We have a Filipino woman who works for us. She has been a citizen here for 25 years and has worked for us for 12. Her sister went to Qatar 15 years ago and has been miserable. We have just finished preparing a sponsorship for her in our country and now need to extract her.
It involves having a replacement passport printed for her in the Philippines, her brother flying to Qatar under his Canadian passport and then bussing her to a neighbouring country to fly out of.
I finished my highschool in Qatar, and a part of the program was an internship. Mine was at QFCHT, Qatar Foundation for Combating Human Trafficking.
It was just a bunch of houses in which maids who don’t have things going well with their Sponsors stay in, waiting for a ticket back home. The QFCHT would just host them and negotiate the sponsor for sending them home.
Like, a 2-floor 5-room or so house that has 10 maids living in it. Their passports are confiscated by their sponsors, who were often times irrational egoistic wretches who believe they’re superior (keep in mind that the sample at QFCHT was the set of maids with the worst sponsors, I’ve seen a lot of kind Qataris who were fair and respectable). I heard though that this sponsor system has changed a while ago, not sure how is it done now since I no longer live there, but hope it’s better.
We once, at our home, needed help cleaning so we called one of those Maid agencies for a temporary cleaning. They sent us a Filipino maid. While she was cleaning, she came across my little library that I had been growing during my ECE bachelors. She looked at the books and asked me if I am studying electronics. Started talking about her graduation project back home. She had graduated from ECE too..
I saw that with Nepali workers too. Many of them were highly educated, qualified, individuals, but I don’t know what financial situation compelled them to come to Qatar to work as waiters, maids, and other jobs that are way below their qualifications.
I tried to learn some phrases in their language to joke with them and cheer them up when I interact with them. It always felt odd being on the service-receiving side. A lot of them were resilient in keeping their smile and sanity in spite of the assholic treatment a specific class of customers. That class earned the “bakla” title.
There are a lot of factors but the ones I could think of right now are salary of engineering graduates here in Philippines are very low and culturally. Culturally in the sense that in provinces, some parents treat their kids as "investment". I paid your college tuition so when you graduate you should start paying back by buying us a house, car, phones, etc. So there's really that pressure to get a high paying job right away.
> Their passports are confiscated by their sponsors
How does this work? As an adult, if someone tries to take my passport I would refuse. If they snatched it out of my hands, I would take it back. If they somehow got the better of me and hid it or locked it up, I'd go to the police.
I could see maybe an abusive situation where going to the police isn't an option because the victim is locked in the house. In that case I'd expect that when the perpetrators are caught they'd be charged with kidnapping for that. And then some other charge (theft?) for locking up the passport.
Perhaps they have a family back home literally starving and it's a sacrifice at the time they think they're willing to take to feed their family and send money home. They're desperate and willing to let a lot of things happen you and I might not be.
They're also in another country that's highly male power oriented, probably talking to a male head of a household, potentially to someone wealthy and even powerful. Meanwhile you may be significantly smaller, may be female (this isn't meant as an insult... just that you may have less muscular mass/strength), and are in a country where someone may claim you stole your passport from their possession and they may literally cut your hands off, where the authorities may even agree with this should you go to them. Or, at the very least, they may no longer sponsor you and you may go home to your starving family with few other options. Some may argue that means the option you had was better, I think it's an argument to promote modern slavery and exploitation.
My situation and I suspect yours are not remotely the same to these folks. If someone snatched my passport, I'm a fairly good sized and a reasonably strong male to muscle myself in (I also have a concealed carry permit, so I have a weapon should I need it). I have several more explicit rights and resources at my disposal, I have a government that issued my passport that will look at it say it's clearly my passport. My stance in such a situation is significantly different, assuming it happened here in the US.
Meanwhile you have examples like Britney Griner who had similar advantages to me, arguably even more given her fame, and even she was detained and at the mercy of the Russian government where we literally had folks like Tony Blinken bartering a hostage exchange for her return. I'm not sure that would be the case if I was detained in Russia on similar charges (then again I probably wouldn't have been targeted as readily, either). The power dynamics in these situations aren't so dry cut but I assure you, these maids have very little power and rights. I recently had a layover in Qatar and even I was a bit weary of that--I tend to like to have layovers in more progressive countries where I'm less likely to deal with some abusive government.
I think you watched too many movies. In real life this even happens to people from the west working there. They need your passport to take a copy, and then it's gone. You're going to fight them then and there? Good luck with that, security and the cops won't be nice to you.
I once worked at a company where some had to go to Dubai to install one of our systems. Some of my more knowledgeable colleagues refused to go, and after hearing their stories, I would also never go.
It sounds like you're describing a movie plot set up to me. Any time I've given my passport to an official I received it back immediately. And you're saying the police are in on the scam? That's fiction as far as I'm concerned.
I guess that's my answer though. Things are just drastically different in some places and the authorities are on side to support the perpetrators rather than the victims.
18y ago I had to attend a meeting in an Italian city. The building had security and they asked us to give them our passports and that we'll get them back on our way out.
I was a bit confused, but as a junior developer I wasn't going to make a scene for that,.when apparently nobody from the group was blinking at the request (perhaps everybody was thinking the same?).
Luckily a senior manager from $bigcorp barged in and when asked to hand his password just confidently yelled "there is no fucking way I'm going to give you my passport" and walked through. We followed.
This is a society set up for this sort of thing. You are physically isolated both at the home level and the community level. There is nobody you can run to. It is a physical taking of your passport. Your desire to get it back or any words you might have in you don't change the fact that your passport is gone and you are isolated.
There is a "breaking" period for most of these workers where they are demoralized as well.
I used to live in a country with shitty police. An American I knew there reported several crimes. The officer would ask for his ID and when he opened his wallet the officer would extract his cash and send him on his way. Weirdly, he always believed it would be better next time, but this was actually the good level of service. The locals never went to the police because they knew to expect worse. The police in many countries serve only the powerful and themselves.
10's of thousands of cases (trafficking cases, not legal cases) and a handful of convictions of 'sponsors' show that the likelihood of coming out on top in such cases is very small.
It was only because of all the controversy over migrant workers rights during the prelude to FIFA World Cup in Qatar that holding your employees passports became illegal.
Before that, employers had the right to do so and it was (might still be) the norm.
Refusing to hand over your passport is like refusing to hand over your passport at immigration.
I think snatch is not the right term, but an agreement between employer and employee that former gets to keep the passport in the duration of the employment. This is illegal but the host country I think just doesn't impose this law or the employee is scared to report to authorities since they are oblivious or ignorant of the said law. Mainly they just want to get a job, get paid regardless.
i would imagine that if taking of passports is common knowledge by now, they'd just have a fake passport to give away and hide the real one. Then they can leave when they got their money from their job, or sees a better opportunity and have the ability to move.
I know maids from my mothers village in kerala India that have been imprisoned there and passports taken away. Some of them have had no contact for decades.
lots of men are imprisoned there too in similar circumstances. People think slavery is a relic of the past but We have the highest number of slaves now in history of humanity.
> People think slavery is a relic of the past but We have the highest number of slaves now in history of humanity.
Like Eva Kaili who was defending Qatar in the European Parliament. In that case it seems that a few bags of money was the culprit for her ignorance though, along with a few drinks in some kitsch club there.
Yea that might be a visible example of corruption but the way I see its exploration of weak humans by a larger wealthy set human beings.
There are men imprisoned on fishing boats in asia where public turns a blind eye because of their own selfishness. And then there is slaves digging up cobalt in africa with their bare hands( JRE episode recently ) to supply us gadgets.
I think politicians just give us a way out to absolve ourselves from the exploitation that we all are willingly involved in.
There is also significant cases before and currently in South Korea, namely illegal immigrants working at farms with nigh-slave labour conditions and factory workers in Samsung/Hyundai etc large multinationals
I like how US federal overtime laws specifically exclude agricultural workers.
I cannot imagine any reasoning to do this other than to take advantage of farm workers that are poor and probably do not know English.
So politically, the nation wanted people to have a minimum, albeit pathetic, pay to quality of life at work ratio. But even then, it was okay to explicitly screw at least one tribe of people. And entering 2023, there is still no political impetus to fix this.
Everyone gets screwed commensurate to their organized labor power. Industries of "illegal" immigrants have the least leverage, and that's reflected in institutional legal frameworks
This is the question we should be asking. As an African I know a few people, qualified teachers who migrate to UK and US to care for elderly there. I don't think the world wants to answer that question. I see headline after headline on the plight of refugees and immigrants and yet the people in leadership positions for those countries where immigrants come from are never really asked any tough persistent questions. I see the same leaders addressing the UN and often accusing the countries that accept refugees from their own country of ill treating them. Talk about hypocrisy. Anyway a root cause analysis is needed but everyone seems content to deal with the symptoms so the underlying problems causing desperation and seeking of greener pastures at all costs continue.
In Philippines the jobs are concentrated on the capital Manila, and a couple of Metropolitan cities. But the rest are in the province with scarce job opportunities. Plus residing in the capital is not easy with cost of living very high and crowded. Mainly the salaries are very low plus survivorship bias to those who made it.
She cannot get her old passport. If her "employers" know she is leaving, they will stop it.
I won't post about how we plan to get her out but I believe it is a good one and it has very littler risk to her or their brother. Perhaps when it is all done will feel ok posting more.
It is costing us a lot of money in the end, but the woman we employ is part of the family at this point and it's important to us that her sister is safe. We will employ the sister on her landing in our country and will do so for at least a year.
Not 100% sure what you are implying?
OP seems to be not from Qatar (notorious for being a modern slave labor economy) and in turn implies a good worker/emplyer relationship.
Quite a few people from poorer countries seek better conditions and employment elsewhere for understandable reasons, whats so wrong in this case?
No, I don't. I tried to point out that the beginning of that sentence is triggering something in me that the writer did not intend but that jumped out at me anyway. Whether you feel that that contributes to the discussion or not is not my problem. The same could be said for your comment, and yet, here we are. What strikes me is that just pointing something like that out would result in a barrage of comments all pointing out the same thing which I had already pointed out in the original comment: that I realized that it wasn't meant that way.
Thanks for that vote of support, I haven't ever seen such an idiotic response to an innocent remark on HN before. I'm still confused about it, it's as if people read the first 4 words and not the rest of my comment and then decided to have a pile on orgy.
There are lots of uses of "have" that are not property. "I have many friends," "I have a butcher in town who does great work," "I have 10 employees in my business."
Beyond a token effort to be reasonable in word choice it is not his responsibility to try and hedge against the unforeseeably long tail of potential misinterpretations. Your jump to conclusions response is your responsibility, not his. His language was fine.
But that's not what it says, it literally says 'we have a Filipino woman, who works for us'. The difference is subtle and that's what made it jump out at me. If it were written the way you just did that likely would not have happened. I assume this is because this isn't my first language even though I use English more than Dutch these days but oddities like that jump out at me likely much more pronounced than they would to someone who is born into the language.
If I had written something to the same effect it would likely have been 'A Filipino woman who works for us' just to avoid that sense of possession, doubly so because of the context.
Apologies, I did not cut-and-paste but wrote it out, that was not intentional, and any change in the expression can be ignored, to me it still reads just the same, I checked my original comment and there I fortunately did get it right.
i was chalking it up to the language difference as well, i was aware that english isn’t your first language. i see what you are saying but for example i have a black engineer who works for me, and he’s one of my best. and neither of us think he is a slave. nobody native speaking english would bat an eye at that sentence even formed that specific way. with the comma though, i would agree with you. it’s subtle.
I figured pointing out that I realized that the OP did not mean what I read into it would pre-empt the ridiculous barrage of follow up comments and pile-ons but that was wishful thinking on my part.
Do you feel that your responses to each subsequent comment have added value to this thread? Would editing the your parent comment have been the less selfish approach?
I once met a very bright young lawyer from London, UK. She had worked on human trafficking cases in the UK. And she was so shocked with what was happening in the UK and the apathy of governments across the world that she decided to do a startup to tackle this problem. It requires a lot of money and connections to get a project of this nature off the ground. She was hoping to get into YC. Was rejected. After few months of trying to raise funds she gave up. She once said to me that there are actually online marketplaces, similar to how Amazon is for goods, to sell humans!
> there are actually online marketplaces, similar to how Amazon is for goods, to sell humans!
This should be easy to prove. Closest I can think of is some Telegram groups you might find in places like Syria, but that hardly warrants the Amazon comparison.
A good blog post would be a detailed tour of this site and going through the process of buying a slave and then interviewing them about their experience, afterward I guess you could let the slave go off and do whatever they wish or perhaps resell them to get your money back since you are unable to take care of them anyway.
As a Brit, it seems useful to know whether it's literally true that people can buy slaves online in the UK, from amazon-style sites.
Modern slavery certainly happens - but I've never seen it on silkroad-style websites.
A post by someone online, who once talked to someone who said you could buy slaves online ain't exactly first-hand evidence - Perhaps someone was mistaken, or taken in by darknet scam artists.
Those sites are fake. Just like the sites selling weapons are fake. The sites selling credit card dumps with pins are fake. The sites selling hitman services are fake.
If they find some idiot willing to send them money to "buy a child sex slave" they will just perpetually extort them with that.
Only places where these sorts of markets can actually work are places like Syria where they're backed by some sort of local authorities like IS.
Various aspects of slavery and human trafficking, for all intents and purposes, never entirely disappeared when you think about it. Society abstracted some of these things away in free markets through labor and monetary exchanges for labor.
Some of the very obvious differences between pure historic slavery and what we have now is that human rights are significantly better across the board and individuals have some degree of autonomy to decide what aspects of their self and time to sell and whom to vs previous time periods where those things were just taken from individuals.
So long as we're able to give labor that degree of autonomy (e.g. autonomy enabled by the ability to provide necessities for themselves and their family like basic food, housing, and so on) then I think we have a reasonable compromise. Vast wealth disparity (leading to monopolistic behavior on the employment side), lack of competing opportunities to sell your time/skills, and markets trending and stabilizing to states that are not labor-friendly undermine this.
This continuously peels away the abstractions we have to create autonomy for individuals and moves the needle back towards owning people like slaves, holding them on a leash indirectly through monetary mediums of exchange (i.e. currency) and so on. If I need money and food and shelter and the only real viable route to attain this reasonably is to sell myself or allow myself to be sold on abusive markets that may want more than say just my maid services (perhaps 'maids with benefits' situations, i.e. disguised prostitution) then that's what's ultimately going to happen.
We may claim the people have autonomy but we've just created complex systems around their autonomy that give the appearance of choice. People need viable and reasonable choices, not just a set of options where only one is reasonable for a stable and happy life unless we want to slowly erode back to systems like indentured servitude and beyond.
The article explicitly calls out Filipino maids as the highest selling and having been to the Philippines and now being part of Filipino family, I understand why. The country is very poor overall and the culture exports labor to import wealth due to the lack of local opportunity. Sure they can study anything and go anywhere in the world but it turns out, many go to certain middle eastern countries and pursue maid careers because it's their only real viable option. Some of the more lucky Filipinos study in school and are able to get degrees in healthcare or hotel services and work abroad in countries with better protections. Even then, they're held on a leash and abused through visa programs like in the US where they're paid a fraction of the rates their US native counterparts earn and lack mobility to transition positions readily to negotiate competitive wages, so they lose rights to employers and work in undesirable locations, under market rates, and often the under the worst sort of contract situations.
It's not like this story of maids in Saudi Arabia where conditions are even worse but it shows how we need to maintain autonomy for everyone. Aside from the being most humane thing to do, out of sheer self-interest, if you sell your labor for time in any fashion, these infringements on rights slowly peel away your rights as well. You may not see it in your lifetime but we should push for better labor rights across the globe to prevent stepping back to past atrocities we've seen in slavery systems.
Failure to create and enforce laws that prevent human trafficking fall squarely on government, and subsequently the people who choose cost as the main priority when purchasing a product or service and then vote for representatives that ensure cheap goods continue to flow.
Blaming “the market” is similar to not taking responsibility for climate change by demanding government action and changing your own habits.
Until we look in the mirror, there can be no change or progress.
If modern slavery has slaves picking fruit in the UK or working in brothels in Germany or washing cars in France, that's absolutely something those governments could crack down on, I agree.
On the other hand, if some lithium is mined by slaves and, after going through a complex supply chain spread across a bunch of countries, some of it ends up in devices that make their way to the Spain, or lowers world lithium prices benefiting Spanish consumers indirectly - the fact the slavery happened outside of Spain's jurisdiction makes it far more difficult for Spain to to throw the slavers in jail.
If Spain doesn’t know that it is occurring there isn’t anything they can do. If Spain does know that it’s occurring they can ban products or fine/jail the manufacturer. As an example (and not one I largely agree with) if Nike is using child labor in a sweatshop to build shoes, Nike has a HQ in the US, the executives and corporate workers live in the US, and they import products to the US. Enough said there. That’s strictly a failure of the US government to regulate and enforce regulations. Nike may be morally apprehensive, but like a parent, you are responsible for your child.
On the other end if a country is engaging in slavery or various derivatives of it, it’s still the fault of that government for allowing slavery to take place. If it’s a failed state then we have an obligation to not trade with that state, or perhaps even engage in nation building activities in an extreme case.
There are always things we can do. We simply choose not to as a people and by extension as a government. Unfortunately human nature and cognitive dissonance play a leading role in this and they are very, very good actors on the stage.
> If Spain does know that it’s occurring they can ban products or fine/jail the manufacturer.
Spain has heard that some slavery is used by Subcontractor A at Mine B in Zimbabwe, which sells to Distributor C which also works with Mines D, E and F and sells bulk lithium on the international lithium markets where distributors G and H also sell, and where Battery Factory I buys some of their lithium but they also buy from J and K, and they manufacture cells under contract for battery brand L which sells them to home solar battery assembler M who also buy cells from brands N and O and actually only sell things ex-works in China, and Reseller P imports them into the EU.
Subcontractor A says the reports of slavery were wrong, that was actually perfectly legal prison labour. Mine B says actually they no longer work with Subcontractor A, and a local government inspector has certified them as slavery-free. Between C and O all the bulk materials get commingled, records occasionally get a bit mixed up, and precise sourcing details are commercially confidential. The battery reaches the shores of the EU with no known links to slavery.
>Failure to create and enforce laws that prevent human trafficking fall squarely on government, and subsequently the people who choose cost as the main priority when purchasing a product or service and then vote for representatives that ensure cheap goods continue to flow.
Producers have responsibility as well. Government should enforce such laws and consumers, in an idealistic sense, should be able to choose products and services that don't require slavery. Meanwhile, pretending that as a producer or supplier, I have no power or choice in the selection of labor is a farce at best. Every participant in a given market has some degree of responsibility.
The market itself is a system of policies, regulations, actions, and so on contributed to not solely by government or its constituents but also by private entities that have financial influence in policy making, often more than the people we're looking at in the mirror. Yes, as a consumer I have some responsibility and yes, governments have some responsibility as well, but so do other players like businesses and the very structure of the policies, regulations, and even incentives in a given market structure. Ignoring these is just passing blame along to others. It's critically important to realize that not everyone has the same weight of influence in a given market. I can look in the mirror all day but the influence in my choice of a my potential future EV purchase has miniscule sway relative to the opinions of someone like, say Elon Musk with a mountain of resources and influence.
This is the “my vote doesn’t count” syndrome. Nobody will do anything because they think someone else will save them or make the decision for them such that their lifestyle doesn’t have to change. The truth is that the people demand cheap goods based on slavery and human suffering. It’s what society actually wants.
I’m not saying businesses are absolved of responsibility, but if they are acting poorly it’s our responsibility to change that behavior. But how can we do that when we don’t actually want them to change?
Until the US government makes Nike stop using child labor to make sneakers, I’m not going to get mad at Nike either. Everyone is getting what they want except those who we treat poorly (oversimplification). Nike makes money, you get your new shoes every year for cheap, and the US government doesn’t have to do anything or risk have people voted out of office.
The more quickly we all come to understand this and stop trying to shift blame the more quickly we can actually solve problems. Until then we will keep buying our Nike shoes and complain about child labor and not actually do anything. If you don’t like these things like child labor, you can minimize what products you buy and where you buy them from. If you don’t like factory farming then yea suck it up like I do and pay more for eggs. Put your money where your morals are.
> Various aspects of slavery and human trafficking, for all intents and purposes, never entirely disappeared when you think about it. Society abstracted some of these things away in free markets through labor and monetary exchanges for labor.
Anecdote time, slightly related ! Be me, in wealthy western Europe. Walking a Sunday trail, hundreds of people. Taking a break on the side of the trail, looking at a community garden and reading the plaque about which vegetables is being grown, by who: local public "help" centres (read: a public social support program, state-funded, it's a pillar of our society, to help people find jobs and get back on track). The plaque reads that when vegetables are ripe people are free to pick it up (just don't take everything). Was having a nice chat with a random lady up to that point, most likely a bit leftist, nice, then she drops that line "Well, it's free, it's fine, after all it's all being paid for with our money".
On the way back I kept thinking about that and came to the conclusion that slavery could easily come back in less than half a generation. And I am not talking about how work is structured or how our society regulates work and employment and how it's an abstraction. We are always half a generation away from losing our social advancements (English correct wording escapes me at the moment).
Edit: for once I caught the comments before losing the ability to edit so I'll reply here.
> I can't help but to think some meaning was lost in what you are intending to say. What is "it" that the woman was talking about? Is "it" picking the a ripe vegetable from the garden, like the sign says you can?
It's that "it". But the most important thing is in the second part "it's being paid for with our money". The goal of that community garden is not really to feed anyone but to get some people back on track through a regular schedule, group activity and supervised work. Social services are not supposed to produce vegetables or anything that anyone should pay for, a bit like the US prisons that have become free/cheap labor. It's hijacking the original goal. From this I could easily picture a world where people without jobs are forced to get through that system and become free workers tasked to grow vegetables or clean the streets (and it's something that happened in the Netherlands: a public worker whose job was cleaning the street lost his job then got through a back-to-work program in which he was tasked with the same job but for no salary (he was paid - much less - through social support).
> Is "it" the government paying folks to plant and tend the garden for the benefit of the public?
That's how it was framed in her mind but that's not the reason why there are free vegetables there at that place and time.
She's not supposed to get vegetables for free because it's paid with her taxes, she gets them for free because those vegetables are not grown to be sold or make a profit.
> I don't understand this anecdote. What was objectionable about what the woman said (if anything). I'm a leftist and I think its important to recognize that value does not come from nothing, but is the result, one way or another, of labor, which is all she seems to be acknowledging.
She normalized having people working without a salary and not being fairly compensated (or being compensated by whatever price the market set). Plus, people working that garden somehow don't have a choice in choosing that job (growing up vegetables) because it wasn't a job, it was part of a reinsertion program. The fact she pays taxes to finance such programs shouldn't mean we get free labor. That's where she crossed into indentured work.
I'd like to add something else: there are community gardens a few blocks away from where I live. But there's a waiting list to get on it, it's real garden but more for hobbyists and retired people. It's all financed by city taxes through a "green/food/health" kind of program.
But the gates to the garden are closed and the fences are high and fact is it can only be used by retired people who lobbied to get some parcels in the first place.
I don't understand this anecdote. What was objectionable about what the woman said (if anything). I'm a leftist and I think its important to recognize that value does not come from nothing, but is the result, one way or another, of labor, which is all she seems to be acknowledging.
I can't help but to think some meaning was lost in what you are intending to say. What is "it" that the woman was talking about? Is "it" picking the a ripe vegetable from the garden, like the sign says you can? Is "it" the government paying folks to plant and tend the garden for the benefit of the public?
Why is "it" (whatever "it" is) somehow related to slavery?
That is a lot of text for what is a very simple concept. Being able to say "no".
> Even then, they're held on a leash and abused through visa programs like in the US where they're paid a fraction of the rates their US native counterparts earn
That is not abuse. They can leave anytime. And if you talk to them, they are grateful for the opportunity to work here for "a fraction of the rates their US native counterparts earn" and would resent people like you who would take that away from them.
What is outrageous about the story posted is that they can't leave anytime they want. Their passport is taken from them. That's wrong.
But it cannot be solved by sending helium balloons woth sulfut into the stratosphere, or by getting saudi money through softbank. So the idea is not the best match for VC funding.
I would be interested in a crowd-sourced approach where she hosts open-source tools she runs periodically to generate reports to give to the right people in government. I don't know how international matters should be handled but I imagine initiative can be taken to remove the problem in our own backyards.
The "right people in government" are the ones doing it in the first place, alternately pictures exist of them doing naughty things, and a dead hooker can always be "found" in their trunk. Epsteinyay idn'tday illkay imselfhay .
Given odds of for profit application getting YC funding are already in the low single digits, odds of a nonprofit getting funding are basically nonexistent.
Understand your point, though to my knowledge YC doesn’t release numbers related to counts of nonprofit applicants. Might easily be even more competitive than the for profit applicants since would only take 60 nonprofits per batch to be at least as competitive as the for profit applicant pool.
More importantly: Are there partners focused on nonprofits? Do the batches have enough nonprofits to cluster like nonprofits? Is there training that’s specific to nonprofits? Do they have a demo day specifically for nonprofits? Is there a nonprofit alumni network with 10,000+ members? Does YC have a significant brand within the nonprofit funding community? How many significant nonprofits have been a part of YC? Etc.
No idea why you're getting down voted. I was genuinely baffled myself.
How do you run a startup (a for profit business?) that fights modern day slavery?
Number of aspects to nonprofit models. Funding wise, options include: cash donations, in kind donations, grants, loans, endowments, government contracts, for profit activities, for profit partnerships, government subsidizes, etc.
Basically, much likely for profits, there patterns which provide insights into paths which are most likely to provide significant opportunities for impact.
Seeing how it's a different person that replied to you, I assume he was (poorly) trying to make a joke about how her business plan was to scalp human listings the same way people scalp PS5.
Yeah, she is a lawyer. And in addition to hiring engineers she would also require a group of lawyers and people(ex as well as current) from the government and law enforcement to get this working. This requires initial funding.
I know a lot of people, especially Americans, just can’t help but take a crap on America every chance they get, but we’re talking about a 15 year old crime, for which the perpetrators were held accountable versus an active slave trade in Saudi Arabia. Human trafficking in all forms is abhorrent but these are not the same IMHO.
I explicitly note that in my own country (NL) there are also many such cases, especially in the exploitation of women for the sex trade which is particularly lively here and a reason why plenty of women from Eastern countries are trafficked here, as well as the agricultural sector where people are grossly taken advantage of to labor under very bad circumstances often having to rent their bed for roughly what they make during a day of work.
I'm glad that you brought up agricultural indentured servitude. I live in the midwest US, and I feel that the migrant workers that we hear so many bad things about are just picking the individually optimal outcome, and if we wanted to see fundamental change we need to punish the companies that exploit these workers for rock bottom wages.
If you read the X-Dossiers (statements from victims and such in Dutroux case) you’ll find a lot of shocking things involving highly ranked people from Belgium, The Netherlands, etc...
I've heard of other recent cases of slavery, but unfortunately this was the only one I remembered enough details about to find a reference to. I'm guessing that for every case that's discovered and prosecuted, there are many others that are not (seems to be true of crimes in general).
And I certainly have no intention of crapping on America, which has provided me with many opportunities. But I think we should be aware that horrors like slavery can happen here too, not just in far-off countries.
Yes. I say surprising, because traditionally web servers redirect from the bare name of a directory to the equivalent with a slash at the end. This then either redirects to the index.html or just serves it directly. In Apache, these are both handled by mod_dir: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_dir.html. They are using Varnish in front of the web server, and I don't know if they want this behavior or not.
"The Global Slavery Index 2018 estimates that on any given day in 2016 there were 403,000 people living in conditions of modern slavery in the United States, a prevalence of 1.3 victims of modern slavery for every thousand in the country."
I'm not entirely sure how they got to that number though.
It's also important to remember that slavery is explicitly allowed in the US constitution, and there are certainly valid interpretations of modern slavery that would count significant numbers of those currently incarcerated as being victims of modern slavery - for example https://harvardpolitics.com/involuntary-servitude-how-prison...
No it doesn't, just because you find something hard to believe doesn't mean you can't check on it yourself. This isn't a journal peer review and citations are not required.
I don't even think this is what they were talking about but there are over one million prisoners in the US and prisoners can be forced to work without pay. The constitution doesn't consider that slavery but the rest of the world certainly can.
> The constitution doesn't consider that slavery but the rest of the world certainly can.
It does actually.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Most places skirt that by paying the inmates for the work. However, the pay determined was decided in 1896 at 27p/day. That's 27 cents. A day. It might have changed over the years but that's what it was in Virginia when my step-father was a judge.
> The constitution doesn't consider that slavery but the rest of the world certainly can.
Section 1 of the 13th Amendment explicitly refers to this as slavery:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
I wasn't referring to prison labor although that is a valid discussion too. It's ironic that the "land of the free" only leads in incarcerated citizens, obesity, and diabetes per capita.
I also don't have a reference on hand. I listened to an NPR radio segment that blew my mind. There's a bunch of information from reputable sources but finding a specific number can be tricky. First of all, it's estimated because it's obviously unknown. Also, defining the "bounds" of slavery inherently changes the count. There is a fairly recent citation that states there are 400,000 enslaved people in the United States on any given day.
A lot of Western solutions sound like variants of Simpson's Paradox, where equity is increased locally, and decreased globally.
This is, for example, true if one provides people with a better-but-not-good-enough option. If I do something not meeting Western standards, I'm liable to get cancelled. On the other hand, many options a step up from slavery are just that: a step up from slavery, and would be considered very exploitative by Western standards. Sustainability matters for scalability.
Likewise, cultural imperialism is bad, and a lot of options do a lot more (distributed) harm while helping individuals. I like cultural diversity.
Options also need to stakeholders and implementation. It's easy to say "If I were dictator of the world, I would do X," but they do need to content with incentive structures, politics, and similar types of issues.
I'm not quite sure how to even have that discussion, since if something can be misinterpreted, you're liable to be cancelled (or at the very least, receive some very bad press).
I mean, there’s certain types of cultural exports or hegemony that makes sense. We got the Aztecs to stop sacrificing children to Huitzilopochtli. We don’t live in a world where people REALLY believe in total cultural relativism.
I think you’re spot on that we in the West find “step above slavery jobs” extremely distasteful. This results in situations where the news media celebrates the closing of a “child sweatshop” in Cambodia, but the cameras aren’t rolling when, faced with poor economic conditions due to the factory closing, those same children are now working in a child brothel, which everyone agrees is worse.
Similarly, Siddharth Kara has recently revealed the horrors going on in the Congo involving the Cobalt trade with the warlords and the Chinese. That ones interesting too because thirty years ago the operations were run by South Africans but the western world largely agreed this was wrong so they ceded the land back to the Congo. This resulted in warlords becoming enriched by the power vacuum and becoming well armed and making things horrific for the poor people living in Congo who have to mine up toxic cobalt with their bare hands in dangerous tunnels and pits.
The solution to child and worker exploitation is not look sad and just buy the cheap garments and cobalt.
This is a coordination problem first and foremost. The solution is to tax the shit out of supply chains that don't provide the basics.
...
And yes, development economics is ugly. There's no royal road from subsistence farming to Switzerland-level, but whatever road there is it's not composed of separately inscrutable steps. It's perfectly okay to strive to make each step better and less horrible. Just as on the other side of globalization it's not some unknowable force closing non-profitable mines, and again it's a coordination problem that the disadvantaged folks and regions of globalization, in the developed economies, only got a big pat on the back. (And yes yes, there were a few programs to try to retrain unemployed people here and there, but it was simply a waste of money, because they got no help to mentally deal with the situation. Folks should have been encouraged very heavily to move where the jobs are instead of wallowing in semi-deserted corporate towns of misery.)
Maybe not being cancelled shouldn't be your top priority? People talk like getting cancelled is a death sentence. Free speech advocates went to jail in times past. Now people act like getting ratio'd on Twitter for saying something insensitive is the worst possible fate.
That trivialises the destruction of peoples’ lives.
It’s that sort of thought pattern that allows the mob to justify its behaviour.
Getting “cancelled” causes real world harm. Imagine losing your job, being too toxic to find work elsewhere, being unable to pay your mortgage, being unable to keep a roof over your family’s head.
Give me a break. What the above poster calls getting cancelled is not going to destroy their life. He's talking about fear of a downvote for saying something someone disagrees with on Hacker News, that's the context, so no I'm not minimizing the destruction of people's lives.
No, I am talking about things like job loss, followed by loss of ability to pay mortgage, followed by child losing school district. You have no idea who I am, or what my life position is.
There are places I'm willing to stick my neck out, and there are places I'm not. Each of these is an ROI calculation.
It’s hard for people to engage in pile-ons for their own amusement and maintain that they’re a good person if they spend too much time dwelling on the lives of the people they’re ruining.
LOL, people who get cancelled get their bank accounts and credit cards and exchange accounts shut off, and are completely exiled from modern society. They can't complain about it either because they're banned from all social media. All of the above happened to me!
You obviously sympathize with the mob destroying people's lives to trivialize the effects like this.
You were exiled from modern society and had your bank accounts cancelled? What for? Sorry, but I don't believe that this was caused by a tweet or hacker news comment.
The mention of 'exchange accounts' leads me to believe there are possibly two unique situations this individual is co-mingling:
1) Transferring money between crypto exchanges and regulated financial institutions in ways that trip fraud or AML detection measures leading to closed accounts
2) Actions against one or more social media accounts in reaction to content this individual has posted or shared
People love to act like one social media post against the "mainstream" is potentially life destroying but there's yet to be an actual example of that. Just loud jerks being loud jerks and getting mad when told to leave the party.
Sorry, I'm not watching a two hour YouTube video to figure out what point you're making. Suicide is a serious concern and we should certainly take more steps to be civil online, but there's also never a singular simple reason for why someone made that decision.
Considering your mention of cultural diversity in the context of slavery I can't interpret this other than as mere preference.
But there are actual victims of this cultural diversity, and cultural imperialism which destroys such cultures as have victims would be strongly preferable to the continued existence of such cultures.
As an additional data point. Qatar and the building of the stadiums. Migrant workers kept in absolute inhumane conditions and worked to death in the heat.
If a culture is okay with that maybe it's okay to want to nudge that culture to change.
Those games should have been boycotted by any country that is a signatory to various anti-slavery declarations. Instead they were used to whitewash the reputation of the government.
It's a "private event", after all FIFA is just a big trade group, that happens to have a de facto monopoly.
I think the correct course of action would be to "tax the shit out of that" too. (Just as with all the other stuff mentioned in the comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34172394)
But of course it's never the right time to do that, as currently half the EU is trying to suck their dick for a bit more natural gas. :/
US culture has victims in cages on the border with Mexico, victims in Gitmo, victims being locked up in prison due to racism, and about a million victims in Iraq/Syria. Not to mention most of global warming is from rich people.
Are you okay destroying US culture? Or are you an apologist for our racist justice system?
Would, as you put it "cultural imperialism which destroys such cultures as have victims would be strongly preferable to the continued existence of such cultures" in the context of Western culture?
See what I did there? If the point I tried to make above isn't clear:
* The point isn't to say slavery is okay -- it's obviously not -- but a lot of stuff in every culture is not okay.
* A lot of other stuff in every culture is not okay as perceived by other cultures (especially around sex, gender, and religion), but comes down to values.
* And a lot of other stuff is beautiful, unique, and good.
Western cultural imperialist interventions haven't worked out well in the past. I'm glad to write more about that too. Even if you -- as most of these comments seem to -- believe that Western culture is superior, culturally imperialist interventions haven't led to the outcome you want.
What interventions are you proposing, and why would you believe they would work any better here?
Okay but we agreed it was wrong and basically forced the Aztecs to stop sacrificing people to their sun god. I don’t think you’ll find a sane individual today advocating for child sacrifice to make sure the sun comes up in the morning. The Aztecs certainly would have preferred to keep being on top and brutalizing the other tribes around them. Is this a lack of cultural diversity? When do we stop respecting cultural diversity and step in to do what we believe to be the right thing?
The point isn't to justify slavery as cultural diversity but to be able to sell a more equitable model that is realistic given widespread values in the region. And one that does not inadvertently lead to more harm. As well as address the details of implementation and oversight.
I actually hate the language of "more equitable model that is realistic given widespread values in the region."
Ending slavery isn't controversial. Western notions of equity are, in both gross and subtle ways.
If I:
- work harder than you;
- have greater aptitude;
- have richer, more educated parents;
- have better / more culturally-aligned social skills;
- have a wealthier social network;
- have higher test scores / university pedigree;
- have better ethics; and / or
- am more ambitious, greedy, and motivated than you
What should are relative outcomes be? Cultures differ here. Some would like more equal outcomes. Some would like more meritocratic outcomes (for different definitions of 'merit'). Some would like more laissez faire / libertarian / freedom-oriented outcomes (e.g. preservation of property rights).
That's okay. I'm not a cultural relativist on ending slavery. I do respect diversity on concepts like what "equity" means.
I think narrow, targeted interventions could work well around slavery, but would break down the instant those were perceived to touch on LGBTQ, women's rights, religion, equity, or a swarm of other issues around values. On the other hand, omitting at least a few of those, I'm unlikely to make headway in the West. That's not to mention economic / corporate issues, like IP rights.
Of course it isn't. What is not obvious is what replaces it that isn't de facto slavery or even reduces opportunities for people so that they are exploited elsewhere. Nor how the replacement is monitored for effectiveness and compliance.
It is easy to say that slavery is bad and make it illegal. Fixing the actual problems in monarchies/dictatorships and impoverished countries with little opportunity is not easy or simple. The fact that a lot of slaves are not technically slaves but officially and legally "employed" makes the issue pretty plain to see. How do you see the solution to compliance in Middle Eastern monarchies and even in Western democracies where it is already illegal but happens none the less? I assume you are going to go out and implement these right away if it is so easy and obvious.
You are looking for equitable solutions in places that explicitly do not value them. Improving that is hard, if it is not already obvious.
I don't have a solution -- which is why I called for a discussion -- but in this specific context, I think a lot of this comes back to framing this with regards to local value systems. This is a good starting point:
Another good starting point is prestige and how it impacts perceptions of individuals involved.
A lot of the framing in this discussion carry a lot of Western baggage which is likely to rub people the wrong way in the Middle East.
I can think of several solutions which I think could at least be more effective than what the West is doing; I do think there is room for prestige projects here. I'm not sure how helpful that would be, since in terms of "implementing," I don't know any Saudi royalty. Do you?
> If I do something not meeting Western standards, I'm liable to get cancelled.
This just means you’re getting information from unreliable sources. “Cancelled” sounds like you’ll be unemployable but 99% of the time it means someone said something insulting, some people criticized them, and they had no significant consequences. The American and English right-wing like to talk like cancellation is a real problem because it’s both an effective marketing tool (notice how often complaints about being cancelled are delivered in for-profit books and media by people making upper-class incomes from it) and as a proactive defense against criticism.
My sense is that a lot of the political class throughout the world is heavily benefitting from it. As long as that’s the case then the problem isn’t gonna get resolved.
The sad part is that working as slave maids is the best possible option for a lot of these people. Last week only dozens of Rohingya refugees died because they were adrift on a ship for a month and no country rescued them because they didn't want migrants. South Asia sadly has a lot of such stories. Myanmar in conflict, Afghanistan is shambles, Pakistan desperately poor, Sri lanka also in chaos. Only India is somewhat stable. All of these poor people are exploited a lot by the rich Gulf states.
Yes, although I think it'll be, not because the media apparatus is going to be less lenient, but because they no longer feel the need to restrain their evil.
In this case we also presumably have these companies that replace 'master' with 'main' etc. in technical literature and comments, but which are cooperating with things which may well be actual slavery.
This is something that leaders from Africa and Latin America have talked about a lot.
Western democracies love using the appearance of moral superiority as a diplomatic tool while turning a blind eye to their own corruption and failings (ie. United Fruit, JP Morgan Chase, Boeing, gun violence, police brutality)
1. It’s cheaper to whitewash (ie. affirmative action) than effect change (ie. reparations for Haiti, descendants of slaves in US)
2. It perpetuates the good guys vs bad guys myth /propaganda at home that makes it easier to wage war and disenfranchise “third-world” countries.
Slavery is abolished in the west and currently existing slavery should be a primary focus-- whether it's a western company participating in a possible slave market, or Saudi participating in it-- such entities and individuals must obviously be destroyed, and immediately.
How we deal with morality and history is a separate question and of less interest.
Additionally, it’s also estimated that the US has at least a half million people in domestic servitude as stated in the article. This does not include sex trafficking which is a separate issue.
There are of course Roma beggar-gangs who have travelled to Sweden and who practise some kind of forced labour system on their members, but this is not something officially permitted and to the degree that this is a phenomenon it is only possible because of the foreignness of these gangs the the difficulty of Swedish policemen to genuinely understand what is going on.
When we have access to experts we try to break these things up and to prosecute.
Furthermore, we are not in any way reliant on these groups, since they are, as I have mentioned, beggar-gangs. They do not offer any service, but beg for money outside supermarkets and on trains.
Slavery is abolished on paper, but there are more than enough well-known instances where we still have slavery or slavery-like conditions... Italy is estimated to have 50k people in agriculture, mostly in tomato picking, and a further 95k in prostitution and domestic labor [1] as a result of a lot of undocumented immigrants being exploited, Spain's agriculture modern slavery is smaller but still existent [2] and known for at least a decade [3], even Germany has massive issues [4] with estimates going up to 167k people [5].
We may not have overt slavery any more in the Western world, but covert slavery and human trafficking? Absolutely.
Genuinely curious, who would pay reparations to Haiti? France? How much would need to be paid and how would it be administered to make a dent in Haiti?
At least, the sums extracted from Haiti and corrected into 2022 money should be part of the conversation. It’s much less murky than reparations in the US. Slave owners in Haiti were both black and white, and foreign policy toward Haiti was directly punitive to demonstrate an economic cost for other potential slave uprisings.
The date after which I perceived a change in the coverage of Saudi Arabia in the US was September 11th, 2001, but I don't know whether the coverage changed or my awareness of it did. Similarly, that you perceive a change in coverage may reflect not an actual change but only a change in yourself: you expect bias in coverage based on national interest and you perceive national interests to have changed, so you interpret individual articles like this to reflect a change in coverage generally.
I would say it is possible, likely, that people have false impressions of the general conditions in other nations based on news organizations' choosing to cover stories that are not generally representative of conditions in the nation. This will be true for all nations, regardless of whether anyone in the organizations are choosing, consciously or unconsciously, to cover stories confirming or creating biases. I think a greater problem is our own biases and attention selecting the news coverage we attend to. I think it is not the case that bias in coverage is centrally coordinated as you imply.
This is all aside from whether a particular article is true. This is something actionable. Choosing to believe or ignore individual articles based on your prior belief in bias leaves you in a hall of mirrors.
When exactly has Western media been soft on Saudi Arabia? They have always been portrayed as a backwards country that oppresses women, kills LGBT people, and since 2014 Saudi Arabia has also been heavily criticized for their war in Yemen. There were also BBC/Channel4 documentaries from more than a decade ago about how Saudi Arabia was indirectly funding the radicalization of Muslims in Europe.
There was a brief moment when MBS was seens as the reformer. Then a few minutes later it turns out he gave the order to chop up Jamal the journalist. :|
In the US, media is totally critical of Shiite-majority nations while avoiding any serious critical view of Sunni-majority nations. If that's too opaque, then another way to put it is that the US stigmatizes, sanctions and engages in military interventions in countries that the Saudi government is hostile towards: Iran, Iraq, Yemen and Syria; who are Shiite-majority and Shiite-ruled. The Saudis are themselves Sunni and they treat Shiites as "barely Muslim". Saudi interventions in Oman or Yemen are ignored while Iranian interventions get reported to American audiences.
What is happening in the Middle East is a modern version of the Thirty Year's War. This time, instead of Catholic vs Protestant, it is Sunni vs Shiite.
Disclaimer: I've lived in both Iran and Saudi Arabia - dad was in the oil business.
Yes. But the Western Media has been soft on those in the West who do business with SA, have political relationships with SA, etc.
For example, even POTUS Trump* got a free pass. His first overseas visit was to SA. Imagine that, of all our allies, he goes to SA first. And yet, not a peep of outrage, even from The Left leaning media. Why would that be?
* This is not an attack of DJT. It simply a perfect example of how (intentionally) blind the media is to those who accept and enable SA.
Coverage of Mr Trump’s financial arrangements with KSA were prominent in coverage of that visit, and what the change could mean. For example, while campaigning he said that KSA was responsible for 9/11 and that it wouldn’t exist without American intervention. The story of his visit as POTUS notably covered this change. Mainstream media covered his son-in-law arranging Saudi funding. Covering change is more important than fanning outrage.
You missed the point. That is, they are not the only ones. In fact, the whole country (read: US fed gov, and perhaps plenty of states) are in bed - comfortably - with SA.
But as long as they have oil, and we need to kneel before them, our media plays along.
Note: This is not a critique of SA. They're a sovereign nation. I'm not fit to judge (and it's off topic). This is a critique of Western media and it's willingness to look away.
There was quite a bit of discussion about this when it happened. Not sure what news media you were listening to, but there was quite a bit of push back for this decision when it happened from main stream commentators.
Discussion? Yes, in the usual token sense. But not much more. And if amything it was directed solely at Trump, not the USA's long standing (hypocritial) relationship with SA. That's simply not something the USA MM does.
Regardless, it's one example. The point is, the Western Media is relatively blind to anyone or anything that involves itself with SA. RT probably does a better job.
Not any more or less than they usually do. I was expecting, if nothing else, consistency in how they use their tactics. But not doing so is just as telling.
Conclusion: We have a conpletely failed Fourth Estate; which means "the democracy" (they're so fond of fearing for) is no democracy - by the text book defintion - at all. The irony is absurd.
I think specific examples would help this back on track. We have a grandparent comment and others in the thread supporting negative media narratives about KSA culture. We have a parent comment about the coverage of US business involvement with KSA and a few commenters supported that with their recollections of the media narrative around conducting business with KSA, not even getting into cultural or military problems.
It’s interesting if your media diet has changed favorably for either KSA culture, military, or business connections. Maybe the career arc of Rex Tillerson, or the investiture arc of Jared Kushner have been sculpted by some outlets and not others.
Honestly thinking back I don't think I have ever read where an article saying anything positive about SA society and culture. This is thinking back decades. So I think the SA is evil ship launched a long time ago
> I guess now that SA has signaled a slight shift away from the US empire, we're going to be seeing a lot more articles about how evil they are.
Telling that the gist of the article isn't "These people are suffering from slavery" but rather "These people are selling slaves" - the focus is on the Saudis, not on the slaves. Unfortunately, slavery is rampant the world over even today. My own grandfather was a slave.
But this is not a piece intended to help the slaves. This piece is intended to slander the Saudis.
A piece intended to help the slaves would focus on who they are, where they came from, his they became slaves, how to help release them from bondage, and most importantly how to prevent further cases. In other words, actionable information.
This piece is slanderous because it does not focus on slave owners in general, but rather on a specific slave owner. This piece does not convey the message "owning slaves is wrong for all people" but rather "Saudis are bad, because they own slaves". There is no focus on other groups of people who own slaves, only the Saudis.
The kafala system isn't going anywhere so long as we can't tell these countries to take their oil and drink it. The same thing (i.e. "sponsoring" someone by capturing that person's passport and forcing low wage labor for any hope of retrieval) happened to those enslaved workers in Qatar, and then the Qatari women had the nerve to brag about how liberated they were -- that there was no housework to which they were shackled. Hmm, I wonder how many other problems they can outsource to the exploited world's poor?
I can’t wait to see these useless oil states crumble.
Dubai, Qatar, all these barbaric places flourishing in oil wealth, using it toward trafficking and slavery as they drive Mercedes over sand dunes and eat Johnny Rocket…makes me so angry
Very true. The working conditions for maids in Singapore are atrocious. Work 6 days per week, 14-16 hour days, salary Is SGD 1,000 / month on average. I live here as an expat (no maid, I refuse it) and my neighbours really treat their maids like 2nd class humans. There are often reports of maids being beaten up or abused by their “masters”.
I've always been against hiring people to do my chores, but eventually I can only defend this from the perspective that doing my own chores makes me a better person. (Instinctively I don't want to do it, but morally I cannot justify not doing it now.)
I don't believe that hiring servants is bad. Ultimately, it creates an opportunity for them as well.
If you have a maid and pay them well, give them better than average working conditions, and don't punish them when you have emotional problems, you give them an opportunity to grow an alternate career on the side.
If you "refuse to participate", that does not fundamentally create more equality in itself.
Right, you could hire a maid and give them double the salary and normal working hours and now everyone wins. And if they move on to a better career, great, the system worked.
As long as the money does go to the maid, which is far from being certain. Even in a country as strict as Singapore, some are hostages rather than free workers. I'm sure it's much worse in others.
The next step is wondering if you trust yourself staying true to those intentions. I think it's safe to assume that most people who are bad examples never intended to and still believe they are the good guys. We are amazing at deluding ourselves.
I do not understand what maids could be doing for 14 to 16 hours per day for 6 days per week. Singapore abodes are small, and surely they have washers/dryers? Are they also serving as cooks, nannies, nurses, and shopping assistants?
I was once thinking like the OP too. However, life taught me that you can find someone to do any sh*t job (provided you pick from a large enough pool). Likely because their circumstances are improved by it, at least a little.
Hence I'd rather try to improve things a little bit for one person, unlike my purist (and naive) younger self.
I must admit though, personally I still find it hard still to make someone else do something I myself loathe doing.
> I must admit though, personally I still find it hard still to make someone else do something I myself loathe doing.
Not sure how you avoid it. I assume you don't pick all of your own apples or slaughter your own cows or mine your own iron or cobalt. Delegation is the cornerstone of civilization.
Presumably you're someone quite well paid and can afford to pay a cleaner at western rates (I pay mine 15 GBP per hour in London).
A cleaner will clean better and faster than you, letting you not only enjoy a clean stress-free home, but also enabling you to make a more productive use of your time.
Then I’d happily pay more then 15% income tax in this country so we can provide better foreign aid to said countries so they can afford a better education. Encouraging slavery does not solve the root cause.
on the other hand, the USA has close to 100K drug overdose deaths per year and singapore has close to none - not sure we are being very humane in the USA by allowing so many people to die from a preventable causes - maybe singapore is harsh in their methods, but maybe we should learn something.
It’s not like there isn’t some kind of middle ground - germany has about 1000 drug overdoses per year and we managed to get there without hanging people. Portugal, a country that has decriminalized drug consumption in 2001 has even better numbers, much lower than most other European countries.
Doesn’t SG tightly control their press? So how do we know how many overdose deaths they have? Also, they have a population of about 6M, including expats, compared to 300M in the US.
It’s not even the prescription opioids alone - germany has a similar prescription rate for opioids as the US (or at least had for a very long time), and we still don’t see the same effect.
The way these treatments are administered and checked upon matters, too as well as the underlying social dynamics.
How has 'the US tried to be "harsh" on drug dealers for decades'? In San Francisco the Honduran drug dealers gather around luxury SUVs for catered meal breaks before resuming their murderous work. We are currently wildly out of control. Enough Fentanyl was seized in California in 2022 to kill everyone in the USA twice. God only knows how much more got through and into people's bodies.
Check the amount of alcohol present on the shelves of US stores. There's enough to kill the roughly half-the-population who consume several times over.
The point is not to compare alcohol & fentanyl, but to note that "enough X to kill Y" is a really bad way to think about quantities of drugs.
Or Hong-Kong. It's borderline slavery. Although in Hk most of the maid don't seem to suffer too much, I can imagine how worse it could be in Singapore considering the local culture and population.
I remember digging into this somewhat and was surprised how prevalent it was; even in the uk, us and canada.
Once you know the current code words for the gender, type of slave, and job, you can even use Google to search and find open sites.
It was depressing to see but I honestly could not see what could be done. The fact it is done so openly and with so much money involved, I found it hard to believe that law enforcement was clueless if not complicit in it.
>Once you know the current code words for the gender, type of slave, and job, you can even use Google to search and find open sites.
Well, don't hold back. Open a window for us into that realm. If it was that "open" would it not be on the radar of agencies combating the human trafficing?
The agencies doing that have their hands more than full, there are many more cases that they know about than that they have personnel to act on because politically it isn't a huge priority so there aren't funds enough to make this go away once and for all.
Chinese get smuggled by the truckload into Western Europe and the only time you will hear about it is if they end up suffocating, which makes it newsworthy. And that's just one example of many. I'm against the death penalty but human traffickers make me doubt my stance on that.
For people saying slavery is 100% abolished in the US. It’s just masked as Penal labor.
Slave labor in the United States is explicitly allowed by the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
They could be paid for their work. It is labor, after all. And they don't get a choice.
The removal of their liberty is supposed to be punishment for their crime, and that's plenty of punishment. Ideally, they'd be reformed while in prison. And while I'm dreaming, they could build a nest egg by working there, instead of being exploited.
What would have happened had they refused to work? They won't get whipped or beaten.
Arguably community service under threat of imprisonment is also compelled labour. If you agree that's a valid punishment for a crime, then we're not really talking about whether compelled labour is a problem in and of itself so much as the specific conditions under which labour can be legitimately compelled.
I can appreciate the desire to ensure criminals have some money when they get out since a lot of crime is correlated with poverty and job prospects are slim. However, you're neglecting that prosecuting and incarcerating people costs society money, which is to say that criminals owe society a debt, and in principle, criminals should be paying as much of that debt as is feasible.
That said there are multiple ways to do this. One is compelled labour the proceeds of which they'll never see, but perhaps work can go to lowering their sentence. Another can be deferred compensation, where they get a fixed stipend once out based on their work while incarcerated.
I can think of a bunch of other ways, but I'm not sure I agree that the compensation should be minimum wage. People fund the government via taxes, but criminals aren't just not paying into the system, they are actively draining it. I'm not sure garnishing wages they'd otherwise earn is in principle unjust anymore that income tax is unjust.
This does ignore the damage done to the free market though. Every job that a prison inmate takes up, is a job that could be taken by a non-criminal and which would pay for at least federal minimum wage.
I'd call the difference of prison wage and the minimum wage lost money.
I agree there are externalities to consider for a proper proposal, my purpose here was only to argue that compelled labour without minimum wage compensation isn't intrinsically wrong, it depends on the specific implementation.
The legitimacy of an enterprise shouldn't be judged based on where it's allowed to happen - it should be the other way around. The two app stores should be designated as 'slave markets' for allowing this to persist for so long after being alerted. It's especially ironic that these companies are keen on deep invasion of privacy of regular citizens in the name of CSAM and terrorism. This is an exaggerated form of their 'Rules for you, none for me' attitude.
In addition, I object to the 'black market' terminology. Unlike the objections these companies have with 'master' on git - which doesn't have any relationship to slavery, black is an actual term related to a race that's misappropriated with a derogatory connotation.
> In addition, I object to the 'black market' terminology. [...] black is an actual term related to a race that's misappropriated with a derogatory connotation.
It doesn't appear that "black" in "black market" refers to race:
Yeah, it's worth noting that black people weren't usually referred to as black people in western societies back then, but various variations of the N word.
Black is an actual colour, and in opposition to light. That's where all these black/grey/white trichotomies come from.
The usage of black as an adjective to describe illegal deeds and things not only precedes the slavery in the North America but existed in cultures which never even seen people with a black skin. But you can't argue with SJW with logic.
This isn't just saudis. Dubai, Emirates, Egypt ... under the Kafala system, foreign workers gets their passport confiscated by their employers and aren't free to get out of the country. It's slavery, there is no other name for that.
Of course maids get abused, tortured and raped by their employers and the family, and even when they travel to Europe with their employers, they are mistreated the exact same way. But since the Saudis are filthy rich, Europe turns a blind eye...
Hard to put a finger on why but there's something about gulf Arab countries and a common attitude of entitlement and arrogance that's special to them, but not so in Oman and Iraq. As if money buys superiority.
We don’t even call 18th-century indentured servitude slavery. The conditions of Atlantic chattel slavery have set a particular threshold on the spectrum and people don’t seem to revert to the old, Biblical definition.
The idea of an otherised society where some home sapiens are less human than others has deep roots and countless manifestations (war, slavery, gender biases, other forms of exploitation). It is also the primary manifestation of evil.
Yet is clearly an unstable (high maintenance) collective mental state. It is predicated on active oppression. The stable ground state is fundamentally egalitarian. Almost by definition.
Progress and civilization are not relative concepts. They are counted objectively by the number of brains that can reach full emotional, perceptive, creative etc maturity.
> Yet is clearly an unstable (high maintenance) collective mental state. It is predicated on active opression. The stable ground state is fundamentally egalitarian. Almost by definition
I would not be able to come to this conclusion based on my experiences. Humans are very tribal animals, and it takes a lot of work to work towards egalitarianism. You can even see it in children, where they form “cliques”, and engage in bullying, even amongst siblings.
Not that it is inevitable that humans will “otherise” other humans to the level that they are OK with keeping them as slaves, but there is a large spectrum of ordering in probably all of our minds, as opposed to viewing everyone as the same.
there is a lot of clanish behavior that is somehow innate and can be exploited. there is also an enormous cultural ability to rationalize and justify the "naturalness" of a multi-class society. further, people are born with a spectrum of abilities and character traits that facilitates segmentation.
without oversimplifying though the complex interplay of these and other factors (e.g. the degree to which technology can diminish the need for subjugated human labor) the point is that no human likes to be considered a subhuman. Hence the construct is predicated on social machinations and its persistence, at least at scale, is always precarious.
Yes; slavery is explicitly permitted under the Constitution as a criminal punishment, even today. It's pretty gross.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
I think there's still a significant difference between that and the Saudi maid example, where they've not even been convicted of a crime of any kind.
Although, the existence of this does create the prison industrial complex. It also drives things like mandatory minimums, the drug war, and other negative aspects of US law. Because there is a financial incentive for convictions and incarceration, more laws with prison as the sentence are made. Lobbyists from major corporations often support these laws, and then purchase the labor from the prisons.
I'm not sure I see the argument that forced labour as punishment for breaking the law is intrinsically wrong. Community service is compelled labour with the threat of prison of you don't comply. If that seems reasonable to you, then we're not really debating whether compelled labour is the problem so much as the conditions under which it happens.
Well, the fact that google and apple have slave marketplaces in their app stores should be of relevance to the many google/apple employees that frequent this site.
I’d say it’s quite relevant since these people are traded openly on the country’s largest online commerce platform (including auctions). It’s a good example of technology facilitating modern day slavery and therefore very relevant to an open debate about the perceived “modernisation” of Saudi Arabia.
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The sketches for the two guys that kidnapped Madeline McCann look an awful lot like the Podesta brothers. Then there’s the whole Prince Andrew thing. And then Epstein and Maxwell. How does Maxwell get convicted on trafficking charges but none of her clients do? As long as the political class is heavily involved the problem isn’t gonna get solved.
So long as society isn’t willing to address some basic matters, slavery and exploitation will exist.
Finite resources, unrestrained population growth, paired with rampant individualism where everyone wants more than their neighbour.
I wonder what the effects of having a perfect enforcement mechanism against exploitation would be ?
Would we finally plan resource allocation and population growth more reasonably ? I suspect it would just go horribly wrong somehow and we would end up in some version of Malthusianism.
