Dinesh Kamath's Editorial 'Slavery still exists' that was published in Newsband

Slavery still exists

There are more people enslaved now than over four centuries of slave-trading. There is need to act to end this trade in misery.

A young woman gets duped into a modelling assignment and then kidnapped by a gang who it is claimed wanted to auction her to the highest bidder for sex. That is a sobering reminder that slavery has not gone away. This appears a case of an attempted trafficking for sexual exploitation.

It is also not a typical story of modern day slavery. Today’s slave tales are about the subjugation of vulnerable, often poor, people who lack basic protections afforded by a functioning legal system. Despite being outlawed slavery remains a business. Slaves today are those coerced to work or to sell their bodies or to part with their organs. They are “owned” by an employer and treated as a commodity. Slavery is found in homes that employ domestic workers.

The reason slavery exists is that we let it. There is need to modernise slavery laws. Slavery is morally wrong and illegal. Slaves are a lot more expensive than people working for a wage as the employer doesn't have to house, feed, and care for employees. Slavery is something quite different. Where a person is subject to the complete will and control of others, has no freedom of movement and no choice of action, is totally constrained.

The accommodation and food supplied is actually the bare minimum to keep the individual - the quasi-commodity - in a productive state. The miniscule wages paid to some workers, are nowhere near enough to keep body and soul together let alone pay for health care

Slavery in its many forms can be distinguished from many other very exploitative forms of 'employment'. There is urgent need to stop people trafficking and slavery. There are at this very minute in this country hundreds of men and women who are no better than indentured servants to their rich masters, with very little right of recourse should their employers decide to abuse them - and abuse them they do. That this can happen in this day and age just shows how much the government actually values human rights when they come up against money: very little, it would appear.

The rich buy their staff to treat them as slaves, massively open to physical and sexual abuse. The government should not exclude specifically "domestic workers" from the legislation, one of the most vulnerable groups because they largely work in an 'alone' situation which is also poorly regulated.

It took the barrel of a gun to end much of slavery in the last century. The Ottoman Empire, one of the largest slavers in history, over 6 centuries, had its Slaver markets closed by force. What is needed is an intervention on a similar scale.

If you see from one angle, aren't many of us slaves to some extent? Since our freedom is constrained between 8 am and 5 pm for five days a week for a meager salary which just about covers a mortgage. Obviously no comparison to slavery in normal sense.