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Slavery Was Never Abolished – It Affects Millions, and You May Be Funding It

posted by mrpg on Friday October 19 2018, @02:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the or-suffering-it dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

When we think of slavery, many of us think of historical or so-called "traditional forms" of slavery – and of the 12m people ripped from their West African homes and shipped across the Atlantic for a lifetime in the plantations of the Americas.

But slavery is not just something that happened in the past –- the modern day estimate for the number of men, women and children forced into labour worldwide exceeds 40m. Today's global slave trade is so lucrative that it nets traffickers more than US$150 billion each year.

The article asserts that much of today's slavery is being driven by the demand for electronic goods.

[Edit: fixed ILO links]

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 19 2018, @02:49PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 19 2018, @02:49PM (#750935)

    Today's global slave trade is so lucrative

    Or, maybe not lucrative? $150B / 40m = $3500/slave/year. So, how can that be lucrative? It's on margin of society, if anything. Sounds to me like mostly poor and criminals exploiting the poor.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 19 2018, @03:03PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 19 2018, @03:03PM (#750941)

    I had a friend in Nairobi. He was an English professor at a university and one time he made an assignment to write an essay about what good things happened to their country. One of the students wrote about all the good things that came out of the slave trade. He said at first he was dumbfounded, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized it was true.

    $3500 is nothing in the west, but a few years of work in developing countries.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by FatPhil on Friday October 19 2018, @03:05PM

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Friday October 19 2018, @03:05PM (#750944) Homepage
    For a large chunk of the world, $3500 is a lot of money. It's half a decade's per-capita GDP for several countries in south america, africa, and asia.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 20 2018, @09:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 20 2018, @09:42PM (#751485)

    Or, maybe not lucrative? $150B / 40m = $3500/slave/year.

    Why do you make such a calculation? The rich doing the exploitation don't give a rats ass how many slaves there are. All they care about is getting that $150B annually. If anything they want more slaves so their income would likely go up and their risk per unit would go down...