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