The whole point of granite, that it is hard and durable, is also the reason it is difficult to mine and process. It has to be carefully removed from quarries in large thin slabs, so you can’t just go in with dynamite and bulldozers. Careful handling means handwork, which requires people with drills and chisels, hammers and crowbars gently working the granite out of the ground. And in India, the most cost effective way to achieve that is slavery.Where do they get slaves? Refugees of natural disasters are one source.
“See the little girl playing with the hammer?” asked a local investigator. “Along with the child, the size of the hammer grows, and that’s the only progress in her life.” Slavery in granite quarries is a family affair enforced by a tricky scheme based on debt. When a poor family comes looking for work, the quarry bosses are ready to help with an “advance” on wages to help the family settle in. The rice and beans they eat, the scrap stones they use to build a hut on the side of the quarry, the hammers and crowbars they need to do their work, all of it is provided by the boss and added to the family’s debt. Just when the family feels they may have finally found some security, they are being locked into hereditary slavery. This debt bondage is illegal, but illiterate workers don’t know this, and the bosses are keen to play on their sense of obligation, not alert them to the scam that’s sucking them under.
Especially in countries where corruption is rife, slavers act with impunity after environmental devastation, luring and capturing the refugees, the destitute, and the dispossessed. This has happened in countries like Mali, where sand dunes drift right over villages, forcing the inhabitants to flee in desperation, seeking new livelihoods, only to find themselves enslaved.In my previous post on Christianity and the end of slavery, I had thought of modern slavery in the "entertainment" industry - sex slaves for one. My other thought was that in the absence of Christian influences on our culture, our recent fascination with Mixed Martial Arts matches where one combatant typically ends up beaten senseless is only a tiny nudge away from Rome's gladiators where the loser ended up dead. Do away with Christianity and you're left with ... why not?
In any case, slavery is going on now because in industries that involve high levels of risks from toxins or accidents, you need life to be very, very cheap.
"... Slavery in granite quarries is a family affair enforced by a tricky scheme based on debt. When a poor family comes looking for work, the quarry bosses are ready to help with an “advance” on wages to help the family settle in. The rice and beans they eat, the scrap stones they use to build a hut on the side of the quarry, the hammers and crowbars they need to do their work, all of it is provided by the boss and added to the family’s debt. Just when the family feels they may have finally found some security, they are being locked into hereditary slavery. This debt bondage is ..."
ReplyDelete... absolutely forbidden by that "harsh" and "pro-slavery" Old Testament.
One of my pet peeves is with persons (generally, but not always, Catholics) who point to the Mosaic prohibition against usury and from that claim that God prohibits the lending of money at interest, as will and must happen in any functional economy. When they do this, they rip the actual Mosaic prohibition out of its context, and thus misrepresent the prohibition – for in almost every instance in the OT where the prohibition against usury is stated, the rationale for the prohibition is also stated: it is to prevent the use of debt as a tool to turn people into slaves.
That was an interesting article. A few points that I think are key:
ReplyDelete1. The slavers are only able to do this economically because they are not paying for the slaves. They are stealing their lives from them. They are wrapping them up in the most extreme form of debt peonage, where acquiring the slave costs the slaver nothing, and the slaver then has no actual ongoing costs because the slave is then forced to support themselves.
2. Like most criminals, the slavers are causing immense harm to others in exchange for fairly paltry benefits to themselves. "If slavery were an American state it would have the population of California and the economic output of the District of Columbia" - this basically means that the actual productivity of the slaves is only about 4% of that of free people in the US. The slavers are making a pittance, and the only reason they can continue to do it is because the misery they cause is a price paid by others, not by themselves.
3. What the slavers do is not legal even in the countries where they exist. It is only allowed because, like most criminals, they have corrupted their governments into looking the other way. It does not appear that anyone actually thinks it is morally defensible, they only think that they can get away with it.
"Like most criminals, the slavers are causing immense harm to others in exchange for fairly paltry benefits to themselves. ... The slavers are making a pittance, and the only reason they can continue to do it is because the misery they cause is a price paid by others, not by themselves."
ReplyDeleteThis is the way of sin; those who sin always must seek to offload its onto others.
"It does not appear that anyone actually thinks it is morally defensible, they only think that they can get away with it."
Ah, but *why* does no one think it is morally defensible?
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"Like most criminals, the slavers are causing immense harm to others in exchange for fairly paltry benefits to themselves."
Tell me about it. The people who broke into and ransacked my house a couple of years ago caused me many thousands of dollars of loss. And the gain to them was a mere pittance of the loss they caused me.
But here is why criminals do such economically counter-productive destruction -- while holding a real job would benefit them far more than their criminal activities, and at generally less expenditure of effort per "unit" of benefit, a real job requires them to show up every day.