incredibly long hours; in fact almost any form of abuse is possible. The worst things that happen to illegal migrant workers can easily be classified as servitude. These abuses happen every day and night in London and all over Europe.
One argument against letting asylum seekers work while their claims are processed, and against openness to economic migration, is that it drives down wages for “British” workers (however defined). But surely creating a pool of people forced by their illegal status to accept atrocious pay and conditions from employers who do not pay NI contributions or deduct income taxes is creating ultra-low-wage competition for the same “British” workers such policies aim to protect. Such exploitation would not be possible in a free market where workers had have a right to a contract that the employer must respect and had the opportunity to look for jobs from other employers.
Swedish TV did a documentary about illegal migrants working for long hours and meagre pay at a meat packing plant. After the documentary they had a discussion with, among others, the Minister for Labour and the chair of the Liberal Youth of Sweden, Frida Metso. The panel were asked if they were shocked and surprised by what they had seen. The Minister, like Captain Renault in Casablanca, declared that he was shocked (even though his government’s policy made such abuses inevitable). Frida said she was not the least surprised because she met illegal migrants regularly and knew what the ban on working drove them to accept. She also pointed out that this is the natural and inevitable result of banning people from working.
If our existing laws do not do enough to prevent coercion into slavery they should certainly be tightened. But it is equally important to repeal all laws that ban people from working – they are illiberal and unjustifiable, and fail to help the people they are meant to help.
I was amused that Labour are not supporting this amendment because they feel that it’s already covered by existing law. Actually I think they might be correct, but that’s never stopped them before, has it?
Jock, you’ve missed my point completely.
To be crystal clear, I was saying there was no comparison between the kind of slavery that rips families from their land, inflicts unspeakable brutality, murders millions, strips them of their names, identity and culture; that kind of slavery… and domestic servitude, even enforced servitude. Quite simply the word ‘slavery’ is not appropriate to be applied to both, because they are so very different, in so many respects.
Mr Holloway: I think you and Mr Coats are talking (typing?) past each other. The transatlantic system of slavery that you describe as being the only one to merit the term “slavery” was certainly an especially brutal form of slavery. But as a historian I have to say that its brutality does not make it any “more” slavery than other instances throughout history. What about the Irish people kidnapped and sold as slaves by the Vikings? They were often “exported” to the Middle East, which was surely alien to their culture as much as the Caribbean, the Southern United States and indeed Brazil were to the African victims of the eighteenth-nineteenth century Atlantic slave trade.
Slavery is not defined by the brutality inflicted on slaves; it is defined by the status of unfreedom. Wikipedia defines it very well: “Slavery is a form of forced labour in which people are considered to be the property of others. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to receive compensation (such as wages).”
The treatment of human beings as items of property who cannot make their own decisions is the core of slavery, and what makes it so alien to liberals and almost all modern human beings. The atrocious conditions on the slave ships were wrong in themselves – they would have been equally criminal had they been inflicted on paying passengers. Likewise the harsh discipline on the plantations would be equally unacceptable if imposed on wage-earning workers. The reason maltreatment is linked to slavery is that slaves can’t walk away from brutality in the same way that employees usually can. And even supposedly “free” workers like illegal immigrants can face exploitation (although not on the same level as slaves) because their options are limited by the law, as I pointed out in my comment above.
Slavery is intrinsically wrong no matter how “well” slaves are treated, for example in terms of food and clothing provided. For example, Southern slaves seem to have had an equal or better material standard of living (consumption) than Northern factory and agricultural workers. But when the South lost the Civil War and slavery was abolished the plantation owners found it impossible to continue the exploitative gang system of labour even if they doubled wages – ex-slaves did not want to continue working under the same system because it treated them as subhumans, even if it would have made them purely materially better off than any other working-class Americans.
I don’t think it is a good idea to use “servitude” instead of slavery to define the treatment of people as property, because it is a nebulous term in comparison: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servitude includes conscription, domestic service and penal servitude, for example.
@Niklas, call me Lester! You say that “slavery is not defined by the brutality inflicted on slaves; it is defined by the status of unfreedom”, but I say to you that that depends on who is doing the defining.
To many whose ancestors were indeed enslaved Africans, those who recognise and live with the legacies of enslavement, I suggest that their definitions may well not be as academic and detatched as those who categorise it as the status of unfreedom.
Those who have visited Elmina’s Castle, for instance, may not refer first to a Wikipedia definition, but to their heart.
I don’t know whether “servitude” is a nebulous term or not, but I do know that whatever term is used, a different one needs to be found to seperate it from the kind of enslavement that is characterised by unspeakable brutality.