You may eat sustainable food. You probably support green building. You likely recycle, compost, and buy local.
But what about sustainable people? What about the tie between fair trade and human rights? And how close it all is to home?
If you’re in Berkeley on April 20 you should drop by “The Slave Next Door.” It’s an event named after the FTS book that exposes modern slavery in the U.S. You can hear inspiring speakers, meet local organizations, buy fair-trade products—and get ready to make justice personal.
The Project Peace Speaker Series is proud to host FTS co-founder Kevin Bales, co-author of The Slave Next Door and one of the world’s leading experts on modern-day slavery. As well, a local slavery survivor, Minh Dang, will join the discussion for a night of information, inspiration, and action.
Many Bay Area anti-trafficking organizations are participating in the event. It is sponsored by Free the Slaves, Fair Trade USA, and Mazzarello Media and Arts.
Mark your calendar: Friday, April 20, 2012, 7:00-9:30pm- doors open at 6:30 p.m. First Presbyterian Church,2407 Dana Street,Berkeley,CA94704. Check here for tickets.
Kevin Bales was recently interviewed by María Hinojosa for her show “One-on-One.” They discuss modern-day slavery in the U.S., and refer to The Slave Next Door, the book Bales co-wrote on this topic (historian Ron Soodalter was the other co-author). The U.S. “could be the first slave free country in human history,” Bales says, “if we just decide to make that happen.”
The above video is a preview of “One-on-One” interview. The full show will air this Saturday, February 19 at 6:30pm ET. For more details on broadcast schedules, go here.
On Saturday, it will be Lincoln’s birthday. It is normal for American school children to learn that President Lincoln ended legalized slavery in the U.S. with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. It is not as usual for school children to learn that slavery persists to this day. In fact, it never ended.
In their book on modern slavery in the U.S. The Slave Next Door, Ron Soodalter and Free the Slaves President Kevin Bales cite a State Department study that says between 14,500 to 17,500 people are trafficked and enslaved into our borders every year. They go on to say that the precise number of enslaved U.S. citizens is as yet unknown, but, “a conservative estimate would be around fifty thousand and growing.”
The horrifying truth is that modern slavery victimizes American citizens. And it happens all over the country. But how to translate this alarming reality into something that can be presented in a middle school, or high school class room?
A New York-based non profit has tackled this very challenge. Girls Learn International (GLI) was founded by women who saw that “in depth lessons on human rights are rarely available or entirely absent from school curricula within the United States.” GLI launches extra-curricular classes in schools across the U.S., where children learn about contemporary human rights issues. They are paired with schools in developing countries, cultivating cross-cultural friendships.
Recently, GLI approached Free the Slaves about including modern-day slavery into their curriculum. FTS worked with Irish NGO Trocaire to develop education packs for after school programs. (You can download our kits here!). GLI was able to adapt this material for their own curriculums. The results of this are attached here as PDFs—one lesson plan for high school students, and one for middle schoolers.
GLI’S AFTER SCHOOL HUMANITARIANS
Each GLI chapter is partnered with a school in a developing country. Their pilot chapters brought together schools in New York and New Jersey with schools in Afghanistan and Kenya. Now, there are chapters in 14 states and 10 countries. The chapters operate as extra-curricular clubs. Using curriculum developed by GLI, students learn about human rights issues affecting women and girls. They become activists in their own communities by raising awareness about the issues they learn in class. They even fundraise on behalf of their partner schools.
Learn more about Free the Slaves’ resources for teachers here!
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) put out a press release saying the “new frontier” in labor trafficking will be employment discrimination laws.
In their book on slavery in the U.S., The Slave Next Door, Ron Soodalter and FTS President Kevin Bales wrote that U.S. laws don’t adequately protect major sectors of the labor force. The National Labor Relations Act, signed by President Roosevelt back in 1935 gave basic workers’ rights to virtually every worker in the U.S.—except domestic and agricultural workers. To this day, workers in these sectors are denied adequate protection from exploitation.
There are signs that this is changing. Last year, New York became the first U.S. state to give extensive rights to domestic workers.
From the EEOC’s press release: “Anti-employment discrimination laws—particularly those prohibiting race and national origin discrimination as well as sexual harassment—are an integral part of the national fight against human labor trafficking… Florrie Burke of Freedom Network USA, an umbrella organization of non-government organizations combating forced labor [said], “I would say that human trafficking is not only an immigration issue, it is not only a criminal issue, it is not only a moral issue or women and children’s’ issue—it is a human rights issue and needs to be regarded as such.”
Read the rest of the announcement here >>
'The Slave Trade' by Auguste-Francois Biard, 1840. Many think that slavery has long been abolished in the U.S. But thousands are trafficked into our borders every year.
A great article on modern slavery in the U.S. came out this week on The Prisma website. Written by Carolina Cositore, the piece sites Free the Slaves (thanks for the shout out!), and refers to the book The Slave Next Door written by FTS President Kevin Bales and historian Ron Soodalter to illustrate the complex social and economic forces that allow slavery to exist—even thrive—in certain sectors of American industry.
A great read! Check it out here:
Whatever date you guess that slavery ended in the United States, you will be wrong.
Uncounted thousands of men, women and children are now enslaved in every state of the Union today, working in construction, in gardens, in orchards, in stores, in homes as domestics and as sex slaves. The number is uncounted because it is difficult to identify all of them.
The US government estimates around 16,000 people are trafficked into the country every single year and a very high number of US citizens (mostly children) are also being held against their will and forced to work.
All told, Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter tell us, in their very provoking book, “The Slave Next Door -Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today,” that a ‘conservative’ estimate is 50,000 slaves, and the number is growing.
Bales is president of DC freetheslaves.net and sociology professor at Rochampton U and Ron Soodalter is a Lincoln scholar and on the board of the Abraham Lincoln Institute.
Slavery is a dramatic word which numerous groups use to draw attention to their real injustices and misery. While in no way denigrating their suffering, we must remember that true slavery always obviates choice. And this article is about slavery. Whether through lies, threats or actual violence, slaves are held against their will and forced to work for nothing or very little beyond subsistence. Slaves are made to believe they are without options and cannot leave. And, as throughout history, the slaveholders profit.
When we learn how to look, we can identify these slaves in our own neighborhoods – perhaps in the homes of neighbours who are ‘helping’ a woman from another country by providing housing while she does housework and cares for the kids – many slaveholders start out seeking someone to “help and who will help out” whom they don’t have to pay much.
One out of four of all US slaves are enslaved domestics. Let’s be clear, we are definitely not talking Jennifer to here, nor are they starring in The Nanny Express, although such films might be part of the fantasy that lures them to believe the recruiters in their homelands. These women do not have control of their passports or work permits, do not speak English and are often beaten, abused, raped and kept in the most primitive of conditions at subsistence level.
National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
We recently reported on the first ever permanent museum exhibit on modern slavery. The exhibition is at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. And Free the Slaves is proud to say we are part of this groundbreaking show. Along with a handful of other leading anti-slavery organizations, FTS shared our decade’s worth of research and content with the museum. And FTS President Kevin Bales’ most recent book The Slave Next Door—co-written by historian Ron Soodalter—is on sale at the Freedom Center gift shop!
Last week the New York Times wrote a review of the exhibition. It’s a great write up:
CINCINNATI — Peer through a circular hole into one of the displays in the permanent exhibition “Invisible: Slavery Today,” opening on Saturday at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center here, and you see a tawdry room the size of a closet. On the floor a stained mattress is scrawled with the words: “At sixteen, her new ‘life’ had begun.” The irony stings. Around the portal’s opening, a seemingly handwritten account tells of Margo’s abusive father, the promises of escape offered by Lenny and her delivery into sexual slavery.
A few steps away is another sparely told tale: Karin, a young mother of two in Sri Lanka, is lured by the promise of a waitress job in Singapore. Lift the heavy drapery covering an opening and you gasp at the display’s brute theatricality, offering a glimpse of her fate. A light suddenly comes on, casting shadows on a hanging sheet: hands reach out to grasp a woman’s silhouette.
There are no explicit images here, only the suggestion of something horrifyingly entrapping. It is a bit like the battered metallic case with a hole cut in its top, in another display. No sex, but force: Mariano is smuggled into the United States to support his Guatemalan family. Cesar promises him room and board but instead turns him into a prisoner, forcing him to pay back his increasing debts by picking tomatoes; he finally escapes by cutting through a truck’s roof.
Luis CdeBaca, U.S. State Department's anti-trafficking Ambassador-at-Large
U.S. Anti Trafficking Ambassador Luis CdeBaca gave an eloquent speech on modern slavery yesterday, at a special symposium titled “Slavery: Through the Eyes of George Washington”, hosted by Free the Slaves, Black Women United for Action and Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association in Mount Vernon, Virginia.
He said that of all the different kinds of slavery, “perhaps most vulnerable” are domestic workers: “Usually working outside the protections of prevailing labor laws—and sadly, that’s the case in the United States today—and socially isolated in their workplace, domestic workers too easily fall into modern day slavery.”
Here is Luis CdeBaca’s speech (via U.S. State Department website):
'The Slave Next Door,' by Ron Soodalter and FTS President Kevin Bales is about slavery in the U.S.
Good afternoon. I am honored to be with all of you today on the grounds of Mount Vernon to discuss the phenomenon of modern slavery. I would like to thank the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, Black Women United for Action, and Free the Slaves for partnering together to host this event and raise awareness about slavery—both in the past and in the present form.
Throughout the day you have heard from many subject-matter experts, from the highest levels of government, to non-governmental organizations, to victims who have become survivors. I am heartened to see the scope of interest and action from so many different groups and individuals. Thank you for all that you do.
Right now we are just miles from where generations of Americans have walked in pursuit of their own rights, equalities, and freedoms. A lot of different words have been used to describe why.
In 1848, 77 slaves walked quietly through the streets of Washington, clandestinely making their way to a small ship, the Pearl, which was to take them North, away from their bondage. No matter what it was called – a “particular institution,” “servants,” or “staff”– it was slavery, and they were making a run for freedom.
As you know, in the early part of this century, women across America marched the streets of Washington to gain the right to vote. Sometimes it was called women’s suffrage, or voice, or having their say at the ballot box. No matter what the name, they simply sought equality.
Decades later, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. led the Civil Rights Movement in the March on Washington and thousands of Americans joined him in the fight for jobs, equality, rights, fairness, and freedom. No matter what you call it, they sought their constitutional rights.
As we discuss this history from the days of Washington to the suffragettes to the state of human trafficking in the world today, one thing remains constant: people continue to seek their freedoms. Human trafficking is a term that can mean different things to different audiences and in different languages. As Secretary Clinton said earlier this year, “Let’s call it what it really is—a modern form of slavery.”
Ron Soodalter, co-author (with Free the Slaves President Kevin Bales) of The Slave Next Door has posted a piece on Huffington Post, calling for support of the California Transparency in Supply Chains act. This bill would require California companies that make over $100,0000 a year to post what they are doing to ensure that slavery is kept out of their supply chain. The Slave Next Door investigates slavery within the US, and posits that slavery never really went away. The book is being released in paperback today, August 23—which just happens to coincide with the International Day for Remembrance of the Slave Trade.
This past June, Free the Slaves, along with our partners in ATEST, endorsed this bill in a letter to the California Assembly Judiciary Committee. You can download our statement here.)
Here is Soodalter’s post from HuffPo:
In just a few days, we will commemorate the International Day for Remembrance of the Slave Trade. Although most of us might be unaware that the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade lasted some 350 years, we do tend to believe that slavery is a thing of the past — that the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment banished it forever from our shores and that America has been slavery-free ever since.
Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. Most Americans are unaware of the extent to which both foreign nationals and U.S. citizens are victimized by human trafficking and various forms of slavery in our country today. And if we think that our own lives are untainted by the products of slave labor, we must think again. As Free the Slaves president Kevin Bales and I point out in the newly updated paperback edition of The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today (UC Press, 8/23/2010), there’s a very good chance that the clothes we wear and the food we eat have been tainted by slavery. Cotton, that symbol of bondage in the pre-Civil War South, is now being picked by slave labor on three continents, and marketed as clothing here at home. The orange juice and tomatoes we have with our burgers at lunch could very well have come from a Mexican or Guatemalan immigrant working under coercion. The rug we walk on at home could have been woven in India, Pakistan or Nepal by one of a hundred thousand child slaves, seven, eight, nine years old. Cell phones and lap tops require an element called tantalum; it comes from an ore that is mined in the Congo, often by slaves.
Ron Soodalter is the co-author, with Free the Slaves President Kevin Bales of The Slave Next Door, exposing modern day slavery in the U.S. The book comes out in paperback August 23.
The American humorist Will Rogers once said, “It ain’t that we’re so dumb; it’s just that what we know ain’t so.”
Certain things we know to be true. We know that the South kept slaves, and the North fought a righteous war of liberation. We know that the slave trade was legal right up to the Civil War. We know that the Emancipation Proclamation freed all the slaves, and that the United States has been slavery-free ever since. These things we know—and none of them are true.
On the other hand, most of us do not know that slavery not only exists throughout the world today; it flourishes. Slavery is legal nowhere, yet it is practiced everywhere. With an estimated 27 million people in bondage worldwide, this is twice as many people as were taken in chains from Africa during the entire 350 years of the TransAtlantic Slave Trade. In seeking to place blame, we’re tempted to point to the “emerging nations” as the culprits, whereas in fact slavery exists in such “civilized” countries as England, France, Spain, Italy, Israel, Ireland, Greece, Sweden, Denmark, Japan, China… and the United States. Most Americans are clueless that slavery is alive and flourishing right here, thriving in the dark, and practiced in many forms in places you’d least expect.
