The amount of people living in slavery has nearly doubled in the last ten years – despite a near-global consensus that this great evil is only a remnant of the past. For insight on this pressing issue, we turn to Ben Samaroo – a CEO whose grandfather was born a slave – who reveals why the matter grows more pressing by the day and the transgenerational impact it will have on our future.
One in every 150 people are slaves. That’s not a historical fact coming out of the pre-emaciated south, nor from colonial British plantations during the Gregorian period, nor any record out of any history books. These are modern numbers, reported by the International Labour Organisation in September 2022.
One in 150. That’s almost 50 million people – young and old – robbed of agency and living in horrifying conditions against their will. It’s happening right under our noses. These – by the nature of this beast – are conservative estimates. The actual number of slaves in the world today is likely much higher.
We like to think that slavery is well past us. We read the history books – horrified by the greed and cruelty that produced the triangular slave trade and others like it – and think that we now know better, while there are more slaves in the world now than at any other point in human history.
The troubling thing – we’ve been able to say this year over year. The 49.6 million people in slavery today compares to reports from only ten years ago that cited 27 million people. The number has almost doubled in that time.
As long as we keep viewing slavery as a solved problem – an ailment of the past – it’s only going to get worse in our present.
Woven into our clothes, ingrained in the lithium in our batteries, and acting as an underlying layer of the most prolific global industries – modern slavery is infectious, brutal, and has a trans-generational impact cemented in its legacy.
Ben Samaroo, an outspoken activist and thinker on this issue, understands this legacy all too well. His grandfather worked without agency on a Caribbean sugar plantation until 1917. The British ruling over him called it indentured servitude. Samaroo calls it what it really was: slavery.
“In many cases, indentured servants often had worse conditions than the slaves who were freed,” Samaroo says. “When slavery was outlawed in the British Empire, all they did was rebrand it.”
This rebranding remains par for the course. Indentured and bonded servitude remain euphemisms for slavery in the modern age – along with others like sweatshop work. Samaroo tells this story more in-depth in a contribution piece written for the Toronto Star.
It’s a game of coercion. The exploitation of people in desperate and impoverished conditions – where the cost of staying alive is to work with no control over the terms.
We live in a world of middlemen – and the global nature of most industries enable top players to operate with convenient ignorance. Nonconsenting children are sent into mines to secure cobalt that will be used in the latest generation of phones. Migrants are sold a false promise of steady income in a new country – only to find themselves stuck in foreign lands, forced to harvest produce under duress. Thousands live and work inside factories strung with suicide nets – knowing nothing other than their captivity.
It’s big business. Slave traders today make up to 30 times more ROI than the slavers in the history books. The global brands at the top, well, they’re stocking the shelves of our shopping malls, grocery stores, and ecommerce warehouses at fantastic margins.
“Since the start of the pandemic,” Samaroo says, “the large companies have been under pressure from stakeholders to improve their profit margins. The only way to do that is to use cheaper labor. So then it just ends up being people in these vulnerable communities that get, you know, deceived and tricked into working in environments equivalent to a slavery situation.”
This sudden and abrupt rise in demand for slave labor has ghastly implications that will impact generations. Take history as an example. While emancipation occurred in the American south in 1863 – the impact of slavery in the United States still lingers. The modern descendants of freed slaves are but three to four generations removed from destitute poverty – shown in a contemporary racial wealth gap that has shown little to no reduction in the last 70 years.
Samaroo, now the co-Founder and CEO of WonderFi, is a rare exception to the rule – three generations removed from the slavery his grandfather was submitted to.
“My family had to win the lottery hundreds of times over for that freedom to happen,” he says.
Most are not that lucky – and looking at the intergenerational impact slavery has left throughout history, one wonders what the implications of the number of people in slavery today.
“There’s still 50 million people with no liberties at all,” Samaroo says. “Slavery doesn’t just end. The transgenerational trauma and the economic ramifications will impact the children of all these people.”
It’s a snowball – one that’s been rolling since the dawn of human history – growing larger than ever before. Will ours be just another generation that ignores it?
Ben Samaroo is the co-Founder and CEO of WonderFi.
