Modern slavery has recently emerged as a major source of popular fascination and political preoccupation. This rapid promotion to the front ranks of global conversations regarding exploitation has had profound consequences. Not all of these consequences have been positive or desirable. High profile campaigns against ‘modern slavery’ typically focus upon a relatively small number of ‘aberrant’ and ‘exceptional’ cases, which are assumed to stand apart from other ‘lesser’ abuses or ‘normal’ practices. This separation between the ‘exceptional’ and ‘everyday’ is central to the appeal of modern slavery as a political cause, because it concentrates attention on individual cases of the ‘worst of the worst’. Governments and corporations feel comfortable supporting campaigns against exceptional cases of modern slavery – rather than broader campaigns for migrant or workers’ rights – because this focus on exceptional cases effectively pushes larger global systems of exploitation, violence, discrimination and privilege into the background.
It is for this reason that someone like Ivanka Trump, whose ‘Trump’ branded products are made by precarious and vulnerable workers in places such as Indonesia, feels entirely comfortable denouncing modern slavery and human trafficking as an ‘ugly stain on civilisation.’ The ‘stain’ of modern slavery does not directly challenge the systems of labour exploitation that generate tremendous profits for the Trump brand. Targeting exceptional cases is not only very difficult in practical terms, it also tends to create an informal separation between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ cases. When slavery is the threshold against which all other categories of labour are measured, then systems of exploitation viewed as ‘bad but not all that bad’ may appear as unremarkable or even desirable. There are currently hundreds of millions of ‘free’ labourers across the globe who routinely endure terrible wages, precarious conditions, unsafe and unhealthy workspaces, sexual harassment and assault, and bullying and abuse. They may well be formally ‘free’ to leave, in the sense that they can quit their jobs and seek other options, but their precarious status is nonetheless likely to make it very risky for them to quit, and their alternative options may be no better. Despite their predicament, campaigns against modern slavery tend to exclude precarious ‘free’ labourers from their orbit of concern.
Both migrants and workers are widely understood to be deserving of certain types of rights. However, there remains significant disagreement regarding what those rights look like. On the one hand, we have the argument that all migrants deserve protections as migrants, and that all workers deserve protections as workers. On the other, we have the argument that there are some migrants and workers – usually a much smaller subcategory – who should be the focus of protection efforts. Campaigns against modern slavery specifically target some workers and migrants as deserving of protection: those who are forced to work, or to continue to work. The much larger group of precarious workers who do not meet this threshold are left out of the equation. And since these thresholds are hard to satisfy, the vast majority of migrants and workers get pushed to the margins.
