Has Globalization Fueled Slavery?

Globalization is credited with much of the world’s recent scientific and economic advancement. Many Americans and Westerners today live in an entrancing, push-button world of ease, where virtually anything is readily available by simply walking down to the local Wal-Mart and handing over a credit card. In this world of prosperity, many of our toys and our essential machinery come from faraway places we’ve never visited or even heard of.

Certainly, globalization has helped many nations. China and India, for example, are building modern cities and engineering and manufacturing goods at a rate and on a scale unimaginable just a decade ago.

But globalization has a dark side. Behind the neon glow of technological and economic growth, evils spread in the shadows. One example is a problem most Westerners view as a thing of the past—but which, thanks in part to globalization, is enjoying an unhappy renaissance: the slave trade.

All told, there are an astonishing 27 million slaves—according to conservative estimates—worldwide today.

That’s more than the number of slaves involved in the Atlantic slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Christian Science Monitor says the present glut of slaves is greater than ever in human history (Sept. 1, 2004).

The U.S. government estimates that 600,000 to 800,000 people are forced into slavery each year.

Though the bulk of slaves are located in Asia and Africa, the number of slaves trafficked across international boundaries and into the Western world is growing too. Many of the slaves entering the Western developed world originate in Albania, Belarus, China, Romania, Russia and Thailand.

The modern international slave trade commonly involves trickery to induce victims to cross national borders in search of new jobs. Once the targets arrive, they are forced into bondage. Slavers typically recruit individuals in economically poor countries by promising them good jobs in richer countries. The catch is, victims must borrow huge amounts of money at exorbitant interest rates from the slavers in order to pay supposed costs of transportation, documentation procurement, and help in finding work upon arriving in the new country.

Often, once victims have been transported (or smuggled) to a foreign country, they cannot immediately find a job and thus become unable to pay back the rapidly growing debt. The slavers then typically take their identification and travel documentation, threaten them with deportation and physical harm to them or their families back home if they try to escape or go to the police, and force them into some form of physical bondage.

If the slave is a young woman (80 percent of slaves on the global market are female; up to 50 percent are under age 18), she is often forced into the prostitution industry. Approximately 43 percent of the known slaves on the global market are used for sex. The rest are funneled into other forms of unpaid manual labor or a combination of sex and manual labor (Foreign Affairs, November-December 2006).

One reason the slave trade is booming is that it is extremely profitable. Slaves are cheap—by some sources, at the lowest price in 4,000 years—and very lucrative. The UN estimates that slave traffickers make about $10 billion a year—$10,000 net per slave (ibid.). And once sold, the slaves are even more profitable for their owners, especially in the sex industry. Enslaved prostitutes can earn their owners thousands of dollars per day and can be sold, resold or traded, like postage stamps or baseball cards.

According to Foreign Affairs, the main cause for the growth in the international slave trade is globalization. Unfortunately, the same developments that have eased the flow of labor, goods and capital among nations across the globe have made the slave trade easier.

As Marian L. Tupy, the assistant director of the Project on Global Economic Liberty at the Cato Institute argues, “unintended negative consequences of human discovery are common.”

For example, advances in travel have cut the costs of transport by thousands of dollars. The price of a slave in 1840 adjusted to today’s dollars was approximately $40,000. Much of that price was due to transport-related costs, as the slaves were sailed across the Atlantic. Today, a slave can be purchased in Africa for $30 and then smuggled to other parts of the world for little more than the cost of a couple airline tickets.

“With globalization and cheap transportation, you can move people easier and quicker than guns or drugs,” said Joy Zarembka of the Campaign for Migrant Domestic Workers Rights. “And you can use them over and over and over again. You don’t just sell them once and call it a day. It’s very, very profitable.”

This is an aching and terrible paradox: Globalization, with its associated technological advancement, has created much wealth for some, yet has enabled the enslavement of others. Rapid increases in science, technology, industry, commerce and trade—considered by many to be signs of progress leading toward a more peaceful future among nations—have done nothing to halt, and have rather helped, this horrible crime against humanity.

It seems intrinsic to the human condition—this paradox of degeneration amid progress.

There is a fundamental reason behind slavery: human nature. Economic advancement does not improve character. It does not reduce greed and selfishness. Unless human nature changes, mankind’s problems cannot be solved—and slavery, for example, will continue.

However, the Bible does speak of a time just ahead of us when mankind’s problems will be solved—and it will be through addressing those problems at their source: rooting out human nature. Under the direction of Jesus Christ at His Second Coming, God’s law of love will be taught and enforced—forbidding stealing and lying, requiring employers to respect employees and treat them fairly, eliminating the causes of debt and implementing principles that lead to financial stability and prosperity.

We are living in the final days of the evils of modern forced labor and unjust enslavement. To understand more about the world that will supplant it, and how it will come about, read The Wonderful World Tomorrow—What It Will Be Like.