Modern slavery and the gendered paradoxes of labour unfreedom

Since the financial crisis, the partial recovery of profitability of business has happened at the expenses of workers worldwide. In the UK, improvements in employment rates have been paralleled by a decline in real wages. Abroad, countries hosting global labour-intensive manufacturing hubs have witnessed a further intensification of harsh labour regimes.  In this scenario, unsurprisingly, industrial disasters and sweatshop scandals proliferated.

It is in this context that the term ‘modern slavery’ is increasingly being used in media and policy circles, where it is more or less loosely deployed to capture extreme exploitation in global supply chains. With reference to the garment industry, debates on ‘new’ slavery trace back to the 1990s, and intensified after the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster.  But to what extent is the term ‘modern slavery’ helpful, and which other categories of analysis could be used instead?  I have previously stressed elsewhere  the relevance of engaging with definitional debates; definitions always come with analytical and political implications.  Here, I argue that the term ‘modern slavery’ is limited in describing the reality of the modern global garment proletariat.  The term ‘labour unfreedom’, instead, is better equipped to capture this reality.  This said, we should adopt a far broader definition of ‘unfreedom’ than that generally suggested, and emphasise both the economic and the social aspects of labour oppression.  This is particularly important to capture the lived experience of labour subjugation of the millions of women garment workers who stitch our clothes.

While well-meaning, the debate on modern slavery shows several limitations. First, acritical reference to ‘slaves’ working in modern industries risks perpetuating imageries of developing regions as undifferentiated lands rich in cheap labour.  Instead, these areas have fairly distinct political and economic trajectories.  Acknowledging this is crucial to developing meaningful policy and political responses.  Second, the debate on modern slavery can be hijacked by reactionary forces, engaged in what Bridget Anderson calls ‘violent humanitarianism’. For instance, last year, the Italian Prime Minister invoked the fight against ‘slavery’ as an excuse to engage in extremely aggressive anti-immigration practices. Finally, the debate on modern slavery risks ‘exceptionalizing’ labour abuse in global industries, reducing it to an individual relation of domination perpetuated by a few culprits. It also risks narrowing our attention to extreme forms of exploitation, like forced or trafficked labour.  However, the ‘normalcy’ of exploitation in many global sectors should also concern us deeply as it is incompatible with progressive struggles in support of decent work.  Notably, the ILO, at their International Labour Conference 2016, addressed issues of forced and trafficked labour in the overall context of the governance of global supply chains.

In the garment sector, the limitations of the modern slavery debate manifest clearly. Events like Rana Plaza are wrongly turned into exceptional, one-off disasters with no connection to systemic labour abuse. Moreover, often the policy debate is reduced to the identification of the ‘real’ bad guys.  Can we really decide if H&M is worse than M&S or better than Primark?  The escalation of sweatshop scandals and so-called disasters in recent times has involved a great number of buyers and demonstrates the limitations of single culprit-based approaches.

Implicitly or explicitly, the debate on modern slavery intersects with that on ‘labour unfreedom’. However, unlike the former, the latter has not fallen into the trap of exceptionalizing given labour outcomes.  Given its roots in debates within the intellectual Left, the category ‘labour unfreedom’ is already understood as systemically linked to processes of exploitation and to the development of capitalism. However, as illustrated by Jens Lerche, it is a term which is also contested. Moreover, in my view, classic understandings of unfreedom have tended to be too heavily framed around ‘productivist’ understandings of exploitation. They have over-emphasised the economic facets of unfreedom, at the expenses of the non-economic, social ones.