Ratna and Nadim Siraj
October 28, 2024: This special report is on a subject that some people could find too uncomfortable to process. It’s a subject that’s seen as a social taboo. A subject that the modern corporate world doesn’t want you to talk about. A subject that the mainstream media never touches upon deeply. That’s because the mainstream media itself, too, is part of the problem that the subject is about.
So, what is this subject? It is… slavery.
No, I’m not talking about slavery from the ancient past. I’m talking about modern-day slavery. Slavery that exists today – right now as you’re reading this article. The only difference is that today, it’s not called slavery. Modern-day slavery is described using sanitised words, such as ‘employment’ and ‘occupation’.
We will approach this sensitive subject by first looking at some disturbing incidents from recent times. Incidents that raise questions about the very nature of modern-day jobs. About whether modern-day job life is actually a continuation of historical slavery.
The disguise
Well, slavery hasn’t disappeared into thin air just because it ceased to exist in legal terms. In the name of ’employment’ and ‘occupation’, slavery remains firmly in place. It’s the story of humankind today.
Back in 1843, when British pirates were controlling India under the banner of the East India Company, the invaders made a cunning move. They declared that slavery was henceforth illegal.
We saw a similar declaration at the global level much later in 1948. That year, slavery was declared illegal by the United Nations after the UN came out with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
These actions were clearly just an eyewash. It was a clever way of telling the working class that officially they were no longer slaves. They would live on as slaves, but not officially. Crafty terms such as ‘indentured labour’, ‘workforce’, ‘human capital’, ‘staff‘, ‘personnel‘, ‘manpower‘, ‘office-goer‘, and ‘human resources‘ came in vogue, giving the world the impression that slavery was a thing of the past.
Fast forward to 2024. In the world right now, there are about 350 crore people contracted as employees. That’s close to half the world’s current population of about 820 crore. A majority of the 350 crore employees lead the life of glorified slaves.
Many of them live in the poorest and most thickly populated parts of the world, mostly in South Asia (led by India), Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia.
Even a few affluent countries around the world are home to glorified slaves, such as Japan, Brazil, and a few parts of China. In fact, in 33 years between 1991 and 2024, the global population of official employees went up from about 223 crore to 350 crore. That’s a lightning-fast increase in the number of employees, and therefore, in the number of undeclared slaves.
It shows the tightening grip of corporate empires on the human population.
Slavery in India
You must be wondering: what’s the scene in India? According to the latest data, the total number of employed people in the country was about 41 crore as of March 2023. A significant number out of that 41 crore employees are leading the life of undeclared slaves.
Undeclared slavery has been growing in society like a silent cancer over the last half a century. The cancerous growth picked up pace since the early 1990s when various countries, including India, increasingly started to come under more and more control of corporate empires, resulting in corporatised living, consumerist lifestyles, and an aspirational corporate work culture.
Let’s now look at some recent developments that indicate how decision makers in the corporate world want the undeclared slave class to accept their undeclared slavery.
Let’s start with India. In July, the death of a young employee in Pune sparked a massive controversy. Anna Perayil, a 26-year-old chartered accountant who worked at Ernst & Young, died. Her parents claimed she died because of excess work pressure from E&Y. The company denied having a hand in her death. But the episode kick-started a nationwide debate about growing work-life disbalance in the urban space.
Soon after the Pune woman’s death, the focus was on scooter maker Piaggio. A parliamentarian in Maharashtra called for a state-level investigation into charges of toxic work culture at the Italian company’s India office.
The discussion about work-life disbalance brought into focus an old video of Bhavish Aggarwal, the CEO of Ola. In the video, he openly says India’s working class shouldn’t ask for off-days on Saturdays and Sundays. He says weekend offs are a Western concept; that Indians should look forward to working even on weekends. His words were: “I don’t think work is about five days and off.”
Well, that seems like a convenient suggestion from an employer’s point of view, isn’t it? There should be no off-days at all in work life!
Far worse than this remark was what Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy had thought aloud in recent times. He publicly asked India’s young working class to work 70 hours per week in their initial years to help the country’s economy grow.
Seventy hours a week basically means 14 hours of work per day in a five-day work cycle. So, according to him, the young working class should lay their bodies down to look after the national economy. Then, why do we have the RBI and the government? What are they for? To watch young people work and die?
Shantanu Deshpande, founder and CEO of Bombay Shaving Company, also said something similar that drew criticism. He once openly advised India’s young working class to eat well, stay fit, and put in 18 hours of work every day.
What a paradox, isn’t it? If you work 18 hours a day for years, when will you get the time to eat well and stay fit?
The new Dark Age
Earlier this year, people in Karnataka woke up to alarming news. The state government declared that it was making plans to legalise 14-hour work days for employees in the IT and ITeS sector.
Thankfully, due to pressure from staff unions, the government backtracked and paused it. The new proposal, now on hold, is called ‘Karnataka Shops and Commercial Establishments (Amendment) Bill, 2024’.
While debates were raging surrounding the Pune worker’s death, the mainstream media did what it does best. It fanned the fire for a little while, and then abruptly closed the chapter, moving on to covering state elections, its favourite subject.
What nobody noticed during this entire episode is that the debates have been restricted to a very narrow vision. No-one is connecting the dots and realising that all these episodes are together symptoms of a collective systemic disorder.
The disorder of modern-day slavery, which is the DNA of India’s fast-growing corporate world.
Corporate bigshots from around the world are dropping the same hints. Many influential CEOs are saying there’s no need for ‘work-life balance’. Instead, work and life should fuel each other.
It basically means corporate bosses are telling their modern-day slaves that work and life are no longer two separate things. Their work must become their life, whether they like it or not. Well, that outlook comes straight from the rulebook of ancient slavery, when slaves had only one lifestyle – full-time slavery.
Global trend
Here’s a prominent case study. Many people think someone like Elon Musk is a very accommodating and liberal corporate bigshot. Well, when Musk took charge of microblogging site Twitter (now called X), he publicly asked his employees to dedicate their entire life to work. It was reported that he wanted to promote an alarming concept of “84-hour week”. Basically, he wants people to work for almost 17 hours a day.
Here’s a story from China. In 2019, Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma floated a concept called “996 work system”. The 9-9-6 system means employees should work from 9am to 9pm for six days a week. Jack Ma tried to justify his regressive, anti-staff idea by saying the 9-9-6 system will be a blessing for young workers. Thankfully, the Chinese government declared his idea illegal and shot it down.
A top former Google functionary has also flirted with the idea of making life hell for the employee class. Ex-CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, was once speaking at Stanford University. He said if Google wanted to win the AI race, it shouldn’t be thinking about work-life balance for its employees. He criticised the idea of allowing employees to go home early and work from home, post the pandemic.
Winning was more important than pro-employee policies, Eric Schmidt said. He was criticised so badly for his comment that he had to backtrack and soften his stand.
We are also aware of the Amazon company’s acts against its employees in some parts of the world. It has been reported that Amazon once tried out a policy of 14-hour work days with no bathroom breaks for delivery drivers. In the past, the American company openly disliked the idea of worker unions.
The signs are grim. In recent times, the Greek government has been toying with the idea of mandatory six-day working week for the employee class. The proposed law wants to allow employers to force their workers to work six days a week for an additional payment.
Problem of numbers
The problem in this debate is that those who shape the narrative are busy downplaying the numbers. They don’t want the world to realise that almost half the human race has been sucked into sophisticated slavery.
The UN and its various bodies usually pose as the leading authority on labour rights around the world. We have the International Labour Organisation (ILO), Walk Free, and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).
According to these three organisations, India is officially home to about 1.1 crore slaves. Now, that’s a very small fraction of India’s employed population of 41 crore. So, obviously 1.1 crore slaves is a highly, highly downplayed number.
Countless Indians work as slaves bonded to their masters in multiple sectors, such as garment and textile production, silk manufacturing, agriculture, brickmaking, tea gardens, and the vast natural-resource mining industry.
The golden cage
Even various types of round-the-clock corporate jobs in shiny offices and gated trade centres are increasingly turning into glorified slavery contracts. A cursory look at urban work life in the big cities shows a young and trendy employee class hanging out in uber-cool settings in Western-style glass offices owned by conglomerates and MNCs.
But a deeper look at the work hours and working conditions paints a grim picture – that of a collective unhappy and unfulfilled job life bouncing off the walls of congested cities.
The global official number of slaves is also grossly downplayed. The international bodies claim that worldwide there are about 4.96 crore slaves today. That’s clearly a highly downplayed number in a global employed population of about 350 crore people.
Modern-day slavery, disguised as employment, is present in almost every country, across all continents. No part of the world is spared. In terms of numbers, Asia is home to most of today’s sophisticated slaves.
Now, if you go by the proportion of slaves in a given population segment, then the Gulf countries in West Asia win the race. The six Gulf countries allow the most unforgiving form of slavery. The six nations are Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE (United Arab Emirates), Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait.
Most of the slaves trapped in the oil-rich Gulf are from Bangladesh and the Philippines. About three to five million Bangladeshi men are entrapped across West Asia as slaves. Many of them lead deplorable lives under the infamous ‘kafala system’ or the archaic slave-owning system.
In the article here, you’ll find chilling details of how the slavery system in the Gulf works.
‘Dark’ chocolate
Another hotspot of modern-day slavery are the cocoa fields of Africa. Countless children from Ivory Coast, Ghana, Mali, and Burkina Faso work as slaves in Western Africa’s cocoa fields. The fancy and expensive chocolates from Switzerland, Belgium, and the Netherlands that are so popular among us actually originate from the slave farms of Africa.
You will be shocked to know this. About 21 lakh African children today work as slaves in the cocoa fields of Ghana and Ivory Coast. Most of them are in the age group of 12 to 16 years. And did you know that 40% of these chocolate slaves are young girls?
There’s another hotspot closer to home – in the state of Nagaland. A few years ago, a census discovered that more than 11,000 children aged five to 14 years were engaged in various types of hard work in the northeastern state.
It’s the same story in Bangladesh. A five-year-long investigation into child slavery in Bangladesh’s leather industry uncovered shocking details. It found that children are working in dangerous and harmful conditions at every stage of leather processing. They are forced into the slavery trap due to a perpetual financial crisis in their families.
The resistance
In the middle of the doomsday scenario, there is some good news. Enslaved people are not taking things lying down all the time everywhere. Recently, more than a thousand striking workers at a Samsung plant near the southern Indian city of Chennai revolted against low wages and punishing working conditions. Authorities were dragged to the negotiating table by the defiant workers, and agreed to take up their demands soon.
Then in Australia earlier this year, the government rolled out a new law that sparked a debate. The new law gives Australia’s working class the right to disconnect all communication from their employers outside of work hours. It means, masters cannot disturb their slaves round-the-clock.
If employees in certain industries in Australia choose to ignore messages and calls from office outside of work hours, then they cannot be legally hauled up or punished by their employers.
Laws and flaws
In this world of sophisticated slavery, it’s important for the working class to be aware of the laws in place; the laws that have been designed to protect them from exploitation. It’s a separate discussion how effective the laws themselves are.
In India, the vast working class needs to be aware of four specific laws. Those who work in factories and in the manufacturing sector should be aware of what is called the ‘Factories Act, 1948’. Those employed in corporate glass offices in big cities should carefully go through the ‘Shops and Establishment Act’.
Then there’s the ‘Code on Wages, 2019’, which covers wage-centric and salary-related matters. And then we have the ‘Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020’. This law is supposed to address child slavery and toxic work conditions.
But, of course, had these laws in India and many such regulations in other hotspots of slavery worldwide been strong and bulletproof enough, the cancer of modern-day slavery wouldn’t have ballooned.
Permanent and not cosmetic measures are needed in the hotspots of modern-day slavery, such as in Western Africa, Bangladesh, and in many pockets of India and its neighbouring countries.
Wiping out slavery is a long shot. It’s a distant dream that’s likely to remain unfulfilled simply because modern-day slaves, just like slaves from ancient times, aren’t in the driver’s seat. But as an important step, the world first needs to wake up to the fact that slavery still exists. In different forms, under different names.
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