An issue much discussed and poorly understood

In recent years, the Western world has seen a flurry of concern and subsequent legislation around the scourge of ‘modern slavery’. However, both the concept itself and the laws designed to prevent it remain vague and unclear, spoken about mostly discussed by bureaucrats, NGOs, and CEOs. 

The responses by Federal and State Governments to this issue have been fervent, with both a Federal and a NSW Act being passed in 2018. Beyond the legislative changes, entire new bureaucratic bodies have been established, with a dedicated Commissioner at both a federal and state level. 

On its surface, the term modern slavery already raises some questions. What is so ‘modern’ about it? What is the use of differentiating it from slavery of different eras or different systems?

The definition that is given by the UN Special Rapporteur on modern slavery draws a legal distinction between ‘traditional’ or chattel slavery and modern slavery. Under traditional slavery, the rights of slave owners were enshrined in law and therefore the practice is legal. Those that participate in modern slavery are either legal companies doing illegal activity or companies which are run by illegal organisations such as organised crime. Modern slavery is distinguished then by the fact that it is conducted beneath the surface of the legal economy, not because it is any different in practice or consequence to more ‘traditional’ forms of slavery. 

Despite its change in legal status, structural incentives for slavery still exist within our economic system. While it shouldn’t be understated the importance of the dismantling of a system where political and economic power stemmed from maintaining the legal right to own slaves, this doesn’t mean that those who still engage in slave ownership or slave practices have no political representation.

Legal changes to curb slavery are nothing new, whether in the form of regulation or abolition – how effective these methods are is the more important question. As it stands, liberal legal solutions are still failing to address the real cause of slavery across the globe.

The role of Australian capital in shaping the response to modern slavery across the globe is actually relatively outsized. One NGO ‘tackling’ modern slavery that is responsible for a large amount of reporting and the creation of the Global Slavery Index is ‘Walk Free,’ which was started by mining magnate Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest and his daughter Grace Forrest. This is, of course, the same Twiggy Forrest who, while in the process of pillaging the Pilbara for all its resources, had claimed that Aboriginal people were undeserving of welfare.

Even just a cursory read of Walk Free’s report on the state of global enslavement of women and girls has you run into some outrageous proposals, including that Lebanon should cancel all working visas for women in the country. A little further down, they gladly feature an essay penned by Yeonmi Park, the grifter par excellence who has built a career on outlandish claims about the North Korean regime, including that they have outlawed the concept of love. What comes into focus from these reports is a great deal of unseriousness from the organisation Walk Free; it is a billionaire’s philanthropic smokescreen, either profiling liars or promoting absurd far-right border control policies.

Despite the personal hypocrisies of Twiggy Forrest, Walk Free’s position as an authoritative NGO for research and action on modern slavery earns them meetings with the Pope and positions on panels. Unfortunately, but not unsurprisingly, the discourse pertaining to modern slavery is dominated by the richest billionaires in our country. 

The NSW Modern Slavery Commissioner

In August 2022, James Cockayne was appointed in the role of NSW Modern Slavery Commissioner, newly set up in the wake of the passing of the 2018 Modern Slavery Act for NSW as a state response to slavery. Cockayne is truly committed to the idea that the elements of modern slavery which make it bad are primarily the ways that it harms the optimal functioning of capitalist markets. In a 2022 presentation Cockayne outlined ways in which he thinks modern slavery leaves society worse off, including ‘reduced productivity’, ‘reduced innovation’, and ‘weakened multiplier effects’ (people not having enough money to stimulate sales of consumer goods). 

Cockayne’s neoliberal revelations here are not, in fact, new to capitalism in any way. Early capitalists learnt these lessons already when expending the lives of many millions of enslaved people in service of expanding consumer markets. As capitalism has cemented its place as the global economic system, slavery remains its most thorny contradiction: capitalists will always race to the bottom for cheap (or free) labour, yet in doing so they risk destabilising the very cycles of profit which sustain them. What Twiggy Forrest and James Cockayne cannot face is that this fact remains true regardless of slavery’s legal status or not.

CEOs: ‘We’re not using slaves, trust us’

The hopelessness of this kind of capitalist response to modern slavery typified by these bureaucrats is also reflected in corporate modern slavery statements. The Modern Slavery Act (2018) requires business entities earning over $100m in revenue p.a. to publish yearly reports on slavery risks relevant to their operations. The reports themselves are largely HR-department blather, but also contain revealing insights into the workings of the anti-slavery industry.

The 2022 slavery report for JB Hi-Fi is a good example. Since JB does not directly employ slaves, most of the report is focused on “slavery risks” in the retail supply chain – suppliers and distributors in the developing world. Largely, the point of this is to comply with the law, and to reassure any potentially worried investors that all is well. A substantial amount of the report is spent on toothless liaising with suppliers. In the 2022 report, JB was proud to note that suppliers are now required to make sure that their employees’ wages are “enough for basic living needs with residual income for discretionary spending”. This is something that JB doesn’t even guarantee for its own staff, the majority of whom are on the lowest level of the retail award.

In assessing the risk of suppliers using modern slavery, JB employs a three step process. Firstly, a general risk assessment is provided by the Responsible Business Alliance, a “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) non-profit funded by electronics industry corporations, is utilised. This takes into account the country the supplier is in, the kind of products it produces or distributes, and so on.

The second step is a “self-assessment questionnaire”, filled out by the supplier themselves. This basically consists of questions about whether the supplier uses slaves or is likely to use slaves. If the supplier says “no, we don’t use slaves”, then they move on to the next step. If for whatever reason they say “yes, we use slaves”, then it’s not as big a problem as you’d think. 

The report notes one example of a Chinese supplier whose questionnaire responses indicated a high risk of slavery. After liaising with the supplier, JB helpfully ascertained that the language barrier was the problem; the supplier was able to re-do the questionnaire, giving the correct answers this time and getting their assessment downgraded to “medium risk” and therefore fit to be bought and sold by JB.

The final step is a social compliance audit carried out by a nominally independent auditor, usually employed by the large multinational businesses that specialise in CSR services. JB requires that their suppliers complete one of the major CSR audits, of which there are a handful. It’s not difficult to find the flaws in this system.

According to the JB report, the most common audit of their suppliers is the Business Social Compliance Initiative (BSCI) Audit. Infamously, a BSCI audit of a group of factories in Savar, Bangladesh was carried out by a subsidiary of the German-based TÜV Rheinland. Not long after this audit was completed and the factories certified, the building housing the factories, Rana Plaza, collapsed, killing 1134 people.

The dark hidden shame of Australia: slavery persists

Not only can we not deal with slavery which exists today, Australia still denies and fights against the need for reparations for the slavery of our past. The new focus on ‘modern’ slavery is an attempt to bury our heads in the sand regarding the prevalence of slavery and hyper-exploitation worldwide and our role in creating and perpetuating slavery historically.

In 2020, only a few days after tens of thousands of Australians marched during the Covid pandemic for Black Lives Matter, then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison gave a radio interview making the extraordinary claim that there has never been slavery in the history of colonial Australia. As well as the fact that many Aboriginal people perform slave labour while being incarcerated in prisons today, Australia has a long and potted history of slavery across the continent. 

Australian states were direct administrators of slavery in Australia, and Indigenous Australians were enslaved until the 1970s. This legal, state-administered slavery only ended in the 1970s, and functioned under laws which allowed state governments to withhold the wages of Aboriginal workers for private labour that they undertook, meaning those wages were stolen. Australia’s fifth-largest class action lawsuit ever took on the Queensland government over the question of stolen wages concerning a period of four decades. Despite it being calculated that 500 million dollars of wages were stolen in this period, the settlement for the case was read to be 190 million dollars. Many other class action cases against state governments have either failed or are still taking place. That these practices happened up until the 70s means that these questions are not abstract or historical for Indigenous Australians. The role of the Australian state in the continuation of slavery and its consequences has never been broken.

This is the crucial point that busts apart the liberal desire to distance traditional slavery and modern slavery. The assumption that the legal status of slave owning causes a shift in the political representation and strength of slave owners within a political system is false, as the law does not magically grant political power, representation and strength to the survivors of slavery and their progeny. They grind on, appealing to the courts without ever receiving true justice in return. Both the slave owner and corporations are capitalists, and the workers, in forced or waged labour, are still fucked.

Sex workers: the collateral damage of the modern slavery pushback

Since the advent of tabloid press and debates around responses to slavery, sex work and sex workers have been inflicted with extreme punishment by governments seeking to appear like they are doing something in response to the political problem of slavery. The ‘white slavery’ panic is perhaps the first example of this. With no labour rights or welfare for women following the Industrial Revolution, sex work was highly visible in Victorian England. After a highly sensational piece by W T Stead was published entitled “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon”, Britain’s emerging tabloid press flexed their muscles like never before. Fear mongering about supposed trafficking of white women led to a public protest in Hyde Park, London in 1885 and the passing of what became colloquially known as the Stead Act (after the article’s author), which toughened legislation around the punishment of sex work.

Fast forward to Australia and we see Channel 9/Fairfax producing a tabloid series and subsequent Stan documentary called ‘Trafficked’, which replays the ‘trafficked women’ moral panic, but this time as the white saviour for Asian women. The series portrays Asian sex workers as the hapless victims of traffickers who lock them into debt bondage through fraudulent visa promises, despite the fact that many of the workers depicted in the series are known not to be in these situations. The documentary uses footage obtained without the women’s consent for their bodies and advertisements to be shown, to the huge distress of those whom Fairfax blatantly exploits in the pursuit of gutter journalism. In the wake of this series a former Victorian cop cooked up the ‘Nixon Report’, which put forward the proposal that no Australian visa should allow an individual to work in the sex industry. This would have the opposite effect on the prevalence of trafficking – women trapped in coercive arrangements of sexual servitude already do not report their enslavement due to the fear of being deported, and passing such a law would justify that fear completely. It will also criminalise the work of all migrant sex workers, expanding the power that the AFP have over their work and welfare. The parallels between Stead’s article and Act, and McKenzies documentary and foreshadowed legislative changes are obvious. The tactics and obfuscations that capitalists use when approaching slavery are attempts to hide themselves as the root cause, and have not changed in 150 years. It is not hard to believe that from this, a Labor government may choose to take on sex workers as law-and-order collateral, in order to appeal to a conservative base.

Sex workers have not had to wait for such concrete legislative changes to the legality of their work to feel the impact of the ‘modern slavery’ discussion. As Scarlet Alliance have pointed out in their criticism and the hasty implementation of the Modern Slavery Act 2018, many companies, eager to put an anti-slavery gloss onto their exploitative activities, have begun to make promises to discriminate against sex workers to wash their hands clean of any accusations of sex trafficking. Accor hotels have said they will not rent rooms out to workers, and mining companies have said they will refuse FIFO sex workers operating in company towns or worksites.

Conclusion

The ruling class will often misdirect attention away from legitimate crises by punishing a section of the working class as a cautionary tale. The neoliberal crocodile tears regarding ‘modern slavery’ is a clear example of this. Exploitation in our workplaces and in situations of slavery may differ in degree, but it does not differ in kind. We share a common enemy, and we must be united in rejecting false and dangerous neoliberal solutions to one of the fundamental problems of capitalism.