Forced labour
Forced labour, or unfree labour, is any work relation, especially in modern or early modern history, in which people are employed against their will with the threat of destitution, detention, or violence, including death or other forms of extreme hardship to either themselves or members of their families.
Unfree labour includes all forms of slavery, penal labour, and the corresponding institutions, such as debt slavery, serfdom, corvée and labour camps.
Definition
Many forms of unfree labour are also covered by the term forced labour, which is defined by the International Labour Organization as all involuntary work or service exacted under the menace of a penalty.However, under the ILO Forced Labour Convention of 1930, the term forced or compulsory labour does not include:
- "any work or service exacted in virtue of compulsory military service laws for work of a purely military character;"
- "any work or service which forms part of the normal civic obligations of the citizens of a fully self-governing country;"
- "any work or service exacted from any person as a consequence of a conviction in a court of law, provided that the said work or service is carried out under the supervision and control of a public authority and that the said person is not hired to or placed at the disposal of private individuals, companies or associations ";
- "any work or service exacted in cases of emergency, that is to say, in the event of war, of a calamity or threatened calamity, such as fire, flood, famine, earthquake, violent epidemic or epizootic diseases, invasion by: animal, insect or vegetable pests, and in general any circumstance that would endanger the existence or the well-being of the whole or part of the population";
Payment for unfree labour
- The payment does not exceed subsistence or barely exceeds it;
- The payment is in goods which are not desirable and/or cannot be exchanged or are difficult to exchange; or
- The payment wholly or mostly consists of cancellation of a debt or liability that was itself coerced, or belongs to someone else.
Modern day unfree labour
Unfree labour re-emerged as an issue in the debate about rural development during the years following the end of the Second World War, when a political concern of Keynesian theory was not just economic reconstruction but also planning. A crucial aspect of the ensuing discussion concerned the extent to which different relational forms constituted obstacles to capitalist development, and why.During the 1960s and 1970s, unfree labour was regarded as incompatible with capitalist accumulation, and thus an obstacle to economic growth, an interpretation advanced by exponents of the then-dominant semi-feudal thesis. From the 1980s onwards, however, another and very different Marxist view emerged, arguing that evidence from Latin America and India suggested agribusiness enterprises, commercial farmers and rich peasants reproduced, introduced or reintroduced unfree relations.
However, recent contributions to this debate have attempted to exclude Marxism from the discussion. These contributions maintain that, because Marxist theory failed to understand the centrality of unfreedom to modern capitalism, a new explanation of this link is needed. This claim has been questioned by Tom Brass. He argues that many of these new characteristics are in fact no different from those identified earlier by Marxist theory and that the exclusion of the latter approach from the debate is thus unwarranted.
The International Labour Organization now estimates that at least 27.6 million people are victims of forced labour worldwide on any given day; 86% of forced labour is imposed by private actors: 63% in non-sexual sectors and 23% in commercial sexual exploitation. State authorities account for the remaining 14%. The forced labour prevalence of adult migrant workers is more than 3x higher than that of adult non-migrant workers. From an international law perspective, countries that allow forced labour are violating international labour standards as set forth in the Abolition of Forced Labour Convention, one of the fundamental conventions of the ILO.
According to the ILO Special Action Programme to Combat Forced Labour, global profits from forced trafficked labour exploited by private agents are estimated at US$44.3 billion per year. About 70% of this value comes from trafficked victims. At least the half of this sum comes from industrialised countries.
Trafficking
Trafficking is a term to define the recruiting, harbouring, obtaining and transportation of a person by use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjecting them to involuntary acts, such as acts related to commercial sexual exploitation or involuntary labour.Forms of unfree labour
Slavery
Slavery was common in many ancient societies, including ancient Egypt, Babylon, Persia, ancient Greece, Rome, ancient China, the pre-modern Muslim world, as well as many societies in Africa and the Americas. Being sold into slavery was a common fate of populations that were conquered in wars.Chattel Slavery is an extreme form of unfree labour in which people are legally regarded as property for life and are subject to being bought, sold, or transferred by their owners, and typically receive no personal benefit from their work. One of the most widespread and systematized forms of chattel slavery occurred during the transatlantic slave trade between the 16th and 19th centuries. During this period, it is estimated that between 10 million and 12 million Black Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. Many were taken through the Middle Passage to Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America. In these systems, slavery was typically hereditary, with the legal status of enslavement passed from parent to child. Smaller numbers of enslaved Africans were brought to Europe, and others were also trafficked through the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades. These systems varied significantly in structure, scale, and legal status and were not always chattel in form.
The term "slavery" is often applied to situations which do not meet the above definitions, but which are other, closely related forms of unfree labour, such as debt slavery or debt-bondage.
File:Mines 1.jpg|thumb|Mine workers in Ancient Greece were often slaves
In late 16th century Japan, "unfree labour" or slavery was officially banned; but forms of contract and indentured labour persisted alongside the period's penal codes' forced labour. Somewhat later, the Edo period's penal laws prescribed "non-free labour" for the immediate families of executed criminals in Article 17 of the Gotōke reijō, but the practice never became common. The 1711 Gotōke reijō was compiled from over 600 statutes that were promulgated between 1597 and 1696.
According to Kevin Bales in Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, there are now an estimated 27 million slaves in the world.
File:Остарбайтери 1942.jpg|right|thumb|Ukrainian Ostarbeiters from Kyiv Oblast depart to Nazi Germany to serve as labor force, 1942
Serfdom
bonds labourers to the land they farm, typically in a feudal society. Serfs typically have no legal right to leave, change employers, or seek paid work, though depending on economic conditions many did so anyway. Unlike chattel slaves, they typically cannot be sold separately from the land, and have rights such as the military protection of the lord.Truck system
A truck system, in the specific sense in which the term is used by labour historians, refers to an unpopular or even exploitative form of payment associated with small, isolated and/or rural communities, in which workers or self-employed small producers are paid in either: goods, a form of payment known as truck wages, or tokens, private currency or direct credit, to be used at a company store, owned by their employers. A specific kind of truck system, in which credit advances are made against future work, is known in the U.S. as debt bondage.Many scholars have suggested that employers use such systems to exploit workers and/or indebt them. This could occur, for example, if employers were able to pay workers with goods which had a market value below the level of subsistence, or by selling items to workers at inflated prices. Others argue that truck wages were a convenient way for isolated communities, such as during the early colonial settlement of North America, to operate when official currency was scarce.
By the early 20th century, truck systems were widely seen, in industrialised countries, as exploitative; perhaps the most well-known example of this view was a 1947 U.S. hit song "Sixteen Tons". Many countries have Truck Act legislation that outlaws truck systems and requires payment in cash.