to wonder why the people I know who are most enraged about past slavery are perfectly happy to benefit from modern slavery?

[mosquitofeast]

For background, I work on a project reintroducing freed child slaves into education.

There are thousands of slaves in UK, many of them children. The worst industry by far is the cannabis growing industry, and no, I don't think legalising it will help. How could legally grown cannabis compete in price with cannabis grown by unpaid slaves? Don't buy cannabis. You are supporting child slavery, possibly within a few miles of where you are sitting right now.

The sex worker industry relies totally on trafficked woman and children, and slavery, and yet its ok to go on an BLM march in the morning, and a stag do using a company invested in people trafficking in the evening?

Nail bars and clothing factories, even some illegal UK ones. Don't buy counterfeits. Simples.

(And the Chinese Uighurs need a whole thread on their own.)

So much anger and outrage and blame about historic slavery, why can't that be funnelled into taking a stand against the slavery that thousands of people are experiencing in the UK today?

@barbaraofSeville You can buy a fair trade phone here www.thephone.coop/personal/phones/fairphone3/

The hypocrisy makes my skin crawl to be honest. I certainly dont want to generalise & put people into catergories but there is a crazy amount of hypocritical virtue signalling lip service going on.
Just read in the news yesterday two men jailed for trafficking a Romanian lady and forcing her to be a prostitute. Where are the protests for people like her?
We cannot ignore the past, and i fully agree with slave traders statues being removed, but there are people suffering TODAY from slavery who need our help NOW...

YANBU, the world is rife with it, though where would you start when it comes to abolishing it?
Technology, clothes and shoes are something most people have and use, and many cannot afford to buy higher end and won’t buy secondhand, so its a vicious cycle.
The poor buy cheap to get by, but by doing so, support modern slavery without intent.

Barbara a great post. It's very, very hard to find fair trade options on everything. You're so right about the higher quality items being similarly culpable for using slave labour. I remember a report a few years back that stated that Primark was no worse than M&S, Next, Zara, Monsoon etc so I wonder why it gets such a battering. I don't shop in Primark but do in the others as I need affordable clothing for the DC as well as me! I try to use British companies when I can for bigger items that will last or be passed down (I have 3 boys) or home furnishings but it's difficult, even small 'British ' companies outsource manufacturing abroad and that's untraceable.

contrymary That's utterly ridiculous, so being concerned about modern slavery as WELL as past slavery is taking away from BLM in the same way as All lives Matter as some slaves today are not black. Seriously? So by avoiding some carwashes/ nailbars/ drugs/ sex work I'm undermining your cause? As we say in my part of the world- you're talking pish.

YANBU

On the issue of drugs it's all about economies of scale, legal production will be cheaper because farmers will not need to rent residential properties to start a grow and users would far prefer to use a reputable seller than some shady criminal. Just like they do with our biggest drugs alcohol and tobacco.

@Mydogisthebestest

I don’t buy fakes.

The only beauty stuff I do is my eyebrows and I do them myself.

I’ve never taken drugs other than the ones my doctor prescribes.

I’m disabled and I work full time, I have children who are having difficulties and my partner is shielding and I haven’t seen him since March.

I have no more left to give. I support and campaign on causes that I personally care about and have the knowledge to make a difference on.

How much are you doing for those with my medical issues or the disadvantaged in the community I live in?

People can’t do everything and they have to choose what causes to support.

people have to choose what causes to support, yes, but no one need ever support slavery!

@Andthewinnerislucky

Hmm....I like that we're all using ethically-made phones to point fingers.

phones are a big problem, and the culture for upgrades makes it worse

There is no need to bring the BLM movement into this discussion. BLM is focussed on combatting the disproportionate police brutality that black people face due to racism. Of course the transatlantic slave trade did lead to racism but BLM is fighting not just to address historical wrongs. Black people are still less than just because they are black.

That aside, it is impossible to be truly moral and good in modern society. If anyone watches The Good Place, they explained this very well. Almost every thing we rely on relies on the labour of enslaved people. We can boycott all exploitative businesses but this makes little difference and for many people boycotting is not an affordable option. It is unclear what to do, reducing global wealth inequality would help of course, but that is easier said than done.

great post op but our past is our present and has shaped our attitudes towards bames today. thats the point of the blm movement. your point is more about current economic slavery isnt it and linking to 2 opens the door to blm detractors parhaps?

great post op but our past is our present and has shaped our attitudes towards bames today. thats the point of the blm movement. your point is more about current economic slavery isnt it and linking to 2 opens the door to blm detractors parhaps? Except not all past slavery was black. As another poster said, we need to increase knowledge about slavery past and present, not shame! Focus on shaming people and all you will get is a hard pushback.

BLM, as yet others have said, is about the now of racism, we need to focus on that, not statues, names of building etc. Focus on the hard meaningful issues not the pointless easy targets.

Listen to African black voices, like (and I blush to say this) the woman on Jeremy Vine describing her great grandfathers work as a slaver. Her matter of fact take on it was illuminating.. she is, he was black, dealt in black slaves.

You didn’t actually answer me op.

I buy second hand clothes where possible. I’m on a limited income. What more do you demand I do?

but it's difficult, even small 'British ' companies outsource manufacturing abroad and that's untraceable

Or they set up manufacturing facilities in the UK using imported workers paid less than the UK NMW so they can boast about 'Made in the UK' but neglecting to mention that it's not UK conditions or wages, as per the Leicester garment factories. See also factories in Northern Italy where the workers are Chinese. I don't know the detail but apparently there's a whole industry in Northern Italy where Chinese workers are flown in to work in clothing factories so they can label the clothes as 'made in Italy' and we can all assume that the conditions and pay of the workers would be better than if it said 'made in China/Bangladesh' etc. In both cases workers being forced to work through the pandemic has led to the virus spreading when factories should have closed or protection measures put in place.

Thanks for the link to ethically labelled phones, but what I'm saying is that all these things should be made to ethical standards, it should be the norm, not something niche that we should have to seek out. Yes we might need to pay a little more than we do now, and big companies might have to make less profit and we might not be able to afford so many things, but when compared with people who live on a few pounds a day, nearly everyone in more developed countries can afford it.

@BarbaraofSeville
Or they set up manufacturing facilities in the UK using imported workers paid less than the UK NMW so they can boast about 'Made in the UK' but neglecting to mention that it's not UK conditions or wages, as per the Leicester garment factories.

Some of them are British. They are exploited because they don't realise they can get out of that situation.

Because it's easy to virtue signal but apparently not so easy to actually go without having your nails done or buying your tacky fast fashion items.

This is the OP who thinks driving a car 2 miles is equal to slavery, personally anyone who reduces a persons worth to that of a 2 mile car journery really doesn’t have the welfare of people as a priority.

@Mydogisthebestest

You didn’t actually answer me op.

I buy second hand clothes where possible. I’m on a limited income. What more do you demand I do?

No one is " demanding" you do anything its called a discussion 🙄

@Fairyliz

People don’t actually want to do anything that might affect them, I.e. stop buying cheaply made clothes. It’s much easier for woke citizens to blame people in the past and feel all virtuous.

Exactly the same with many who say they want climate change prioritised. All well and good until they propose tax changes, a limit on travel etc etc then suddenly it all goes quiet. It’s far easier to post a black square on Instagram that effect actual change by changing a habit.

@Mydogisthebestest we can’t do anything that will make a real difference other than to raise awareness of these issues and campaign for change.
The whole of society needs to be rebuilt and we as humans need to stop exploiting each other because we feel superior to them.

Many people can't afford to live ethically, you can be against it and try your best but realistically buying ethically made items is so expensive. Luckily when you're poor you don't contribute so much to things like climate change-- we can't afford a car nor foreign holidays, so at least there's that.

I buy the majority of things second hand. Can’t wait for all the charity shops to be open again in the towns near me.

I drive more than 2 miles so according to this op I deserve to be condemned as a slave trader anyway.

So pardon me for being upset.

I think a lot of people don't make the connection because they have convinced themselves that bad things that happened in the past were done by "evil" people. And they and their friend are not evil, so it's not the same.

I don't think you even need to look at outright slavery - the reason we can buy imported food so cheaply, or clothes from places like H&M, or tech gadgets, is because there are people at the bottom of the global economic ladder who are very close to slaves - by some reckoning, they are slaves, though not chattel generally speaking.

We are almost all complicit in this, or we live within that system even if we are aware of it and oppose it. There are not really a lot of options for most of us to avoid everything of this kind, unless you head off to live off-grid in the wilderness.

It doesn't occur to these people that historically the vast majority of people didn't see slave produced goods and work as really problematic in the same way we don't see cheap washing machines from Walmart as really problematic. Or even if they did, they still had to eat and wear clothes and participate in the economy that they lived within. So slavery touched them just like economic exploitation touches all of us.

I think that for a lot of these people, some of their "activist" activity like going on marches with no real political goal, or tearing down statues, or reading books like white fragility, is a kind of displacement. It allows them to see themselves as good without having to wrestle with really difficult problems or their own entanglement in the current economic landscape and their own relative wealth in global terms.

YANBU, it's an interesting point. I think a lot of people are utterly clueless (wilfully clueless) about modern slavery.

That said the anger about historic slavery is justifiable. There is pain there that needs to be expressed and acknowledged. Perhaps off the back of it there will be a wider discussion about modern slavery.

I suspect, to be honest, that many people are completely unaware of m modern-day slavery. Either that it happens at all or the extent of it if they are aware. People live lives in their own little bubble and can't imagine that just down the road slavery is a thing that is happening.

There is pain there that needs to be expressed and acknowledged. Perhaps off the back of it there will be a wider discussion about modern slavery. For how long? What will signal the correct amount of acknowledgement? What sort of acknowledgment is required? Who is the arbiter? Who is the gulity party, who the injured?

At the moment SM is judge, jury and executioner. That only makes things worse.

I know I am too old to be in tune with the current issues on this. I was, as has been said on other threads, of the hippy dippy generation that was brought up to believe we could all be skin colour blind, all Kumbaya and The Child is Black, the Child is White. I can't express my feeling about the subject without being accused of being blind to my internal racism (as has hppened a few time here ove the years).

But I don't get the self separation, the self othering of black and white cohorts alike (or the weirdness of 'cultural appopriation' these days). Much of it, the loud, self congratulatory SM utterances, just seem like too much virtue signalling and not enough self reflection and thinking!