"The kafala (sponsorship) system binds all low-status migrant workers in the Gulf to their employers. Generally, the kafala system requires the worker to obtain the employer’s permission to travel or leave the worksite to look for other employment. Regulations require a minimum of two years of work for the sponsor (kafeel) before such permission will even be considered. This encourages widespread wage suppression and conspiracies to deny such permission. Such ‘labour bans’ effectively bind the worker to the employer for a long period of time. More significantly, a worker can’t get an exit visa from the government without permission of the kafeel. "
A friend of mine worked there in the 70s. German civil engineer, and the conditions, albeit luxurious, have been what I would call a labour camp. There seems to be a pattern there.
a.) your German friend would likely have not been in the kafala system since that is for the labour force.
b.) the kafala system has been banned in the UAE since 2005, with a pretty punitive fine regime, although that hasn't done enough to eliminate it (Govt. lenient treatment for its cronies vs independent contractors, both who follow the practice). It's still in force in other countries in the region.
c.) Your friend will likely have been staying at a township for workers, which is often the common pattern for mining towns in most countries in Asia. Conditions usually tend to be luxuriant, and nowhere near the labour camps (which are actual camps).
Oh yes, his position was absolutely privilged. It was the stories of how the local powerful people treated women and the fact that all f them had to turn over their passports. And the curfew covering leave from the compound, that bothered me. Pay was very good so. And yeah, the actual "workforce", e.g. manual labor, construction workers and so on had it way worse.
I had a project in Dubai a couple of years ago, and all the people I was inc contact with were foreigners, on all levels. GM of logistics companies, warehouse workers, manaement, everyone was a foreigner. At the higher levels of management that changes, so.
When I tried to get residency in Canada as a Software Engineer I was told by my local MP to get a minimum wage job for two years at Walmart, McDonalds or Canadian Tire because they had rubber-stamp approval with the government, and it was the easiest way.
In my town, all the immigrants worked at those places, and they lived 15 to a small house. Not surprisingly, no Canadian was willing to do those jobs.
While obviously not nearly as bad as the conditions in the article, it's certainly in a similar vein.
You could argue that a less organized de facto system of slavery exists for migrant workers in many other countries including the USA. Migrants roam in and work but really have no rights as they are undocumented. People can intimidate them or worse largely with impunity because who would bother investigating? Sure technically it’s illegal to abuse migrants but nobody’s watching.
Migrant work is something that really demands a coordinated international effort to reform.
Then you have Uyghur forced labor in China.
Slavery has not been abolished in anything but name.
Migrants, even illegal migrants, in the United States DO have rights. The bill of rights covers all people in our country, whether they are undocumented, tourists, students, or whatever. If you abuse them, they may be deported, but you can be prosecuted and serve prison time for abusing them.
Taking away someone Visa is a crime too.. and preventing them from leaving is a felony. And we prosecute people all the time for that.. human traffickers, for example.
I lack the perspective to say if the following point applies in this case, but one must not assume that what is written into law or constitution is what actually happens.
To give a deliberately extreme example, Wikipedia says this about the Constitution of North Korea:
"""Citizens have the right to elect and be elected (Article 66), freedom of speech, the press, assembly, demonstration and association (Article 67), freedom of religious belief (Article 68), right to submit complaints and petitions (Article 69), right to work (Article 70), right to relaxation (Article 71), right to free medical care (Article 72), right to education (Article 73), freedom in scientific, literary and artistic pursuits (Article 74), freedom of residence and travel (Article 75) and inviolability of the person and home and privacy of correspondence (Article 79).""" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_North_Korea#...
I hope people understand that this is exactly why sanctuary city policies and government identification for undocumented individuals is so important. If an individual does not feel safe seeking recourse from the government, they are not capable of exercising the rights they do have in the US.
>Migrants, even illegal migrants, in the United States DO have rights. The bill of rights covers all people in our country, whether they are undocumented, tourists, students, or whatever. If you abuse them, they may be deported, but you can be prosecuted and serve prison time for abusing them.
This means they will have to weight-in the deportation cost to them. So they have half-rights compared to someone who doesn't have to be concerned with that...
You should read about migrants from central or south america - what they go through while traveling through intervening countries and mexico and then coyotes. And deportation back to that is a real threat which means they will shut up in the US.
EDIT: wasn't picking on the US, just saying it's only part of their journey, and once they're in the US, lots of stuff goes unreported.
There is a power imbalance between the employer and an illegal immigrant... they can certainly push that further than they could with a us citizen, but since they do have rights, there are limits to the abuse. The immigrant always has a way out, with the worst case penalty being deportation.
Additionally:
- In some cities ("sanctuary cities"), reporting a crime does not lead to deportation.
- They can also apply for amnesty if the conditions in their home country are that bad.
- Agencies accept anonymous reports. The immigrant doesnt even need to be working at the place at the time of the report.
So depending on the circumstances of the abuse, there may be no consequences to the illegal immigrant for reporting.
Sounds like the real issue is the pull factor of lax immigration enforcement and widespread under the table employment in the US. We should be emulating the Australian model which has saved thousands of lives by effectively deterring dangerous human trafficking. With robust work visa verification and strict border security, coyotes and other human traffickers would be put out of business.
Solve the problem of employers hiring illegal immigrants, and the issue of these employers abusing the inherent power imbalance disappears as well.
Its a politcally untenable position on both sides sadly in the US. If employers were fined 2x, 3x, 4x salary for every single employee found to be working under the table the issue would solve itself. But democrats are of the position that people over staying their visas, illegally immigrating, are as an entire group people who will be killed if they go home so will do nothing to actually make life more difficult for people who do those things.
Pro business republicans are happy to allow their constituents to get a leg up in their businesses off the back of immigrants before they deport them so the immigrants can't use any public services.
Yeah, I doubt it'll be solved anytime soon, given how Democrats see it as a way to gain future votes, and corporate Republicans use it to privatize gains and socialize costs. Paying someone under minimum wage while they collect far more in government services than they pay in taxes is a classic example of abusing unpriced externalities.
Republican businesses owners like trump love illegal immigrant labor because it's another thing they can hang over their head. If they start organizing or complaining they can just anonymously tip ICE about the workers and suddenly their problem is solved.
When they say they want to punish immigration they mean punish immigrants.
Theoretically having rights, and actually being able to take advantage of those rights, are two very different things.
For example, if the asylum seekers during Trump had been able to take advantage of their rights, they would not have had their children stolen from them.
In many ancient Roman and Greek societies, migrant labor was actually lower on the totem pole than slavery. If you are a slave, at least your owner theoretically has an interest in your survival.
Let's point out that being a slave in those societies until very late in their existence did not always mean being locked with a chain.
You would take out a loan or lose a costly war and there were whole shopping districts like Keramikos (pottery shops area) in Athens where the slaves had shops and tried to earn their way out of slavery. Any similarities with present societal structures purely circumstancial ofcourse.
The situation was almost the same in the Classical world. The only difference being the debt relationship was personal and not institutional.
You can do whatever you want while you pay back loans today as long as you keep your contact information current. Just try and move without informing your lenders. That can be treated as a default. And if you can do whatever you want while maintaining a suitable income to make these sort of loan repayments, your experience is an outlier for all but a very small portion of Americans.
It was actually the same way. Outside of their slavery obligations, they were allowed to do whatever they wanted to pay back their sum to earn freedom, more or less. And of course, they did have their housing and food covered meanwhile.
I have to figure there were a few textile mills in cotton states that were operating before the Civil War using slave labor.
This could be run like a regular factory with bookkeeping techniques where labor cost was certainly not zero even though laborers were not getting paid nor free to do anything else but go back to picking cotton.
Labor cost could be reduced to a single line on a spreadsheet like any other business.
After the war with slaves now being paid and free to work elsewhere if they could manage it, this would be offset by the workers paying their own upkeep after the slaveowner had become the employer.
There would have been pressure to keep labor cost from escalating at all if possible.
So things could go forward with as little change in financial risk as could be.
A lot of companies today still have the same type structure as these places had after the war, which can be not much different than the structure they had before the war, and Wall Street is still in the same place it was before the war . . .
While the comparison here is not about chattel slavery of the type practiced in the US, if I remember correctly the amount/ratio of surplus value extracted from slaves and then emancipated workers was not actually all that different. There was a drop, but it wasn't that big.
A big part of that was the increased productivity of freed laborers being compensated by an increased cost of reproduction.
There are many types of relations that were referred to as slavery throughout history. The common, vernacular English definition does refer to chattel slavery and there is an onus during discussion to make oneself clear.
Having said that, equating all slavery to chattel slavery and thus denying that other slavery-like arrangements have existed and continue to exist today is not only a misleadingly US-centric perspective, it also removes the ability to criticize and try to reform social arrangements that severely restrict freedom in subtler and more nuanced ways.
If we're talking about late ancient societies, slavery often meant social subordination to your master and some obligated work.
It is not dissimilar from undischargible debt. In fact, the historians and anthropologists writing about these societies have made the link themselves.
In ancient Rome, selling oneself to slavery of prospective business owner was both a popular immigration path for foreigners and a career for poor citizens.
Sometimes it's used by the state itself for cost savings, as in California under then-attorney general Kamala Harris (now Vice President):
> “Extending 2-for-1 credits to all minimum custody inmates at this time would severely impact fire camp participation — a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought,” lawyers from Harris’s office wrote in a filing.
Well, the upper middle class who have higher tier jobs. Not the working middle class. (In USA everyone is "middle" class, because most are too proud to have class consciousness.)
“In 2015, just 8% of the nearly 1.53 million state and federal prisoners in the U.S. were in private facilities” [0]. Prison slavery is not concentrated in and won’t disappear by closing private prisons. [1]
IIRC the first prison in the US was established in Auburn, NY specifically because slavery had been outlawed and some sociopath was like “ok, yeah, technically, but if we just convict them of a crime first...”
Private businesses pay private prisons far more than the prisoners get paid but less than legit labor driving out fairly paid labor.
Everyone who is benefiting lobbies far stricter laws and harsher sentences not for societies benefit but so their labor force can grow.
This slave labor is disproportionately taken from minorities and the poor who it is more acceptable to enslave. Mostly by patrolling areas which have lots of minorities and shaking them down in hopes of finding drugs. See the fact that black and white people do drugs at the same rate but white people are far less likely to be prosecuted.
In one case they actually caught 2 judges taking bribes from private detention to hand juvenile offenders maximum sentences. Effectively selling other people's kids.
Banning private prisons only removes a fraction of the incentive.
It's not just private prisons. Public prisons also sieze prisoner labor for sale to private customers or for government work like makit license plates.
When the prisoners make the prison owners (public or private) more money than they cost, there is pressure to imprison more people and for longer. That can lead to pressure on the enforcers to look harder for infractions… but they might turn a blind eye to infractions by their friends and bosses[0]. Pretty soon, you get feudalism.
[0] Seven of the candidates in the last Tory leadership contest (including the winner) admitted to using drugs. The government has no plans to decriminalise recreational use of any of those substances: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/09/high-tories...
Do you see anything wrong with having the most incancerated population in the world (25% of the global prison population for just 5% of the world population), or having the most horrendous prison conditions in all the western world?
Do you see anything wrong with blacks and latinos being overrepresented?
Do you see anything wrong with being such a backwater that you still have the death penalty, not to mention BS like "three strikes" laws?
Do you see anything wrong with forced prison labor undercutting regular businesses in the same areas?
The idea that they should earn their keep implies that residing in prison is something of positive value for the prisoner that they should feel obligated to give something back.
Except that they can't. If they came in legally then those sites wouldn't hire them. They're hired for the fact that they are undocumented, and therefore can be paid a fraction of what is legally required.
So then they can just not enter the US illegally. There are Billions of people living outside of the US every day. And the people in the US is crying day in and day out that it is a racist hellhole and how cops are huting people of color on the streets like animals and burning down cities in protest. Seems like they would be better off somewhere else. I would not immigrate to US if someone paid me.
There are, actually, worse places to live than the US. Just because the US is one of the worst countries of its wealth level in the world, and just because the English-speaking web is full of US news, that doesn't mean the US is the worst place to be.
Why not rather petition places that is not racist hellholes to take the undocumented immigrants and even some US citizens as refugees? Why try and get them into a racist hellhole in the first place? Just because it is not the worst place in the world, does not mean that the US is not a hellhole.
Really it is abusive to let anyone into that place.
Where are you getting that information? Near as I can tell, the share of foreign born people who have degrees is similar to the share of all Americans with degrees:
Unfortunately this source doesn't break out those who entered with degrees from those who attained degrees in the US. But I have to imagine that many of those are in the latter camp, meaning they entered without degrees. Either way, the majority don't have any degree according to this.
So then they can go somewhere else. There are billion of people living outside of the US. To suggest they are slaves because they chose to illegally enter the US makes no sense.
I never said that, just that legal immigration to the US is basically closed to everyone, which is historically unusual for the US. I also think it's antithetical to the American project.
So then how are these people slaves if they could just not voluntarily choose to illegally enter a systemically racist country where people of color are hunted by cops like dogs and treated as subhuman trash by all white people?
I disagree with the degree severity of the OP’s statement. But US foreign policy coupled with shifts in climate (political and meteorological?) have made large parts of Central America pretty unlivable. To the extent the we are responsible for the state of affairs in Central America, we should be taking in refuges and economic migrants.
Fleeing violence and poverty? By voluntarily becoming slaves (people who are owned by other people and have no agency in their lives) by illegally entering a systemically racist and white supremacist country where racist white supremacists cops hunt black people like dogs on the street with impunity?!
And they are slaves inside the US but in no other country that they are in except the US?
So what? I imagine the very last concern of people deciding whether to move to another country in hopes of improving their family's life is whether some random internet commenter understands them.
If you actually want to understand it, writing obstreperous and ignorant forum posts isn't going to change anything. Seek out their own voices and actually listen.
> So what? I imagine the very last concern of people deciding whether to move to another country in hopes of improving their family's life is whether some random internet commenter understands them.
They did not call themselves slaves ... someone on HN did. The logic I cannot square is how someone can say these people are slaves with a straight face.
I don't care what they do with their lives, if they want to illegally enter a racist facist hellhole where half the country are white supremacists that is their choice. What I object to is saying they are slaves because they voluntarily make this choice.
Perhaps you are the kind of person who would rather see their family suffer instead of breaking immigration laws for a chance at a vastly improved life and future for your children. The undocumented workers you speak of are not those kind of people.
Perhaps you are the kind of person who thinks slavery is better than liberty as long as your masters look after you well enough. I on the other hand abhor slavery.
You have to believe that being a free person anywhere else than US is worse than being a slave in US for this to make sense. And I'm not a slave, and not in US, and I would much rather be anywhere else than in US, so not sure what I'm missing.
> a vastly improved life and future for your children
In USA? A white supremacist and systemically racist hellhole where cops hunt people of color like dogs on the street and put the ones they don't kill into private slave prisons? How is it better than just not having that?
I would not even visit USA if someone paid me, and I feel sorry for the people who have to live there every day of their lives and if I had more means I would do more to help the people who live in the US find other options. Surely it is some crime against humanity to make people live in a place like that.
As someone who grew up in the middle east near the gulf countries, this is a well-known problem for a long time. The labor is extremely cheap there and none of the Arab natives of these countries work as laborers. Unfortunately it doesn't stop at labor workers, there is a lot of human trafficking there as well. The skyscrapers and the shiny downtowns don't get built by themselves. Someone pays the price.
Anybody who transferred flights in places like Dubai could see huge asymmetry in employees of airport between natives and foreign workers mostly from south east asia. Natives hardly do any work, look utterly bored and either chat or stare at phones all day long.
Foreigners do all the actual hard work (unless they can't like security/immigration work).
I am not surprised, after many stories how badly folks from ie Nepal are treated there. I don't see even a slight international pressure from big players like US or EU. Maybe similar reasons like with China - don't mess with important players, in this case oil providers?
All Emiraties in Dubai get paid huge salaries and as you say, do pretty much nothing. Police officers might make 200k/yr. It's pretty much a giant welfare state.
Many foreigners do very well over there as well, but a much larger percent (Africans, Indians, and southeast Asians) do not. Also the number of women imported on tourist visas for prostitution is staggering.
> Anybody who transferred flights in places like Dubai could see huge asymmetry in employees of airport between natives and foreign workers mostly from south east asia. Natives hardly do any work, look utterly bored and either chat or stare at phones all day long.
Every time I go to the USA I'm shocked when I see that exact same asymmetry between service workers and the white-collar class.
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25972311 and stop posting nationalistic flamebait to HN. It doesn't matter which country you have a problem with—you're breaking the site guidelines and it needs to stop. Please don't do it again.
What’s deeply messed up is that in Bangladesh, where I’m from, people are way more outraged at Israel (which they have zero connection to personally) than quasi-slavery of other Bangladeshis in the Gulf States. It’s the product of powerful propaganda.
It’s kind of horrifying to see the effect of that same propaganda here in the US recently.
> than quasi-slavery of other Bangladeshis in the Gulf States. It’s the product of powerful propaganda.
Why is it surprising? It's not complicated. Gulf states - not Israel - pay the bills in Bangladesh. It also throws in religious fundamentalist indoctrination schools for free, schools that preach hatred of Israel.
> It’s kind of horrifying to see the effect of that same propaganda here in the US recently.
The majority of the US supports both Israel's and the Palestinians' right to exist without oppression and fear of attack. People are largely opposed to either party violating that principle.
Perhaps you missed the outrage in the US at the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, or the bipartisan condemnation of the Saudis' war against Yemen while the previous president and his family courted them, or the US renewable energy industry that is trying to decouple us from Gulf petroleum dependency.
The US public has deeply soured on the Gulf States across the political spectrum. The only people who are still warm to them, as ever, are those who seek access to their immense capital or are enamored with their theocratic and authoritarian system of government.
That's a diversionary hypothetical, and not a very effective one. Especially given the obvious reality that Khashoggi's employer was the Washington Post, which clearly had a reason call out for the truth about his disappearance and murder, and the means to distribute that call on it's opinion pages.
Furthermore, the previous President addressed his killing in the mildest possible terms, claiming (laughably) that the Saudi ruler had no involvement.
You can be outraged at two things at the same time.
But the apartheid situation in Israel is perhaps a more blatant example of ongoing human rights abuse, and thus easier to understand compared to the more subtle racism as class subjection in the US.
There is no "apartheid situation" in Israel. Israeli Arabs have full rights in both law and practice.
So not sure what "blatant example" you are talking about.
> thus easier to understand
There are few situations harder to understand than Israel and Palestine. If you think it's an "easy to understand" situation it's a pretty clear sign you are utterly ignorant on the matter, and should not be posting comments about it.
How would you respond to South African apartheid survivor and Nobel Peace laureate, Desmond Tutu, who said:
"I have witnessed the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children by members of the Israeli security forces," he said in a statement.
"Their humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid government."
> You can be outraged at two things at the same time.
Sure, but what they choose to be outraged about can be telling. You see so many people talking about “apartheid” in Israel, but almost no one complaining about modern day slavery in the Gulf States. Your typical American has no reason to be more “outraged” about one than the other. The fact that one is vastly more prominent in the public consciousness speaks volumes.
This is well-depicted in the movie "Syriana". One of the characters and his uncle are working for the oil industry in such circumstances. Spoiler alert: the nephew becomes and extremist/terrorist, showing how easy it is for a young person with no options and in such circumstances to be so persuaded.
That's a terrific film, but a bit misleading in its central message; many of the most infamous terrorists and extremists in the real world (bin Laden an example) seem to have middle-class/privileged backgrounds.
Actually I think it was really good at showing exactly that. The young Pakistani guy was just a pawn in the game controlled by somebody way above, whom we don't even see in the movie. His immediate superior in the militant ranks, the Arab, looks clearly more educated than he is.
That is exactly how these terrorist organizations are structured.
Obviously what goes on there is a whole other level, but even in the the rest of the world, we should realize that allowing someone to a live and work in a country without enfranchising them is an affront to democracy.
But when? Immediately? As somebody who has worked abroad myself I wouldn't think it appropriate if I suddenly was granted citizenship in a country for just working there for a few years. There should always be a path to citizenship, but I think it is reasonable that you have to live somewhere a decade or so and show that you have a basic understanding of the culture and language first.
You are thinking of you having a great boon where you are in a position to put onerous conditions upon it.
Historically we have actually benefited greatly from being a top destination for immigrants and aquired a lot of talent and may wish ultimately that someone else hadn't skimmed the cream while we make it hard.
I think that the primary requirements ought to be not being a criminal where you come from. People who go to school here ought to be offered citizenship at graduation others ought to wait a year. Even the folks that sneak over to work here illegally commit fewer crimes than natives as it stands.
Our birth rate is less than replacement and our density is a fraction of Europes.
What about multi-generaltional requirements, like "one of your parents must have been born here"?
Also, it gets complex when discussing illegal immigration. What if an immigrant is laying low for an extended time? Is it different if the host country looks the other way and doesn't really enforce the laws, because some sectors benefit from the cheaper labor?
In Sweden, for example someone from Iceland (2 years) and Ireland (5 years) can get citizenship "by just working there for a few years". Immediately I don't think happens many places, but less than a decade does.
In Sweden, if you're from outside the EU, you can get citizenship after 5 years working in the country. I believe that for EU citizens it's less than that.
In many other countries, like Australia and (I think?) Canada, for example, one can become a citizen after 4 years living and working in the country.
Legally. I don't believe the path to citizenship is paved if you are working and staying in either of those countries illegally.
Both Australia and Canada are quite picky on whom they let in. It's points based, supposed to be fit to the needs of the country.
For giggles, I took my score for Canada. As a middle-aged individual, I wouldn't be able to get in under the normal program even while nearly topping out most other categories (I speak English and French, have advanced degrees, etc).
Of course, you can buy your way in to almost any country.
I was talking about legal immigrants. If you're caught illegally in Australia you're basically immediately deported even if you've managed to stay in the country illegally for many years. There were some notorious cases of people being deported after 20 years in the country (not sure if the outcry from their supporters actually stopped any deportation)... Sweden is almost as dacronian. It is known to deport parents of children born in Sweden (who are legally Swedish citizens) because they were illegally in the country.
Everyone who has permanent residency in Canada has a path to apply for citizenship, in principle. I do feel that is reasonable, even morally necessary. In practice it typically takes about 7 years from landing.
I'm pretty materialist. So let's igmore culture/language: if you have a job, they are getting benefits of your presence immediately. So shouldn't you get some franchise immediately? If you don't vote, aren't you effectively a scab on democracy?
The US is kinda hypocritical in that on one hand there is a tacit desire to lord it over non-citizens, and in the other hand there is a vocal concern about exacerbating the glut of labor.
Well, an individual American can't have it both ways: you're either a net worker or net owner.
Another nest trick, what if instead of waiting to accrue the franchise, there was a way to retroactively remove the franchise of those that leave. Why should the past rule over the future?
I don't really know how that would work. But I could imagine a partial implementation would be automatically triggering recall elections if enough voters for the victor moved away before the victor's term was up.
I remember a reddit response to someone saying "Why would you live there, you're just condoning the slavery", the person wrote (I'll paraphrase), "Look around you, who made your clothes (probably underpaid Bangladeshi working in unsafe factories), who made your tech [or who mined the rare-earth metals needed], the difference is, in the West, you're a few steps further from this slavery.".
I guess the principled response to this is to take responsibility for what you use and wear.
The responder is right but glib - his observation should not be a spur to silence and insensitivity to other people's living conditions make societies at all scales more unstable.
What percentage of the migrant labourers are slaves? The article seems to site examples of abuse (no doubt existing and still horrible), but seems to extrapolate them into the norm.
I'm skeptical that it is the majority of cases since migrants send a huge amount of remittances to their home countries and a lot of people depend on this labor. In the article it was mentioned that a builder gets paid $28k per year which is still great for the majority of the world.
The article says that it is not your traditional slavery. Yes they are getting paid and they support their families back home, and yet I am not surprised that they die in such numbers (according to article). You would understand if you came and just witnessed their living and working conditions.
I've worked in Dubai for 4 years and despite I was paid well (and no income tax), it really felt like slavery. And seeing those poor souls in construction sites didnt add to my happiness either.
Btw, i personally knew people who were paid 300$ per month (hotel room cleaning staff). That $28k average per year seems more like officially reported number, not the real one.
I think a really big problem with these discussions is that "slavery" is too broad a term. There's a huge difference between the brutal chattel slavery of black people in early American history and what some people call being "corporate slave" where someone has to work long hours in a white collar job. And yet, people still use the word "slave" for both. And the usage is both serious and unironic.
The 'problem' is introduced by you. The subtitle is "The glittering city-states of the Persian Gulf fit the classicist Moses Finley’s criteria of genuine slave societies" and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century which expands on the topic worldwide, isn't about working long hours in a white collar job.
> 2022 FIFA World Cup, more than 4,000 migrant workers will die in workplace accidents on FIFA projects before the event takes place.
This is clearly made up.
So if you want to believe they are slave states you have to ask why do they need fake statements like this.
Also why are they slave states just because the workers are next door. There's no moral difference for us using their oil or buying shoes or seafood from Asia.
No more than any capitalist society. The gulf states are just an extreme examples of exploitation, but capitalism necessitates treating a slice of society as expendable labor.
Look at an example from the other end of the spectrum, Switzerland, a capitalist society with a good human rights record (at least that’s the general consensus among western nations).
One of their largest multinationals, Nestlé, successfully fought a policy proposal last year that would require Swiss corporations to follow environmental and human rights regulations across their entire supply chain (the Konzernverantwortungsinitiative [1]).
Weeks after this initiative barely failed to pass, Nestlé won a decision in the US Supreme Court meaning the country could not be sued by former child slaves in US court [2].
One company finding its way around the rules and manipulating lawmakers to change the rules for them is still far from the systemic and structural slavery in the UAE.
Companies finding their way around rules by manipulating lawmakers sounds “systemic” or “structural”. And the example I gave was literally a law banning use of slave labor. Only difference is where the slaves are located.
Did you miss the part where they are deceived into taking the jobs and prevented from leaving?
> They often end up in the Persian Gulf after responding to deceptive and misleading advertising in their home countries, causing them to either pay large sums or to borrow such sums from employment agents to secure employment in the Gulf and to pay for their transportation, housing and food. When they arrive, they learn that, based on the value of their wage in real terms, it will be nearly impossible to pay off any debt they have incurred or replenish the sums they have expended. This encourages their employers to withhold, delay or simply not pay wages, coercing the workers to remain on the job, sometimes for a lifetime.
FWIW this did happen to some indentured Europeans in the New World. I'm nevertheless surprised GP thinks that's excusable or defensible in the 21st century.
Indentured servitude or debt bondage is considered slavery with international agreement.[0] It's by far the most common form of slavery in the modern world.
Can anyone at all become a citizen of the persian countries?
No, because they care about preserving their political system and way of life- a bit like Japan
We may disagree, but it's their country. And people who don't like it can always leave (yes, I have heard the stories about passports being taken, I'd call that enforcing the contract for the initial term period, and it's not like consulates don't exist)
You can't preemptively "enforce a contract" by denying someone their basic human rights. Can you explain the ethical system that could possibly lead you to believe otherwise?
I'll take libertarian fantasies safely incubated in a society that won't allow the worst abuses that their philosophy would lead to unchecked for 500 Alex
> Can anyone at all become a citizen of the persian countries?
They are not Persian countries. They are Arab countries that lie on the southwest shore of the Persian Gulf. There are huge cultural and linguistic differences between the two, to say nothing of the political differences, both historically and down to current moment.
Furthermore, those Arab countries have been trying to change the international standard name of the body of water to "Arabian Gulf" to counter their adversary Iran.
- An Arab individual from Omani, Qatari or Bahraini origin
- Arab individual who enjoys full legal capacity, has continuously and lawfully resided in the member emirates for at least seven years
- Any person, other than those mentioned above, who enjoys full legal capacity if he has continuously and legally resided in the member emirates for a period of no less than 30 years
- A foreign woman married to a UAE National may be granted nationality by citizenship after the lapse of seven years
As out of touch as this might seem with modernity, remember that the United States had anti-miscegenation laws on the books until 1967, and only opened immigration from non-white countries in 1965.
You shouldn't be able to sell yourself into slavery.
Putting minimum standards you can't opt out of is the only way to maintain basic right in the face of inevitably growing asymmetry that is the inevitable outcome of even a small amount of initial inequality. Having a slightly higher share of current resources makes it possible to tilt the board to obtain a larger share of future resources until an increasingly small portion owns more and more.
Ultimately slavery would be the alternative for starvation.
Maybe. But singling them out while happily consuming products produced under similar, or worse, conditions reeks hippocracy. It is fully in our power to force companies to source manufacturing to places where you have more than one day off in a year, or are paid in more than lodging and rice, but we don't like to talk about this, although that is actually within our power to change. Why is this?
And, preemptively, this is not 'whataboutism'. As I said, our own consumption patterns are in our hands to change (arguably this includes enabling these gulf states with our tourism dollars but that's another point). But we hear a lot of whining about this 'slavery', however accurate that may be, but hardly any discussion about the outsourced manufacturing processes that we wholly depend on, which almost certainly fit the bill as much as anything.
