Slavery, bonded labour, debt bondage, forced prostitution 

Directly or indirectly, exploitative labour practices affect every person on earth today. We are either the directly exploitative employer or, in most cases, simply the consumer of products made by unfree workers or the recipient of their services.

Exploitative or unfree labour includes:

• Debt bondage: where a person or even a whole family are forced to work in harsh conditions without pay until a debt, real or unfairly incurred, is paid off, often including high levels of interest.

• Forced labour: usually referring to labour made compulsory by a state party or government, either involving a specific people group or for state purposes such as military service.

• Commercial sexual exploitation: including work, paid or unpaid, in prostitution, pornography, lap dancing, strip clubs, live sex shows, mail order brides and child brides.

• Slavery: the sale, purchase or ownership of one human by another. This almost always involves the slave being used for unpaid labour, mostly in agriculture, construction, domestic servitude or the commercial sex industry.

The faces of these labour categories may look the same, but they all have in common long working hours, poor conditions (affecting the workers' health or exposing them to unreasonable risks and toxic environments) and little, if any, payment for services.

The vast majority of people working in these conditions are women and children. Many are forced into the commercial sex industry, and even those who are not are made more vulnerable by their comparative physical weakness and malleability and, in many societies, lower social, economic and legal status.

The Numbers:

• 12.3 million people are forced labourers¹

• 12,000 children are forced to work in slave-like conditions on cocoa plantations in Côte d'Ivoire alone, mostly bought from poor neighbouring nations such as Mali and Benin.¹

• The vast majority of those working in exploitative conditions are women and children.²

Why bother?

For one human to own another is a direct contradiction of all people being made equally in the image of God, and the Bible is very clear that a worker is to be treated well, paid fairly (Deut 25:4, Luke 10:7) and allowed time to rest (Exodus 31: 15-17).

Exploitative labour exists in every nation. Promoting Biblical principles starts at your own front door.

The cost of cheap chocolate

The first step to wiping out exploitative labour is simple: make sure the products you buy are not made using unfree labourers. This means checking the labels - is the chocolate you eat Fair Trade? Buying non-Fair Trade products perpetuates the demand for exploitative labour and allows this abuse to continue.

Resources

¹ "Chocolate Campaign." Stop the Traffik. 3 July 2008 http://www.stopthetraffik.org/chocolatecampaign

² "Modern Slavery - People for Sale." US Dept of State. 3 July 2008 <"Modern Slavery - People for Sale." About.Com. 3 July 2008