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.
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 finished my highschool in Qatar, and a part of the program was an internship. Mine was at QFCHT, Qatar Foundation for Combating Human Trafficking.
It was just a bunch of houses in which maids who don’t have things going well with their Sponsors stay in, waiting for a ticket back home. The QFCHT would just host them and negotiate the sponsor for sending them home.
Like, a 2-floor 5-room or so house that has 10 maids living in it. Their passports are confiscated by their sponsors, who were often times irrational egoistic wretches who believe they’re superior (keep in mind that the sample at QFCHT was the set of maids with the worst sponsors, I’ve seen a lot of kind Qataris who were fair and respectable). I heard though that this sponsor system has changed a while ago, not sure how is it done now since I no longer live there, but hope it’s better.
We once, at our home, needed help cleaning so we called one of those Maid agencies for a temporary cleaning. They sent us a Filipino maid. While she was cleaning, she came across my little library that I had been growing during my ECE bachelors. She looked at the books and asked me if I am studying electronics. Started talking about her graduation project back home. She had graduated from ECE too..
I saw that with Nepali workers too. Many of them were highly educated, qualified, individuals, but I don’t know what financial situation compelled them to come to Qatar to work as waiters, maids, and other jobs that are way below their qualifications.
I tried to learn some phrases in their language to joke with them and cheer them up when I interact with them. It always felt odd being on the service-receiving side. A lot of them were resilient in keeping their smile and sanity in spite of the assholic treatment a specific class of customers. That class earned the “bakla” title.
There are a lot of factors but the ones I could think of right now are salary of engineering graduates here in Philippines are very low and culturally. Culturally in the sense that in provinces, some parents treat their kids as "investment". I paid your college tuition so when you graduate you should start paying back by buying us a house, car, phones, etc. So there's really that pressure to get a high paying job right away.
> Their passports are confiscated by their sponsors
How does this work? As an adult, if someone tries to take my passport I would refuse. If they snatched it out of my hands, I would take it back. If they somehow got the better of me and hid it or locked it up, I'd go to the police.
I could see maybe an abusive situation where going to the police isn't an option because the victim is locked in the house. In that case I'd expect that when the perpetrators are caught they'd be charged with kidnapping for that. And then some other charge (theft?) for locking up the passport.
I know maids from my mothers village in kerala India that have been imprisoned there and passports taken away. Some of them have had no contact for decades.
lots of men are imprisoned there too in similar circumstances. People think slavery is a relic of the past but We have the highest number of slaves now in history of humanity.
> People think slavery is a relic of the past but We have the highest number of slaves now in history of humanity.
Like Eva Kaili who was defending Qatar in the European Parliament. In that case it seems that a few bags of money was the culprit for her ignorance though, along with a few drinks in some kitsch club there.
There is also significant cases before and currently in South Korea, namely illegal immigrants working at farms with nigh-slave labour conditions and factory workers in Samsung/Hyundai etc large multinationals
She cannot get her old passport. If her "employers" know she is leaving, they will stop it.
I won't post about how we plan to get her out but I believe it is a good one and it has very littler risk to her or their brother. Perhaps when it is all done will feel ok posting more.
It is costing us a lot of money in the end, but the woman we employ is part of the family at this point and it's important to us that her sister is safe. We will employ the sister on her landing in our country and will do so for at least a year.
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!
> there are actually online marketplaces, similar to how Amazon is for goods, to sell humans!
This should be easy to prove. Closest I can think of is some Telegram groups you might find in places like Syria, but that hardly warrants the Amazon comparison.
Various aspects of slavery and human trafficking, for all intents and purposes, never entirely disappeared when you think about it. Society abstracted some of these things away in free markets through labor and monetary exchanges for labor.
Some of the very obvious differences between pure historic slavery and what we have now is that human rights are significantly better across the board and individuals have some degree of autonomy to decide what aspects of their self and time to sell and whom to vs previous time periods where those things were just taken from individuals.
So long as we're able to give labor that degree of autonomy (e.g. autonomy enabled by the ability to provide necessities for themselves and their family like basic food, housing, and so on) then I think we have a reasonable compromise. Vast wealth disparity (leading to monopolistic behavior on the employment side), lack of competing opportunities to sell your time/skills, and markets trending and stabilizing to states that are not labor-friendly undermine this.
This continuously peels away the abstractions we have to create autonomy for individuals and moves the needle back towards owning people like slaves, holding them on a leash indirectly through monetary mediums of exchange (i.e. currency) and so on. If I need money and food and shelter and the only real viable route to attain this reasonably is to sell myself or allow myself to be sold on abusive markets that may want more than say just my maid services (perhaps 'maids with benefits' situations, i.e. disguised prostitution) then that's what's ultimately going to happen.
We may claim the people have autonomy but we've just created complex systems around their autonomy that give the appearance of choice. People need viable and reasonable choices, not just a set of options where only one is reasonable for a stable and happy life unless we want to slowly erode back to systems like indentured servitude and beyond.
The article explicitly calls out Filipino maids as the highest selling and having been to the Philippines and now being part of Filipino family, I understand why. The country is very poor overall and the culture exports labor to import wealth due to the lack of local opportunity. Sure they can study anything and go anywhere in the world but it turns out, many go to certain middle eastern countries and pursue maid careers because it's their only real viable option. Some of the more lucky Filipinos study in school and are able to get degrees in healthcare or hotel services and work abroad in countries with better protections. Even then, they're held on a leash and abused through visa programs like in the US where they're paid a fraction of the rates their US native counterparts earn and lack mobility to transition positions readily to negotiate competitive wages, so they lose rights to employers and work in undesirable locations, under market rates, and often the under the worst sort of contract situations.
It's not like this story of maids in Saudi Arabia where conditions are even worse but it shows how we need to maintain autonomy for everyone. Aside from the being most humane thing to do, out of sheer self-interest, if you sell your labor for time in any fashion, these infringements on rights slowly peel away your rights as well. You may not see it in your lifetime but we should push for better labor rights across the globe to prevent stepping back to past atrocities we've seen in slavery systems.
Failure to create and enforce laws that prevent human trafficking fall squarely on government, and subsequently the people who choose cost as the main priority when purchasing a product or service and then vote for representatives that ensure cheap goods continue to flow.
Blaming “the market” is similar to not taking responsibility for climate change by demanding government action and changing your own habits.
Until we look in the mirror, there can be no change or progress.
> Various aspects of slavery and human trafficking, for all intents and purposes, never entirely disappeared when you think about it. Society abstracted some of these things away in free markets through labor and monetary exchanges for labor.
Anecdote time, slightly related ! Be me, in wealthy western Europe. Walking a Sunday trail, hundreds of people. Taking a break on the side of the trail, looking at a community garden and reading the plaque about which vegetables is being grown, by who: local public "help" centres (read: a public social support program, state-funded, it's a pillar of our society, to help people find jobs and get back on track). The plaque reads that when vegetables are ripe people are free to pick it up (just don't take everything). Was having a nice chat with a random lady up to that point, most likely a bit leftist, nice, then she drops that line "Well, it's free, it's fine, after all it's all being paid for with our money".
On the way back I kept thinking about that and came to the conclusion that slavery could easily come back in less than half a generation. And I am not talking about how work is structured or how our society regulates work and employment and how it's an abstraction. We are always half a generation away from losing our social advancements (English correct wording escapes me at the moment).
Edit: for once I caught the comments before losing the ability to edit so I'll reply here.
> I can't help but to think some meaning was lost in what you are intending to say. What is "it" that the woman was talking about? Is "it" picking the a ripe vegetable from the garden, like the sign says you can?
It's that "it". But the most important thing is in the second part "it's being paid for with our money". The goal of that community garden is not really to feed anyone but to get some people back on track through a regular schedule, group activity and supervised work. Social services are not supposed to produce vegetables or anything that anyone should pay for, a bit like the US prisons that have become free/cheap labor. It's hijacking the original goal. From this I could easily picture a world where people without jobs are forced to get through that system and become free workers tasked to grow vegetables or clean the streets (and it's something that happened in the Netherlands: a public worker whose job was cleaning the street lost his job then got through a back-to-work program in which he was tasked with the same job but for no salary (he was paid - much less - through social support).
> Is "it" the government paying folks to plant and tend the garden for the benefit of the public?
That's how it was framed in her mind but that's not the reason why there are free vegetables there at that place and time.
She's not supposed to get vegetables for free because it's paid with her taxes, she gets them for free because those vegetables are not grown to be sold or make a profit.
> I don't understand this anecdote. What was objectionable about what the woman said (if anything). I'm a leftist and I think its important to recognize that value does not come from nothing, but is the result, one way or another, of labor, which is all she seems to be acknowledging.
She normalized having people working without a salary and not being fairly compensated (or being compensated by whatever price the market set). Plus, people working that garden somehow don't have a choice in choosing that job (growing up vegetables) because it wasn't a job, it was part of a reinsertion program. The fact she pays taxes to finance such programs shouldn't mean we get free labor. That's where she crossed into indentured work.
I'd like to add something else: there are community gardens a few blocks away from where I live. But there's a waiting list to get on it, it's real garden but more for hobbyists and retired people. It's all financed by city taxes through a "green/food/health" kind of program.
But the gates to the garden are closed and the fences are high and fact is it can only be used by retired people who lobbied to get some parcels in the first place.
That is a lot of text for what is a very simple concept. Being able to say "no".
> Even then, they're held on a leash and abused through visa programs like in the US where they're paid a fraction of the rates their US native counterparts earn
That is not abuse. They can leave anytime. And if you talk to them, they are grateful for the opportunity to work here for "a fraction of the rates their US native counterparts earn" and would resent people like you who would take that away from them.
What is outrageous about the story posted is that they can't leave anytime they want. Their passport is taken from them. That's wrong.
But it cannot be solved by sending helium balloons woth sulfut into the stratosphere, or by getting saudi money through softbank. So the idea is not the best match for VC funding.
I would be interested in a crowd-sourced approach where she hosts open-source tools she runs periodically to generate reports to give to the right people in government. I don't know how international matters should be handled but I imagine initiative can be taken to remove the problem in our own backyards.
The "right people in government" are the ones doing it in the first place, alternately pictures exist of them doing naughty things, and a dead hooker can always be "found" in their trunk. Epsteinyay idn'tday illkay imselfhay .
I know a lot of people, especially Americans, just can’t help but take a crap on America every chance they get, but we’re talking about a 15 year old crime, for which the perpetrators were held accountable versus an active slave trade in Saudi Arabia. Human trafficking in all forms is abhorrent but these are not the same IMHO.
A lot of Western solutions sound like variants of Simpson's Paradox, where equity is increased locally, and decreased globally.
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.
Likewise, cultural imperialism is bad, and a lot of options do a lot more (distributed) harm while helping individuals. I like cultural diversity.
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.
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).
I mean, there’s certain types of cultural exports or hegemony that makes sense. We got the Aztecs to stop sacrificing children to Huitzilopochtli. We don’t live in a world where people REALLY believe in total cultural relativism.
I think you’re spot on that we in the West find “step above slavery jobs” extremely distasteful. This results in situations where the news media celebrates the closing of a “child sweatshop” in Cambodia, but the cameras aren’t rolling when, faced with poor economic conditions due to the factory closing, those same children are now working in a child brothel, which everyone agrees is worse.
Similarly, Siddharth Kara has recently revealed the horrors going on in the Congo involving the Cobalt trade with the warlords and the Chinese. That ones interesting too because thirty years ago the operations were run by South Africans but the western world largely agreed this was wrong so they ceded the land back to the Congo. This resulted in warlords becoming enriched by the power vacuum and becoming well armed and making things horrific for the poor people living in Congo who have to mine up toxic cobalt with their bare hands in dangerous tunnels and pits.
The solution to child and worker exploitation is not look sad and just buy the cheap garments and cobalt.
This is a coordination problem first and foremost. The solution is to tax the shit out of supply chains that don't provide the basics.
...
And yes, development economics is ugly. There's no royal road from subsistence farming to Switzerland-level, but whatever road there is it's not composed of separately inscrutable steps. It's perfectly okay to strive to make each step better and less horrible. Just as on the other side of globalization it's not some unknowable force closing non-profitable mines, and again it's a coordination problem that the disadvantaged folks and regions of globalization, in the developed economies, only got a big pat on the back. (And yes yes, there were a few programs to try to retrain unemployed people here and there, but it was simply a waste of money, because they got no help to mentally deal with the situation. Folks should have been encouraged very heavily to move where the jobs are instead of wallowing in semi-deserted corporate towns of misery.)
Maybe not being cancelled shouldn't be your top priority? People talk like getting cancelled is a death sentence. Free speech advocates went to jail in times past. Now people act like getting ratio'd on Twitter for saying something insensitive is the worst possible fate.
That trivialises the destruction of peoples’ lives.
It’s that sort of thought pattern that allows the mob to justify its behaviour.
Getting “cancelled” causes real world harm. Imagine losing your job, being too toxic to find work elsewhere, being unable to pay your mortgage, being unable to keep a roof over your family’s head.
Considering your mention of cultural diversity in the context of slavery I can't interpret this other than as mere preference.
But there are actual victims of this cultural diversity, and cultural imperialism which destroys such cultures as have victims would be strongly preferable to the continued existence of such cultures.
As an additional data point. Qatar and the building of the stadiums. Migrant workers kept in absolute inhumane conditions and worked to death in the heat.
If a culture is okay with that maybe it's okay to want to nudge that culture to change.
US culture has victims in cages on the border with Mexico, victims in Gitmo, victims being locked up in prison due to racism, and about a million victims in Iraq/Syria. Not to mention most of global warming is from rich people.
Are you okay destroying US culture? Or are you an apologist for our racist justice system?
Would, as you put it "cultural imperialism which destroys such cultures as have victims would be strongly preferable to the continued existence of such cultures" in the context of Western culture?
See what I did there? If the point I tried to make above isn't clear:
* The point isn't to say slavery is okay -- it's obviously not -- but a lot of stuff in every culture is not okay.
* A lot of other stuff in every culture is not okay as perceived by other cultures (especially around sex, gender, and religion), but comes down to values.
* And a lot of other stuff is beautiful, unique, and good.
Western cultural imperialist interventions haven't worked out well in the past. I'm glad to write more about that too. Even if you -- as most of these comments seem to -- believe that Western culture is superior, culturally imperialist interventions haven't led to the outcome you want.
What interventions are you proposing, and why would you believe they would work any better here?
Okay but we agreed it was wrong and basically forced the Aztecs to stop sacrificing people to their sun god. I don’t think you’ll find a sane individual today advocating for child sacrifice to make sure the sun comes up in the morning. The Aztecs certainly would have preferred to keep being on top and brutalizing the other tribes around them. Is this a lack of cultural diversity? When do we stop respecting cultural diversity and step in to do what we believe to be the right thing?
The point isn't to justify slavery as cultural diversity but to be able to sell a more equitable model that is realistic given widespread values in the region. And one that does not inadvertently lead to more harm. As well as address the details of implementation and oversight.
> If I do something not meeting Western standards, I'm liable to get cancelled.
This just means you’re getting information from unreliable sources. “Cancelled” sounds like you’ll be unemployable but 99% of the time it means someone said something insulting, some people criticized them, and they had no significant consequences. The American and English right-wing like to talk like cancellation is a real problem because it’s both an effective marketing tool (notice how often complaints about being cancelled are delivered in for-profit books and media by people making upper-class incomes from it) and as a proactive defense against criticism.
My sense is that a lot of the political class throughout the world is heavily benefitting from it. As long as that’s the case then the problem isn’t gonna get resolved.
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.
Yes, although I think it'll be, not because the media apparatus is going to be less lenient, but because they no longer feel the need to restrain their evil.
In this case we also presumably have these companies that replace 'master' with 'main' etc. in technical literature and comments, but which are cooperating with things which may well be actual slavery.
This is something that leaders from Africa and Latin America have talked about a lot.
Western democracies love using the appearance of moral superiority as a diplomatic tool while turning a blind eye to their own corruption and failings (ie. United Fruit, JP Morgan Chase, Boeing, gun violence, police brutality)
1. It’s cheaper to whitewash (ie. affirmative action) than effect change (ie. reparations for Haiti, descendants of slaves in US)
2. It perpetuates the good guys vs bad guys myth /propaganda at home that makes it easier to wage war and disenfranchise “third-world” countries.
The date after which I perceived a change in the coverage of Saudi Arabia in the US was September 11th, 2001, but I don't know whether the coverage changed or my awareness of it did. Similarly, that you perceive a change in coverage may reflect not an actual change but only a change in yourself: you expect bias in coverage based on national interest and you perceive national interests to have changed, so you interpret individual articles like this to reflect a change in coverage generally.
I would say it is possible, likely, that people have false impressions of the general conditions in other nations based on news organizations' choosing to cover stories that are not generally representative of conditions in the nation. This will be true for all nations, regardless of whether anyone in the organizations are choosing, consciously or unconsciously, to cover stories confirming or creating biases. I think a greater problem is our own biases and attention selecting the news coverage we attend to. I think it is not the case that bias in coverage is centrally coordinated as you imply.
This is all aside from whether a particular article is true. This is something actionable. Choosing to believe or ignore individual articles based on your prior belief in bias leaves you in a hall of mirrors.
When exactly has Western media been soft on Saudi Arabia? They have always been portrayed as a backwards country that oppresses women, kills LGBT people, and since 2014 Saudi Arabia has also been heavily criticized for their war in Yemen. There were also BBC/Channel4 documentaries from more than a decade ago about how Saudi Arabia was indirectly funding the radicalization of Muslims in Europe.
There was a brief moment when MBS was seens as the reformer. Then a few minutes later it turns out he gave the order to chop up Jamal the journalist. :|
In the US, media is totally critical of Shiite-majority nations while avoiding any serious critical view of Sunni-majority nations. If that's too opaque, then another way to put it is that the US stigmatizes, sanctions and engages in military interventions in countries that the Saudi government is hostile towards: Iran, Iraq, Yemen and Syria; who are Shiite-majority and Shiite-ruled. The Saudis are themselves Sunni and they treat Shiites as "barely Muslim". Saudi interventions in Oman or Yemen are ignored while Iranian interventions get reported to American audiences.
What is happening in the Middle East is a modern version of the Thirty Year's War. This time, instead of Catholic vs Protestant, it is Sunni vs Shiite.
Disclaimer: I've lived in both Iran and Saudi Arabia - dad was in the oil business.
Yes. But the Western Media has been soft on those in the West who do business with SA, have political relationships with SA, etc.
For example, even POTUS Trump* got a free pass. His first overseas visit was to SA. Imagine that, of all our allies, he goes to SA first. And yet, not a peep of outrage, even from The Left leaning media. Why would that be?
* This is not an attack of DJT. It simply a perfect example of how (intentionally) blind the media is to those who accept and enable SA.
Honestly thinking back I don't think I have ever read where an article saying anything positive about SA society and culture. This is thinking back decades. So I think the SA is evil ship launched a long time ago
> I guess now that SA has signaled a slight shift away from the US empire, we're going to be seeing a lot more articles about how evil they are.
Telling that the gist of the article isn't "These people are suffering from slavery" but rather "These people are selling slaves" - the focus is on the Saudis, not on the slaves. Unfortunately, slavery is rampant the world over even today. My own grandfather was a slave.
But this is not a piece intended to help the slaves. This piece is intended to slander the Saudis.
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 can’t wait to see these useless oil states crumble.
Dubai, Qatar, all these barbaric places flourishing in oil wealth, using it toward trafficking and slavery as they drive Mercedes over sand dunes and eat Johnny Rocket…makes me so angry
Readit News
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.
It was just a bunch of houses in which maids who don’t have things going well with their Sponsors stay in, waiting for a ticket back home. The QFCHT would just host them and negotiate the sponsor for sending them home.
Like, a 2-floor 5-room or so house that has 10 maids living in it. Their passports are confiscated by their sponsors, who were often times irrational egoistic wretches who believe they’re superior (keep in mind that the sample at QFCHT was the set of maids with the worst sponsors, I’ve seen a lot of kind Qataris who were fair and respectable). I heard though that this sponsor system has changed a while ago, not sure how is it done now since I no longer live there, but hope it’s better.
We once, at our home, needed help cleaning so we called one of those Maid agencies for a temporary cleaning. They sent us a Filipino maid. While she was cleaning, she came across my little library that I had been growing during my ECE bachelors. She looked at the books and asked me if I am studying electronics. Started talking about her graduation project back home. She had graduated from ECE too..
I saw that with Nepali workers too. Many of them were highly educated, qualified, individuals, but I don’t know what financial situation compelled them to come to Qatar to work as waiters, maids, and other jobs that are way below their qualifications.
I tried to learn some phrases in their language to joke with them and cheer them up when I interact with them. It always felt odd being on the service-receiving side. A lot of them were resilient in keeping their smile and sanity in spite of the assholic treatment a specific class of customers. That class earned the “bakla” title.
How does this work? As an adult, if someone tries to take my passport I would refuse. If they snatched it out of my hands, I would take it back. If they somehow got the better of me and hid it or locked it up, I'd go to the police.
I could see maybe an abusive situation where going to the police isn't an option because the victim is locked in the house. In that case I'd expect that when the perpetrators are caught they'd be charged with kidnapping for that. And then some other charge (theft?) for locking up the passport.
lots of men are imprisoned there too in similar circumstances. People think slavery is a relic of the past but We have the highest number of slaves now in history of humanity.
Like Eva Kaili who was defending Qatar in the European Parliament. In that case it seems that a few bags of money was the culprit for her ignorance though, along with a few drinks in some kitsch club there.
Deleted Comment
edit:
I'm almost 40 now and stories like these have been prevalent since I was a kid.
I won't post about how we plan to get her out but I believe it is a good one and it has very littler risk to her or their brother. Perhaps when it is all done will feel ok posting more.
It is costing us a lot of money in the end, but the woman we employ is part of the family at this point and it's important to us that her sister is safe. We will employ the sister on her landing in our country and will do so for at least a year.
Dead Comment
This should be easy to prove. Closest I can think of is some Telegram groups you might find in places like Syria, but that hardly warrants the Amazon comparison.
Best case, she could get a backup from him.
Also, she should definitely build that scraper with some help independently, then pitch to YC.
Some of the very obvious differences between pure historic slavery and what we have now is that human rights are significantly better across the board and individuals have some degree of autonomy to decide what aspects of their self and time to sell and whom to vs previous time periods where those things were just taken from individuals.
So long as we're able to give labor that degree of autonomy (e.g. autonomy enabled by the ability to provide necessities for themselves and their family like basic food, housing, and so on) then I think we have a reasonable compromise. Vast wealth disparity (leading to monopolistic behavior on the employment side), lack of competing opportunities to sell your time/skills, and markets trending and stabilizing to states that are not labor-friendly undermine this.
This continuously peels away the abstractions we have to create autonomy for individuals and moves the needle back towards owning people like slaves, holding them on a leash indirectly through monetary mediums of exchange (i.e. currency) and so on. If I need money and food and shelter and the only real viable route to attain this reasonably is to sell myself or allow myself to be sold on abusive markets that may want more than say just my maid services (perhaps 'maids with benefits' situations, i.e. disguised prostitution) then that's what's ultimately going to happen.
We may claim the people have autonomy but we've just created complex systems around their autonomy that give the appearance of choice. People need viable and reasonable choices, not just a set of options where only one is reasonable for a stable and happy life unless we want to slowly erode back to systems like indentured servitude and beyond.
The article explicitly calls out Filipino maids as the highest selling and having been to the Philippines and now being part of Filipino family, I understand why. The country is very poor overall and the culture exports labor to import wealth due to the lack of local opportunity. Sure they can study anything and go anywhere in the world but it turns out, many go to certain middle eastern countries and pursue maid careers because it's their only real viable option. Some of the more lucky Filipinos study in school and are able to get degrees in healthcare or hotel services and work abroad in countries with better protections. Even then, they're held on a leash and abused through visa programs like in the US where they're paid a fraction of the rates their US native counterparts earn and lack mobility to transition positions readily to negotiate competitive wages, so they lose rights to employers and work in undesirable locations, under market rates, and often the under the worst sort of contract situations.
It's not like this story of maids in Saudi Arabia where conditions are even worse but it shows how we need to maintain autonomy for everyone. Aside from the being most humane thing to do, out of sheer self-interest, if you sell your labor for time in any fashion, these infringements on rights slowly peel away your rights as well. You may not see it in your lifetime but we should push for better labor rights across the globe to prevent stepping back to past atrocities we've seen in slavery systems.
Blaming “the market” is similar to not taking responsibility for climate change by demanding government action and changing your own habits.
Until we look in the mirror, there can be no change or progress.
Anecdote time, slightly related ! Be me, in wealthy western Europe. Walking a Sunday trail, hundreds of people. Taking a break on the side of the trail, looking at a community garden and reading the plaque about which vegetables is being grown, by who: local public "help" centres (read: a public social support program, state-funded, it's a pillar of our society, to help people find jobs and get back on track). The plaque reads that when vegetables are ripe people are free to pick it up (just don't take everything). Was having a nice chat with a random lady up to that point, most likely a bit leftist, nice, then she drops that line "Well, it's free, it's fine, after all it's all being paid for with our money".
On the way back I kept thinking about that and came to the conclusion that slavery could easily come back in less than half a generation. And I am not talking about how work is structured or how our society regulates work and employment and how it's an abstraction. We are always half a generation away from losing our social advancements (English correct wording escapes me at the moment).
Edit: for once I caught the comments before losing the ability to edit so I'll reply here.
> I can't help but to think some meaning was lost in what you are intending to say. What is "it" that the woman was talking about? Is "it" picking the a ripe vegetable from the garden, like the sign says you can?
It's that "it". But the most important thing is in the second part "it's being paid for with our money". The goal of that community garden is not really to feed anyone but to get some people back on track through a regular schedule, group activity and supervised work. Social services are not supposed to produce vegetables or anything that anyone should pay for, a bit like the US prisons that have become free/cheap labor. It's hijacking the original goal. From this I could easily picture a world where people without jobs are forced to get through that system and become free workers tasked to grow vegetables or clean the streets (and it's something that happened in the Netherlands: a public worker whose job was cleaning the street lost his job then got through a back-to-work program in which he was tasked with the same job but for no salary (he was paid - much less - through social support).
> Is "it" the government paying folks to plant and tend the garden for the benefit of the public?
That's how it was framed in her mind but that's not the reason why there are free vegetables there at that place and time.
She's not supposed to get vegetables for free because it's paid with her taxes, she gets them for free because those vegetables are not grown to be sold or make a profit.
> I don't understand this anecdote. What was objectionable about what the woman said (if anything). I'm a leftist and I think its important to recognize that value does not come from nothing, but is the result, one way or another, of labor, which is all she seems to be acknowledging.
She normalized having people working without a salary and not being fairly compensated (or being compensated by whatever price the market set). Plus, people working that garden somehow don't have a choice in choosing that job (growing up vegetables) because it wasn't a job, it was part of a reinsertion program. The fact she pays taxes to finance such programs shouldn't mean we get free labor. That's where she crossed into indentured work.
I'd like to add something else: there are community gardens a few blocks away from where I live. But there's a waiting list to get on it, it's real garden but more for hobbyists and retired people. It's all financed by city taxes through a "green/food/health" kind of program.
But the gates to the garden are closed and the fences are high and fact is it can only be used by retired people who lobbied to get some parcels in the first place.
There are no free vegetables from those gardens.
> Even then, they're held on a leash and abused through visa programs like in the US where they're paid a fraction of the rates their US native counterparts earn
That is not abuse. They can leave anytime. And if you talk to them, they are grateful for the opportunity to work here for "a fraction of the rates their US native counterparts earn" and would resent people like you who would take that away from them.
What is outrageous about the story posted is that they can't leave anytime they want. Their passport is taken from them. That's wrong.
Some of the staff have been on podcasts to discuss... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoHHwRjPASc
After war and hunger, human trafficking is one of the worst problems society still have to this day.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
https://www.ycombinator.com/nonprofits/
[Edit: Fixed broken URL.]
Nonetheless, there's naturally more outrage about places (like Saudi Arabia and Qatar) where it's still quasi-legal.
A lot of Western solutions sound like variants of Simpson's Paradox, where equity is increased locally, and decreased globally.
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.
Likewise, cultural imperialism is bad, and a lot of options do a lot more (distributed) harm while helping individuals. I like cultural diversity.
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.
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).
I think you’re spot on that we in the West find “step above slavery jobs” extremely distasteful. This results in situations where the news media celebrates the closing of a “child sweatshop” in Cambodia, but the cameras aren’t rolling when, faced with poor economic conditions due to the factory closing, those same children are now working in a child brothel, which everyone agrees is worse.
Similarly, Siddharth Kara has recently revealed the horrors going on in the Congo involving the Cobalt trade with the warlords and the Chinese. That ones interesting too because thirty years ago the operations were run by South Africans but the western world largely agreed this was wrong so they ceded the land back to the Congo. This resulted in warlords becoming enriched by the power vacuum and becoming well armed and making things horrific for the poor people living in Congo who have to mine up toxic cobalt with their bare hands in dangerous tunnels and pits.
This is a coordination problem first and foremost. The solution is to tax the shit out of supply chains that don't provide the basics.
...
And yes, development economics is ugly. There's no royal road from subsistence farming to Switzerland-level, but whatever road there is it's not composed of separately inscrutable steps. It's perfectly okay to strive to make each step better and less horrible. Just as on the other side of globalization it's not some unknowable force closing non-profitable mines, and again it's a coordination problem that the disadvantaged folks and regions of globalization, in the developed economies, only got a big pat on the back. (And yes yes, there were a few programs to try to retrain unemployed people here and there, but it was simply a waste of money, because they got no help to mentally deal with the situation. Folks should have been encouraged very heavily to move where the jobs are instead of wallowing in semi-deserted corporate towns of misery.)
It’s that sort of thought pattern that allows the mob to justify its behaviour.
Getting “cancelled” causes real world harm. Imagine losing your job, being too toxic to find work elsewhere, being unable to pay your mortgage, being unable to keep a roof over your family’s head.
cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8
Not everyone has The Comedy Store stage to relieve their depression.
But there are actual victims of this cultural diversity, and cultural imperialism which destroys such cultures as have victims would be strongly preferable to the continued existence of such cultures.
If a culture is okay with that maybe it's okay to want to nudge that culture to change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnAER5JHHjo
Not all cultures are equal.
Are you okay destroying US culture? Or are you an apologist for our racist justice system?
Would, as you put it "cultural imperialism which destroys such cultures as have victims would be strongly preferable to the continued existence of such cultures" in the context of Western culture?
See what I did there? If the point I tried to make above isn't clear:
* The point isn't to say slavery is okay -- it's obviously not -- but a lot of stuff in every culture is not okay.
* A lot of other stuff in every culture is not okay as perceived by other cultures (especially around sex, gender, and religion), but comes down to values.
* And a lot of other stuff is beautiful, unique, and good.
Western cultural imperialist interventions haven't worked out well in the past. I'm glad to write more about that too. Even if you -- as most of these comments seem to -- believe that Western culture is superior, culturally imperialist interventions haven't led to the outcome you want.
What interventions are you proposing, and why would you believe they would work any better here?
This just means you’re getting information from unreliable sources. “Cancelled” sounds like you’ll be unemployable but 99% of the time it means someone said something insulting, some people criticized them, and they had no significant consequences. The American and English right-wing like to talk like cancellation is a real problem because it’s both an effective marketing tool (notice how often complaints about being cancelled are delivered in for-profit books and media by people making upper-class incomes from it) and as a proactive defense against criticism.
Unfortunately what is available to most is far less than what is possible.
(Or the 1960s, if you wanna go back further. https://www.nytimes.com/1967/03/28/archives/saudi-arabian-sl...)
In this case we also presumably have these companies that replace 'master' with 'main' etc. in technical literature and comments, but which are cooperating with things which may well be actual slavery.
This is something that leaders from Africa and Latin America have talked about a lot.
Western democracies love using the appearance of moral superiority as a diplomatic tool while turning a blind eye to their own corruption and failings (ie. United Fruit, JP Morgan Chase, Boeing, gun violence, police brutality)
1. It’s cheaper to whitewash (ie. affirmative action) than effect change (ie. reparations for Haiti, descendants of slaves in US)
2. It perpetuates the good guys vs bad guys myth /propaganda at home that makes it easier to wage war and disenfranchise “third-world” countries.
I would say it is possible, likely, that people have false impressions of the general conditions in other nations based on news organizations' choosing to cover stories that are not generally representative of conditions in the nation. This will be true for all nations, regardless of whether anyone in the organizations are choosing, consciously or unconsciously, to cover stories confirming or creating biases. I think a greater problem is our own biases and attention selecting the news coverage we attend to. I think it is not the case that bias in coverage is centrally coordinated as you imply.
This is all aside from whether a particular article is true. This is something actionable. Choosing to believe or ignore individual articles based on your prior belief in bias leaves you in a hall of mirrors.
What is happening in the Middle East is a modern version of the Thirty Year's War. This time, instead of Catholic vs Protestant, it is Sunni vs Shiite.
Disclaimer: I've lived in both Iran and Saudi Arabia - dad was in the oil business.
For example, even POTUS Trump* got a free pass. His first overseas visit was to SA. Imagine that, of all our allies, he goes to SA first. And yet, not a peep of outrage, even from The Left leaning media. Why would that be?
* This is not an attack of DJT. It simply a perfect example of how (intentionally) blind the media is to those who accept and enable SA.
Deleted Comment
But this is not a piece intended to help the slaves. This piece is intended to slander the Saudis.
Dubai, Qatar, all these barbaric places flourishing in oil wealth, using it toward trafficking and slavery as they drive Mercedes over sand dunes and eat Johnny Rocket…makes me so angry