Sugar cane harvest. Steven Baird/Flickr. CC (by-nc)
‘Modern slavery’ has become a catch-all and media attractive category that conflates together human trafficking, debt bondage, sex trafficking, and forced marriage, as well as various types of bounded labour that are perceived as comparable to slave systems of the past. This concept has become the core of a ‘new abolitionist’ agenda that is informing the activities and policies of governments, international agencies, and NGOs all over the world.
For its critics, the modern slavery framework falls far short of addressing the structural causes that produce labour exploitation and unfreedom under global neoliberal capitalism. Activists and international organisations fighting against so-called ‘modern slavery’ generally limit their focus to ‘bad’ exploiters and exploited ‘victims’. These are considered exceptions in an allegedly ‘free’ capitalistic labour market, and it is to this market that ‘rescued victims’ should be returned in order to be ‘freed’. They tend to frame labour exploitation as a simple lack of law enforcement or as a juridical matter, ignoring its wider economic and political roots.
