How human trafficking and bonded labor make capitalism possible

economic historians contend that the two

institutions that had the greatest

impact on the 20th century

were capitalism and slavery

the basic argument goes something like

this

the high profits from slavery helped

finance the industrial revolution

providing multi-generational foundation

of wealth that sustained

many nations and families throughout the

entire 20th century

and while there are some disagreements

about the impacts of slavery over the

20th century

there’s one thing that almost all these

historians get wrong

they talk about slavery only in the past

tense

slavery is not gone in fact there are 40

million slaves in the world today

that’s almost three times more than the

entire

400 year history of transatlantic

slavery

slavery has not ended it’s just shifted

now when you look at this map the basic

summary

is that the more red there is the more

slaves there are

so this tells us two things first

slavery’s everywhere

but second is that it’s a particularly

big problem

in asia right now in total there’s about

25 million people that are estimated to

be victims

of modern slavery in asia

that includes an estimated 73 percent of

all victims of sexual exploitation

and 66 of all victims of forced labor

now if you’re asking how that’s possible

today given

so much awareness and concern for human

rights the answers are really

complicated but also simple but what i

want to point out is that for the most

part

people just don’t understand it and

therefore they don’t see it in their

daily lives

in fact within three months of my family

moving to hong kong

i like millions of other people across

asia

had unwittingly and unknowingly

facilitated

human trafficking you see when we moved

to hong kong

we learned it was really common to hire

what is known as a foreign domestic

worker

now if you’re not familiar with that

concept it’s common throughout asia and

the middle east

for people to hire migrant workers

particularly women

to help provide full-time care and

service in their home

at the time my wife and i were young

parents with two small children and i

was working

long hours at an international law firm

so when we heard

you could hire someone to provide

full-time service in your home it

sounded too good to be true

and we fire we found a young woman from

indonesia that we wanted to hire

and we had to process her paperwork

through an employment agency

and my wife told me that there’s two

agencies that we could work with

and one of them was significantly more

expensive than the other

now i remember thinking so distinctively

why would i pay thousands of dollars

more

for something that is essentially the

same service

i didn’t even understand the question

and so understandably

we went with the cheaper service but

what i didn’t think about at that time

was that there are necessary and obvious

costs

to finding training and transporting

someone from indonesia to hong kong

and if i wasn’t paying those costs

someone else was

and that someone else was this worker

now after this woman lived in our home

for a few weeks we discovered that she

had effectively been sold by her family

when she was only 14

years old at that time she had to lie

about her age

they gave her a fake passport and they

sent her to work in singapore for

several years

after time there she eventually made her

way to hong kong

where families like mine unknowingly

heaped

debt and placement fees on her

and even though i considered myself a

legal expert and a human rights advocate

after understanding her story and

looking at the law

i came to the unsavory conclusion that i

had unwittingly

facilitated human trafficking now at

this point many of you are probably

wondering like

what does hiring a foreign domestic

worker have to do

with modern slavery or human trafficking

i think when when most people hear

slavery they immediately think about the

transatlantic chattel slavery that’s

famous from u.s history

or when they hear about human

trafficking they immediately think about

women and young women who are

transported for sexual exploitation

well neither of those ideas are

incorrect but they are

a bit out of date you see modern slavery

is a microcosm of globalization and so

therefore

it has changed dramatically in the past

20 years

so as you can see from this chart this

blue line

represents slate or trafficking for

sexual exploitation

so 20 years ago as you can see the vast

majority of trafficking was indeed

for sexual exploitation but over the

past 20 years now over 80 percent

of human trafficking is specifically

related to forced labor

and similarly as you can see from this

chart again 20 years ago it is true

that the vast majority of victims of

human trafficking

were women and girls but now it’s pretty

evenly split

between males and females so what

qualifies then

as human trafficking or modern slavery

the legal calculation

of whether someone is a victim of these

crimes is actually

a lot more subjective and complicated

than you might think

there are some characteristics that are

consistent for example

these these six areas are generally

considered

legal characteristics of trafficking and

slavery

but since you can’t just go check

ownership anymore officials have to do

an analysis using these factors

to make a subjective determination about

whether someone is considered a victim

now these are the three most common

forms of modern slavery and for

sorry the most common forms of modern

slavery are forced labor

sexual exploitation and debt bondage now

the first two are relatively

straightforward

so forced labor as you’d expect is when

someone is forced

through violence or other means to work

without pay

and sexual exploitation is when someone

is forced to perform sexual acts against

their will

now for the most part these again are

what people think about when they think

of slavery and trafficking

but that third one debt bondage

it’s by far the most prevalent form of

modern slavery and by far

the most common reason for human

trafficking but it’s also the most

difficult to understand

so what is debt bondage or it’s also

known as bonded labor what does that

even

mean well let me give you a quick

example

two years ago i was informed that a

woman

had been brought to hong kong by an

employment agency from

kenya to be a domestic worker

now she was in a terrible working

environment

she was being physically and verbally

abused by a very

mentally unstable employer but the

employment agency that brought her here

they had lied and deceived her about the

conditions of stay

about the working environment about the

salary and many other things

the agent took her passport from her and

would not allow her

would not return it requiring her to pay

80 percent of her salary for the first

eight months that she was in hong kong

even threatening her family in kenya

if she didn’t make those payments

now being completely cut off

from everyone that she knew in a foreign

country

and desperately needing that job she

felt completely

trapped this is a situation that is

shared

by tens of millions of people around the

world

whether they’re working in a bangladeshi

textile factory

or on a thai fishing vessel or even an

entertainer on a cruise ship

this type of bonded labor is all around

us

so debt bondage typically starts when

someone is forced to pay a job for a job

now you may not realize this but

international law states that no one

should ever be required

to pay for a job and most countries

have banned placement fees for

employment i would like to point out

hong kong has not done that

and we desperately need to but there is

a significant

amount of information and power

asymmetry in that process so employment

agents

are able to deceive workers about

employment conditions

their salary and even their rights

so these job placement fees are

obviously quite large and these workers

are generally poor and from developing

countries so obviously most of them

can’t pay

those fees no big deal the employment

agency says hey don’t worry

we will help to secure a loan for you to

help pay for that placement fee and any

other recruitment costs that you might

have

but those loans are then collateralized

using the worker’s passport which means

that a money lender

or the agency itself holds the passport

until that loan is paid in full

this is completely illegal in most

countries

and yet it happens pretty much

everywhere now let me give you a quick

example

this is from one of our cases last year

the police in this instance which by the

way is at a location

like a 10-minute walk down the hill from

here

the police seized 1 400

passports in a single location now they

found

2 800 but they only seized 1 400.

it was the largest police seizure of

passports in history in hong kong’s

history at least

and look at all those passports on the

table and remember

every single one of those passports

represents a worker

who potentially or even probably is a

victim

of bonded labor now the interest rates

on these loans are killer in hong kong

we routinely see rates over 200 percent

which again is completely illegal

that means thousands of migrant workers

go months without ever

seeing a paycheck in fact

did you know that on any given day in

hong kong there are between

70 and 80 000 migrant workers

who are not going to be paid for the

labor they did that day

70 to 80 000. now remember

the primary reason why a migrant worker

comes to a place like hong kong is to

provide for their family they can’t go

six to eight months without sending

money home

so then what do they do of course they

take out more debt

and the cycle continues now you may be

surprised to learn that the average

migrant worker

leaves hong kong with less money than

when they came

and that’s true for tens of millions of

migrant workers around the year

or around the world every single year

now when you add

all these factors together that loan it

acts like a chain

and it tethers the worker to the job

often in highly onerous

even abusive situations until the debt

is completely paid off

now there’s obviously a big difference

between between being someone else’s

property versus being in debt

but the difference is one of degree not

necessarily one of effect

and while chattel slavery is clearly

worse

this model this modern model is much

more scalable

and way more profitable and it’s

way easier to hide in plain sight

now using this system humans have

effectively become commoditized

it used to be really expensive and slow

to move people

around which is why ownership was such a

key part

of the slavery model but as professor

kevin bales points out

that it’s now so easy and so cheap to

move people around

that humans have essentially become

fungible commodities

or as he describes them quote disposable

people

now can you guess what that is i know

it’s a little bit hard to see

that is data visualization that my team

put together to show

hong kong’s largest black market

no it’s not related to drugs not related

to triads

that represents hong kong’s migrant

worker employment agency

and money lending industries every dot

in that image

represents either an employment agency

or a money lender

who are the two main players in the

human trafficking in modern

slavery space now in hong kong alone

there are more than 1

500 domestic worker employment agencies

that’s more than all the mcdonald’s all

the starbucks

and all the 7-elevens combined

now when i saw how many there were i was

shocked my conservative by my

conservative calculations that industry

steals about

700 million hong kong dollars every

single year

from migrant workers 700 million and

globally

it’s billions of dollars so after

learning this i wanted desperately

to provide some transparency on for the

industry so

i did what seemed rational at the time

and i took a day trip up to shenzhen

and i just started walking around like

the low woo market and started buying

any hidden camera that i could find not

creepy at all i guess

i bought fake glasses i bought fake

ipods i bought like notebook cameras i

even bought

a plastic water bottle that you could

fill up and drink out of

and so then i came back and of course

researched the law to make sure we

didn’t do anything illegal but then my

students and i started investigating

employment agencies

so we trained dozens of foreign domestic

workers to do this with us

and over a period of a few months we had

inspected more than 200 agencies here in

hong kong

and as expected although the hong kong

government

had consistently said the illegal

placement fees were not

charged here our investigation showed

that 70

of those agencies required a payment of

an illegal fee in the very

first conversation they didn’t even try

to hide it like we were shocked

at how open and unafraid they were about

this practice

so actually here’s a picture of the

students that ran some of these initial

investigations that was uh in the the

front page of the scmp

and from that moment on hku students

have been key

in all of our investigations now these

cases they’re not sexy

they’re not always they don’t always get

a lot of attention but experts believe

that human trafficking

is the fastest growing criminal industry

in the world and so it’s critical that

we all

understand it now let me give you

another quick example

but for those who maybe watch this on

video at some point and are not in hong

kong please understand that the

situation i’m describing could occur

anywhere because the

situation is very similar regardless of

of where the migrant worker is in the

world

so about three years ago a young woman

from the philippines

was brought was being brought by an

employment agency that we’d been

watching for quite some time

and this case was unique because we knew

two months in advance that she was

coming

so this gave us time to plan and we had

this cross-border investigation all set

up

and the plan was that when she got to

hong kong we were going to combine all

the evidence and bring a case against

the employment agency

but on her second day in hong kong we

received a desperate message from her

she explained that the agency was

forcing her to move to china

and she was going to be one of the

thousands of filipino domestic workers

who was illegally and unwantingly

trafficked into china to work there

she was desperate and she was begging

for help and you have to understand that

if a

migrant worker in most places reveals to

the government

any type of immigration infraction they

are the ones that will typically be

arrested

even if they are being forced into that

situation

so i reached out to my contacts at the

immigration department in labor

and i said will you please grant her

immunity so she can testify without fear

but they wouldn’t do it and so there she

was trafficked into china

to be honest we felt completely helpless

now eventually our team was able to get

her out of china working with law

enforcement we got the agency shut down

and the owners of the agency were

brought on criminal charges but as i

said this was only one case out of

thousands and to be honest it never

should have happened in the first place

but this happens every single day around

the world often with

much worse outcomes you may recall that

last year

39 vietnamese people died crammed into a

truck

trying to get to the uk so via

vietnamese smugglers they call this the

co2 route

because it goes through a poorly

ventilated um

trip across or under in the english

channel in a shipping container

18 000 people are estimated to make that

trip every single year

and even though this is human smuggling

instead of human trafficking they’re

still victims of bonded labor because

they have to pay between 10 000 us

dollars and fifty thousand dollars to

make that trip

and for the skeptics who are out there

and are thinking well these cases aren’t

so bad

please understand there are plenty of

worse examples that i could give you

here

from hong kong like the time an

indonesian consulate official

told me about a young woman who’d been

kept in a cage and

raped every single day for months

until she finally escaped the consular

official had to stand there

while the police told the victim to not

file charges and just go home

because according to them by reporting

this case it would only bring shame on

her family

as a report the case was never reported

her perpetrator was never prosecuted and

no one in the public

ever heard about this case now you may

be asking yourself what can you do

to be honest in a time like in 2020 when

it seems like there’s so many things

going on

and anxiety is an all-time high i

understand that big

issues like this and climate change

which was discussed earlier

they seem unattainable it seems like

there’s nothing you can do

really all i’m asking you do today

especially for those of you that live in

an area like this is to

understand the issue so that you can see

it on a daily basis

be human be empathetic because the

system

of inequal labor that exists currently

will only create tension and problems in

the future unless we address it now

thank you