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Obscured by rhetoric about free markets, new forms of bonded labour have proliferated in recent decades. The millions of precarious migrant workers toiling in homes, fields, hotels and construction sites are just the latest version of a centuries-long process that has seen tens of millions of dispossessed people transplanted to labour in mines, on plantations and railway projects, and in sweatshop industries. From the seizure and sale of 12 million Africans for transport to the Americas to the so-called ‘coolie system’ that, starting in the 1880s, saw at least 17 million Indians and other Asians pressed into bonded labour, poor people from outside the heartlands of capitalism have persistently fuelled modern industry and commerce. But the Second World War and the human rights regime that emerged during the 1940s and 1950s was supposed to have changed all that, explicitly banning forced labour in various international charters, and enshrining basic rights along with paths to citizenship in “host” countries of the Global North.
While these governments still rhetorically espouse such principles, the reality has changed dramatically. The current neoliberal system of migrant labour—firmly entrenched in liberal democracies and vital to capitalism’s on-going expansion—is a de facto regime of forced labour. It is simultaneously a direct product of the dispossession of millions in the Global South from the lands on which they have lived, and of demands for mass supplies of cheap labour in the Global North. Capital wants not just workers, but precarious, low-wage labour. Migration and border regimes effectively secure this, as people who cross borders or migrate internally to deregulated zones are routinely deprived of the rights to vote, to change employers, to join a union, or to access healthcare and education systems. The constant threat of deportation is then leveraged to ensure compliance under these conditions. In addition to facilitating the harsh exploitation of migrant workers, this system also disciplines the citizen workforce. It dampens their demands and expectations by reminding them that they can always be replaced by vulnerable migrants.
