We have a Filipino woman who works for us. She has been a citizen here for 25 years and has worked for us for 12. Her sister went to Qatar 15 years ago and has been miserable. We have just finished preparing a sponsorship for her in our country and now need to extract her.<p>It involves having a replacement passport printed for her in the Philippines, her brother flying to Qatar under his Canadian passport and then bussing her to a neighbouring country to fly out of.
I once met a very bright young lawyer from London, UK. She had worked on human trafficking cases in the UK. And she was so shocked with what was happening in the UK and the apathy of governments across the world that she decided to do a startup to tackle this problem. It requires a lot of money and connections to get a project of this nature off the ground. She was hoping to get into YC. Was rejected. After few months of trying to raise funds she gave up. She once said to me that there are actually online marketplaces, similar to how Amazon is for goods, to sell humans!
I'd love a discussion of a (serious) solutions.<p>A lot of Western solutions sound like variants of Simpson's Paradox, where equity is increased locally, and decreased globally.<p>This is, for example, true if one provides people with a better-but-not-good-enough option. If I do something not meeting Western standards, I'm liable to get cancelled. On the other hand, many options a step up from slavery are just that: a step up from slavery, and would be considered very exploitative by Western standards. Sustainability matters for scalability.<p>Likewise, cultural imperialism is bad, and a lot of options do a lot more (distributed) harm while helping individuals. I like cultural diversity.<p>Options also need to stakeholders and implementation. It's easy to say "If I were dictator of the world, I would do X," but they do need to content with incentive structures, politics, and similar types of issues.<p>I'm not quite sure how to even have that discussion, since if something can be misinterpreted, you're liable to be cancelled (or at the very least, receive some very bad press).
The sad part is that working as slave maids is the best possible option for a lot of these people. Last week only dozens of Rohingya refugees died because they were adrift on a ship for a month and no country rescued them because they didn't want migrants. South Asia sadly has a lot of such stories. Myanmar in conflict, Afghanistan is shambles, Pakistan desperately poor, Sri lanka also in chaos. Only India is somewhat stable. All of these poor people are exploited a lot by the rich Gulf states.
Sadly been going on for a while, there was a BBC story from 2019: <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50228549" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50228549</a>
The kafala system isn't going anywhere so long as we can't tell these countries to take their oil and drink it. The same thing (i.e. "sponsoring" someone by capturing that person's passport and forcing low wage labor for any hope of retrieval) happened to those enslaved workers in Qatar, and then the Qatari women had the nerve to brag about how liberated they were -- that there was no housework to which they were shackled. Hmm, I wonder how many other problems they can outsource to the exploited world's poor?
I remember digging into this somewhat and was surprised how prevalent it was; even in the uk, us and canada.<p>Once you know the current code words for the gender, type of slave, and job, you can even use Google to search and find open sites.<p>It was depressing to see but I honestly could not see what could be done. The fact it is done so openly and with so much money involved, I found it hard to believe that law enforcement was clueless if not complicit in it.
For people saying slavery is 100% abolished in the US. It’s just masked as Penal labor.<p>Slave labor in the United States is explicitly allowed by the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Doesn’t it seem that if there were an online marketplace or app for slavers we could easily find it, see screenshots etc?<p>I doubt it exists but subservience — or near slavery — is everywhere.<p>I see Mexicans working in very subservient conditions with all kinds of legal constraints.<p>I don’t think we treat our undocumented immigrants better than the Saudis — or anyone else.
This isn't just saudis. Dubai, Emirates, Egypt ... under the Kafala system, foreign workers gets their passport confiscated by their employers and aren't free to get out of the country. It's slavery, there is no other name for that.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kafala_system" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kafala_system</a><p>Of course maids get abused, tortured and raped by their employers and the family, and even when they travel to Europe with their employers, they are mistreated the exact same way. But since the Saudis are filthy rich, Europe turns a blind eye...
Hard to put a finger on why but there's something about gulf Arab countries and a common attitude of entitlement and arrogance that's special to them, but not so in Oman and Iraq. As if money buys superiority.
I recently watched the movie Black Girl (1966) which discussed the same subject but in colonial France <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Girl_(1966_film)" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Girl_(1966_film)</a>
See IJM for an example of groups that work on this. Anecdotally, it is common across the world.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Justice_Mission" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Justice_Mission</a>
The idea of an otherised society where some home sapiens are less human than others has deep roots and countless manifestations (war, slavery, gender biases, other forms of exploitation). It is also the primary manifestation of evil.<p>Yet is clearly an unstable (high maintenance) collective mental state. It is predicated on active oppression. The stable ground state is fundamentally egalitarian. Almost by definition.<p>Progress and civilization are not relative concepts. They are counted objectively by the number of brains that can reach full emotional, perceptive, creative etc maturity.
The sketches for the two guys that kidnapped Madeline McCann look an awful lot like the Podesta brothers. Then there’s the whole Prince Andrew thing. And then Epstein and Maxwell. How does Maxwell get convicted on trafficking charges but none of her clients do? As long as the political class is heavily involved the problem isn’t gonna get solved.
So long as society isn’t willing to address some basic matters, slavery and exploitation will exist.<p>Finite resources, unrestrained population growth, paired with rampant individualism where everyone wants more than their neighbour.<p>I wonder what the effects of having a perfect enforcement mechanism against exploitation would be ?
Would we finally plan resource allocation and population growth more reasonably ? I suspect it would just go horribly wrong somehow and we would end up in some version of Malthusianism.