Disposable People - Pesach and Slavery in the Modern World

 

Disposable People

The Torah speaks of slavery in two ways: the Israelite slave and the Canaanite (or, really, non-Israelite) slave. The Israelite slave had many previously unheard-of protections, such as the mandated release after six years. The non-Israelite slave in the Torah was given some protections, such as not being returned to the master after escaping, but was ultimately treated similarly to any ancient slave. 

Moving forward through history, a thousand years or so, and the rabbis of our tradition found themselves uncomfortable with the state of the written law. And through a truly masterful legal framework, they gave all slaves the protections of the Israelite slave. 

Another thousand years, more than a thousand years, and the question of abolition of slavery came to be. Some rabbis saw the trajectory of our narrative, with its reminder that we were once slaves and its growth of protections around the enslaved person, and became abolitionists. I’m sorry to say, not all rabbis were so enlightened. 

And now, here we stand, in a modern world - where slavery is supposedly illegal, where international legislation is in place, where we by and large agree that it is morally horrific. 

And yet. 

And yet there have never been more slaves. There are roughly 50 million people in slavery right now. I’m not very good with big numbers, so I’m going to try that in a more accessible way: around one in every 200 people in the world is held in slavery. Some say as much as one in every 150 people. Even if we define slavery in the narrowest way we possibly can, there are more people being held in slavery in this moment than there were during the entire time of the transatlantic slave trade. 

It is not something that simply happens somewhere else. There are, of course, parts of the world where slavery is more or less prominent. But even considering that, even if you’ve never left this green and pleasant land, the truth is that we will have each interacted with slavery. And I don’t only mean that, in the words of Grace Forrest of the Walk Free Foundation, it is woven into the fabric of our clothing, that it seasons our food, and that it lights up our electronics. I mean that each of us will have encountered a slave directly. As manual labourers, or hotel workers, or just walking down the street. Slaves live among us. It’s a seedy underbelly of society that we prefer to pretend does not exist. But our revulsion at the idea, our turning away, does not touch the fact that it is there. If anything, it helps to feed it. Modern slavery allows and thrives on us looking away from it. 

So - you’ll excuse me, this isn’t happy - but I’m going to suggest we cast disinfecting light into the darkness in these next few moments. 

Slavery in our modern world is globalised. It takes place in the context of fast-moving consumerism and a worldwide network. This all comes together to mean that the human slave is cheaper than ever before and the returns on slavery are higher than ever before. And this all, of course, means that the slave is more disposable than ever before. Once upon a time, owning a slave might have meant taking a person as the spoils of war, or purchasing a slave for a great amount of money. During the transatlantic slave trade, a slave might have cost a slave-owner the equivalent of thousands of pounds. Today, estimates on the going rate of a slave range from forty to seventy pounds. Kevin Bales, Professor of Modern Slavery, suggests that where the returns on a slave in the 1700s might have been around 5%, today, “bonded agricultural laborers in India generate more than a 50 percent profit per year for their slaveholders, and a return of 800 percent is not at all uncommon for holders of sex slaves.” 

Kevin Bales’ work, which is harrowing but well worth reading, is titled Disposable People. That’s what the crux of it really is, I think. We are living in a world in which people are more disposable than ever. 

And our tradition rails against this line of thinking.

Even in the time of the writing of the Torah, when the idea of abolition was millennia in the future, people were not disposable. A slave who ran away was assumed to be first and foremost a person, and not to be returned to a situation he fled from. And the fundamental truth of the Torah, the most important thing I think ever written, is that all people are made in the image of God. Nobody is disposable. 

Nobody should be disposable. 

But they are, unfortunately, invisible. Because we as a society don’t know enough to see what’s happening around us. 

There is a kind of slavery that very much exists in our society, in car washes, cleaning houses, in construction, and so on. Many people are trafficked, don’t have control of their own passports anymore, and “owe” their traffickers more than they can work off. It’s often referred to as “debt slavery”, and there are signs to spot, such as people being dropped off and picked up to the workplace, not seeming to have their own belongings or personal identification.

When they are trafficking victims, they also get caught between pieces of British legislation, because they’re often treated as immigration offenders. But not everyone is trafficked in that traditional sense. The nationality most commonly represented in the statistics of slaves in the UK is British. 

Another element of slavery in modernity is that the labour itself is often criminal. Forcing workers into criminal activity, such as growing cannabis, is a tried and tested method for keeping them from accessing help. The labour that they are forced to take part in itself makes them more exploitable. 

Sexual slavery is similar on that front. The nature of the exploitation makes it more and more difficult to seek help. And I remember, from my past life when I worked in education around sex trafficking, reading accounts of women who would tell the person who purchased time with them that they were trafficked, and being ignored, because the man in question had paid and felt entitled. 

There’s a horrible Catch-22 involved here, because stigma around sex and purity culture is not helpful, but… it is particularly lucrative for traffickers to work in areas that legalise and therefore destigmatise the purchase of sex. And, as an aside, there truly is no ethical way to engage with that trade; not when the majority of people are not there freely, not when even those who claim to be are so often victims of childhood abuse, or entered the trade themselves as children. We have a word for that kind of nonconsensual engagement. 

I know I’m being rather depressing. We’re going to have a lovely time at the Seder later tonight, reliving the origin stories of our people. We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt and, thank God - literally, thank God - we are free. 

But I want to give us a charge for this Passover. I recently earned a certificate from Unseen UK in the Introduction to Modern Slavery - see, and I’m immediately making it your problem - and I just couldn’t walk from that course into Pesach without this. 

The charge I want to give us is this: Pesach is about the story we tell the children. It’s about teaching them of our slavery and redemption. And it is possible, someday, that we can honestly tell that story as a historical narrative, in a world where slavery no longer exists. 

But it takes work. And it takes giving up on the comfortable haze that we live in, where slavery is a problem from another time or another place. 

So here are a few things we can each do, as individuals, starting now. 

1. When you see something, act. 

If we see something that strikes us as wrong, there are people to tell - and the information is easily accessible. It’s not perfect, but it’s something. I also put together a sheet, you can find it at the front, with this kind of information. And if you’re frozen, unsure if it’s worth calling, the answer is: yes. If your internal alarms are raised, then it is worth passing on. And if you need someone to tell you that in the moment, call me; I’ll readily repeat myself. 

2. Learn. 

Slavery thrives on the fact that we all want to pretend everything is fine. It is not. I put some recommendations on this list. You can ignore all my recommendations and find your own, but then, pass it onto someone else so they can learn too. 

3. Donate. 

There are lots of calls on us for tzedakah. There are good organisations doing good work to free enslaved people and root out the causes. Anti-slavery organisations need help. And actually, much of slavery exists because of vulnerability - because of lack of education, because of the climate crisis, because of poverty. Tzedakah that addresses those issues is also working toward the eradication of slavery, so if you have your pet cause, why not give it more attention in order to help protect people from slavery.

4. Demand better. 

Our politicians do have power. Sometimes, a single piece of legislation can make a huge difference. I’m happy to say that, according to the Global Slavery Index, the UK is leading on anti-slavery legislation. And I’m sad to say that it is not close to enough, because that same index estimates that we import around £20 billion worth of products that utilise slave labour every year. We have to do better. 

We have to do better so that one day, we can sit around the Seder table and tell the children: we were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt. And today? Today, we are all free. 

Shabbat shalom. Chag kasher v’sameach.