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Forced labour

Forced labour, or unfree labour, is any work relation, especially in modern or early modern history, in which people are employed against their will with the threat of destitution, detention, violence including death, or other forms of extreme hardship to either themselves or members of their families.[note 1]

Clergy on forced labour, by Ivan Vladimirov (Soviet Russia, 1919)
Unfree labour workers from Plovdiv during WW2

Unfree labour includes all forms of slavery, penal labour and the corresponding institutions, such as debt slavery, serfdom, corvée and labour camps.

Definition

Many forms of unfree labour are also covered by the term forced labour, which is defined by the International Labour Organization (ILO) as all involuntary work or service exacted under the menace of a penalty.[1]

However, under the ILO Forced Labour Convention of 1930, the term forced or compulsory labour does not include:[2]

Payment for unfree labour

 
Convict labourers in Australia in the early 19th century

If payment occurs, it may be in one or more of the following forms:

  • The payment does not exceed subsistence or barely exceeds it;
  • The payment is in goods which are not desirable and/or cannot be exchanged or are difficult to exchange; or
  • The payment wholly or mostly consists of cancellation of a debt or liability that was itself coerced, or belongs to someone else.

Unfree labour is often more easily instituted and enforced on migrant workers, who have travelled far from their homelands and who are easily identified because of their physical, ethnic, linguistic, or cultural differences from the general population, since they are unable or unlikely to report their conditions to the authorities.[3]

Industrial involvement

 
Trenching with hand tools and scant protective gear in rail construction, early 20th century

In many contexts, the use of unfree labour is prohibited under the law and is mainly associated with the underground economy. In other contexts, established industries have embraced the use of unfree labour as a socially accepted practice in that time and place. Use of compelled labour is especially common when the labour involved can not be performed without risk of death, disfigurement, disability, or diminished life expectancy; in the extreme, these detriments render the voluntary labour market uneconomic, and the industry in question is forced to either adopt compelled labour or discontinue operations altogether.

Industries which continue to employ unfree labour worldwide include agriculture, domestic work, manufacture, and hospitality.[4] Mining, defence, the merchant marine and transport infrastructure, which employed questionable practices during the heyday of railway track construction (often involving the use of high explosives or constructing high wooden trestle bridges in sheer mountain canyons), and of canal excavation (sometimes in conditions of permafrost) also have historical ties.

Modern day unfree labour

Unfree labour re-emerged as an issue in the debate about rural development during the years following the end of the Second World War, when a political concern of Keynesian theory was not just economic reconstruction (mainly in Europe and Asia) but also planning (in developing "Third World" nations). A crucial aspect of the ensuing discussion concerned the extent to which different relational forms constituted obstacles to capitalist development, and why.

During the 1960s and 1970s, unfree labour was regarded as incompatible with capitalist accumulation, and thus an obstacle to economic growth, an interpretation advanced by exponents of the then-dominant semi-feudal thesis. From the 1980s onwards, however, another and very different Marxist view emerged, arguing that evidence from Latin America and India suggested agribusiness enterprises, commercial farmers and rich peasants reproduced, introduced or reintroduced unfree relations.

However, recent contributions to this debate have attempted to exclude Marxism from the discussion. These contributions maintain that, because Marxist theory failed to understand the centrality of unfreedom to modern capitalism, a new explanation of this link is needed. This claim has been questioned by Tom Brass (2014), ‘Debating Capitalist Dynamics and Unfree Labour: A Missing Link?’, The Journal of Development Studies, 50:4, 570–82. He argues that many of these new characteristics are in fact no different from those identified earlier by Marxist theory and that the exclusion of the latter approach from the debate is thus unwarranted.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that at least 12.3 million people are victims of forced labour worldwide; of these, 9.8 million are exploited by private agents and more than 2.4 million are trafficked. Another 2.5 million are forced to work by the state or by rebel military groups.[5][6] From an international law perspective, countries that allow forced labour are violating international labour standards as set forth in the Abolition of Forced Labour Convention (C105), one of the fundamental conventions of the ILO.[7]

According to the ILO Special Action Programme to Combat Forced Labour (SAP-FL), global profits from forced trafficked labour exploited by private agents are estimated at US$44,3 billion per year. About 70% of this value (US$31.6 billion) come from trafficked victims. At least the half of this sum (more than US$15 billion) comes from industrialized countries.[8]

 
Freedom from forced labour by country (V-Dem Institute, 2021)

Trafficking

Trafficking is a term to define the recruiting, harbouring, obtaining and transportation of a person by use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjecting them to involuntary acts, such as acts related to commercial sexual exploitation (including forced prostitution) or involuntary labour.[9]

Forms of unfree labour

 
Illustration of Native woman panning for gold

Slavery

The archetypal and best-known form of unfree labour is chattel slavery, in which individual workers are legally owned throughout their lives, and may be bought, sold or otherwise exchanged by owners, while never or rarely receiving any personal benefit from their labour. Slavery was common in many ancient societies, including ancient Egypt, Babylon, Persia, ancient Greece, Rome, ancient China, the pre-modern Muslim world, as well as many societies in Africa and the Americas. Being sold into slavery was a common fate of populations that were conquered in wars. Perhaps the most prominent example of chattel slavery was the enslavement of many millions of black people in Africa, as well as their forced transportation to the Americas, Asia, or Europe, where their status as slaves was almost always inherited by their descendants.[citation needed]

The term "slavery" is often applied to situations which do not meet the above definitions, but which are other, closely related forms of unfree labour, such as debt slavery or debt-bondage (although not all repayment of debts through labour constitutes unfree labour). Examples are the Repartimiento system in the Spanish Empire, or the work of Indigenous Australians in northern Australia on sheep or cattle stations (ranches), from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. In the latter case, workers were rarely or never paid, and were restricted by regulations and/or police intervention to regions around their places of work.

In late 16th century Japan, "unfree labour" or slavery was officially banned; but forms of contract and indentured labour persisted alongside the period's penal codes' forced labour. Somewhat later, the Edo period's penal laws prescribed "non-free labour" for the immediate families of executed criminals in Article 17 of the Gotōke reijō (Tokugawa House Laws), but the practice never became common. The 1711 Gotōke reijō was compiled from over 600 statutes that were promulgated between 1597 and 1696.[10]

According to Kevin Bales in Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (1999), there are now an estimated 27 million slaves in the world.[11][12]

Blackbirding

Blackbirding involves kidnapping or trickery to transport people to another country or far away from home, to work as a slave or low-paid involuntary worker. In some cases, workers were returned home after a period of time.

Serfdom

Serfdom bonds labourers to the land they farm, typically in a feudal society. Serfs typically have no legal right to leave, change employers, or seek paid work, though depending on economic conditions many did so anyway. Unlike chattel slaves, they typically cannot be sold separately from the land, and have rights such as the military protection of the lord.

Truck system

A truck system, in the specific sense in which the term is used by labour historians, refers to an unpopular or even exploitative form of payment associated with small, isolated and/or rural communities, in which workers or self-employed small producers are paid in either: goods, a form of payment known as truck wages, or tokens, private currency ("scrip") or direct credit, to be used at a company store, owned by their employers. A specific kind of truck system, in which credit advances are made against future work, is known in the U.S. as debt bondage.

Many scholars have suggested that employers use such systems to exploit workers and/or indebt them. This could occur, for example, if employers were able to pay workers with goods which had a market value below the level of subsistence, or by selling items to workers at inflated prices. Others argue that truck wages were a convenient way for isolated communities, such as during the early colonial settlement of North America, to operate when official currency was scarce.[13]

By the early 20th century, truck systems were widely seen, in industrialized countries, as exploitative; perhaps the most well-known example of this view was a 1947 U.S. hit song "Sixteen Tons". Many countries have Truck Act legislation that outlaws truck systems and requires payment in cash.

Mandatory services due to social status

Corvée

Though most closely associated with Medieval Europe, governments throughout human history have imposed regular short stints of unpaid labour upon lower social classes. These might be annual obligations of a few weeks or something similarly regular that lasted for the labourer's entire working life. As the system developed in the Philippines and elsewhere, the labourer could pay an appropriate fee and be exempted from the obligation.[14]

Vetti-chakiri

A form of forced labour in which peasants and members of lower castes were required to work for free existed in India before independence. This form of labour was known by several names, including veth, vethi, vetti-chakiri and begar .[15][16]

Penal labour

Labour camps

 
Jewish forced laborers in Mogilev, July 1941.
 
Political prisoners eating lunch at a Gulag, 1955.

Another historically significant example of forced labour was that of political prisoners, people from conquered or occupied countries, members of persecuted minorities, and prisoners of war, especially during the 20th century. The best-known example of this are the concentration camp system run by Nazi Germany in Europe during World War II, the Gulag camps[17] run by the Soviet Union,[18] and the forced labour used by the military of the Empire of Japan, especially during the Pacific War (such as the Burma Railway). Roughly 4,000,000 German POWs were used as "reparations labour" by the Allies for several years after the German surrender; this was permitted under the Third Geneva Convention provided they were accorded proper treatment.[19] China's laogai ("labour reform") system and North Korea's kwalliso camps are current examples.

About 12 million forced labourers, most of whom were Poles and Soviet citizens (Ost-Arbeiter) were employed in the German war economy inside Nazi Germany.[20][21] More than 2000 German companies profited from slave labour during the Nazi era, including Daimler, Deutsche Bank, Siemens, Volkswagen, Hoechst, Dresdner Bank, Krupp, Allianz, BASF, Bayer, BMW, and Degussa.[22][23] In particular, Germany's Jewish population was subject to slave labour prior to their extermination.[24]

In Asia, according to a joint study of historians featuring Zhifen Ju, Mark Peattie, Toru Kubo, and Mitsuyoshi Himeta, more than 10 million Chinese were mobilized by the Japanese army and enslaved by the Kōa-in for slave labour in Manchukuo and north China.[25] The U.S. Library of Congress estimates that in Java, between 4 and 10 million romusha (Japanese: "manual labourer") were forced to work by the Japanese military. About 270,000 of these Javanese labourers were sent to other Japanese-held areas in South East Asia. Only 52,000 were repatriated to Java, meaning that there was a death rate of 80%.[26]

Kerja rodi (Heerendiensten), was the term for forced labour in Indonesia under Dutch colonial rule.

The Khmer Rouge attempted to turn Cambodia into a classless society by depopulating cities and forcing the urban population ("New People") into agricultural communes. The entire population was forced to become farmers in labour camps.

Prison labour

 
American prisoner "chain gang" labourers, 2006. Notice the shackles on the feet of the prisoners.

Convict or prison labour is another classic form of unfree labour. The forced labour of convicts has often been regarded with lack of sympathy, because of the social stigma attached to people regarded as common criminals.

Three British colonies in Australia— New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land and Western Australia—are examples of the state use of convict labour. Australia received thousands of convict labourers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were given sentences for crimes ranging from those now considered to be minor misdemeanors to such serious offences as murder, rape and incest. A considerable number of Irish convicts were sentenced to transportation for treason while fighting against British rule in Ireland.[citation needed]

More than 165,000 convicts were transported to Australian colonies from 1788 to 1868.[27] Most British or Irish convicts who were sentenced to transportation, however, completed their sentences in British jails and were not transported at all.

It is estimated that in the last 50 years more than 50 million people have been sent to Chinese laogai camps.[28]

Indentured and bonded labour

A more common form in modern society is indenture, or bonded labour, under which workers sign contracts to work for a specific period of time, for which they are paid only with accommodation and sustenance, or these essentials in addition to limited benefits such as cancellation of a debt, or transportation to a desired country.

Permitted exceptions of unfree labour

As mentioned above, there are several exceptions of unfree or forced labour recognized by the International Labour Organization:

Civil conscription

Some countries practice forms of civil conscription for different major occupational groups or inhabitants under different denominations like civil conscription, civil mobilization, political mobilization etc. This obligatory services on the one hand has been implemented due to long-lasting labour strikes, during wartimes or economic crisis, to provide basic services like medical care, food supply or supply of the defence industry. On the other hand, this service can be obligatory to provide recurring and inevitable services to the population, like fire services, due to lack of volunteers.

Temporary civil conscription

Between December 1943 and March 1948 young men in the United Kingdom, the so-called Bevin Boys, had been conscripted for the work in coal mines.[29] In Belgium in 1964,[30] in Portugal[31] and in Greece from 2010 to 2014 due to the severe economic crisis,[32][33] a system of civil mobilization was implemented to provide public services as a national interest.

Recurring civil conscription

In Switzerland in most communities for all inhabitants, no matter if they are Swiss or not, it is mandatory to join the so-called Militia Fire Brigades, as well as the obligatory service in Swiss civil defence and protection force. Conscripts in Singapore are providing the personnel of the country's fire service as part of the national service in the Civil Defence Force. In Austria and Germany citizens have to join a compulsory fire brigade if a volunteer fire service can not be provided, due to lack of volunteers. In 2018 this regulation is executed only in a handful of communities in Germany and currently none in Austria.[34][35][36]

Conscription for military service and security forces

Beside the conscription for military services, some countries draft citizens for paramilitary or security forces, like internal troops, border guards or police forces. While sometimes paid, conscripts are not free to decline enlistment. Draft dodging or desertion are often met with severe punishment. Even in countries which prohibit other forms of unfree labour, conscription is generally justified as being necessary in the national interest and therefore is one of the five exceptions to the Forced Labour Convention, signed by the most countries in the world.[37]

Mandatory community service

Community services

Community service is a non-paying job performed by one person or a group of people for the benefit of their community or its institutions. Community service is distinct from volunteering, since it is not always performed on a voluntary basis. Although personal benefits may be realized, it may be performed for a variety of reasons including citizenship requirements, a substitution of criminal justice sanctions, requirements of a school or class, and requisites for the receipt of certain benefits.

De facto obligatory community work

During the Cold War in some communist countries like Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic or the Soviet Union the originally voluntary work on Saturday for the community called Subbotnik, Voskresnik or Akce Z became de facto obligatory for the members of a community.

Hand and hitch-up services

In some Austrian and German states it is feasible for communities to draft citizens for public services, called hand and hitch-up services. This mandatory service is still executed to maintain the infrastructure of small communities.[38][39]

International conventions

  • ILO Forced Labour Convention, 1930 (No. 29)
  • ILO Abolition of Forced Labour Convention, 1957 (No. 105)
  • ILO Minimum Age Convention, 1973 (No. 138)
  • Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, 1999 (No. 182)

See also

Notes

References

Citations

  1. ^ Andrees and Belser, "Forced labor: Coercion and exploitation in the private economy", 2009. Rienner and ILO.
  2. ^ "Convention C029 - Forced Labour Convention, 1930 (No. 29)". www.ilo.org.
  3. ^ "Thailand: Sea Slavery - TheOutlawOcean". Youtube. Retrieved 26 October 2020.
  4. ^ Wilder, Danyella (19 December 2018). "Top 5 Industries using Forced Labor". dressember.org. Dressember. Retrieved 25 May 2020.
  5. ^ "Forced labour". Ilo.org. 15 February 2013. Retrieved 20 March 2013.
  6. ^ Trafficking for Forced Labour in Europe—Report on a study in the UK, Ireland the Czech Republic and Portugal. 2012-01-13 at the Wayback Machine November, 2006.
  7. ^ "Abolition of Forced Labour Convention, 1957 (No. 105)". International Labour Organization. Retrieved 24 October 2013.
  8. ^ Forced Labour and Human trafficking: Estimating the Profits.
  9. ^ "What Is Human Trafficking?". Department of Homeland Security. 24 May 2013. Retrieved 6 March 2017.
  10. ^ Lewis, James Bryant. (2003). Frontier Contact Between Choson Korea and Tokugawa Japan, pp. 31–32.
  11. ^ "Slavery in the Twenty-First Century". Un.org. Retrieved 20 March 2013.
  12. ^ "Millions 'forced into slavery'". BBC News. 27 May 2002. Retrieved 20 March 2013.
  13. ^ Ommer, Rosemary E. (1 January 2004), "truck system", The Oxford Companion to Canadian History, Oxford University Press, doi:10.1093/acref/9780195415599.001.0001, ISBN 978-0-19-541559-9, retrieved 10 June 2022
  14. ^ Agoncillo, Teodoro A. (1990). History of the Filipino people (8th ed.). Quezon City [Philippines]: Garotech Pub. p. 83. ISBN 971-10-2415-2. OCLC 29915943.
  15. ^ Shah, Ghanshyam (2004). Social Movements in India : a Review of Literature (2nd ed.). New Delhi: SAGE Publications. ISBN 978-81-321-1977-7. OCLC 1101041666.
  16. ^ Menon, Amarnath K. (29 December 2007). "The red revolt". India Today. Retrieved 14 June 2022.
  17. ^ Gulag, Encyclopædia Britannica
  18. ^ The Gulag Collection: Paintings of Nikolai Getman 2007-10-31 at the Wayback Machine.
  19. ^ "The original memorandum from 1944, signed by Morgenthau". Fdrlibrary.marist.edu. 27 May 2004. Retrieved 20 March 2013.
  20. ^ "Final Compensation Pending for Former Nazi Forced Laborers". Dw-world.de. Retrieved 20 March 2013.
  21. ^ . Archived from the original on 14 October 2007.
  22. ^ American Jewish Committee (2000). "German Firms That Used Slave Or Forced Labor During the Nazi Era", webpage of Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieved October 21, 2007.
  23. ^ Roger Cohen (17 February 1999). "German Companies Adopt Fund For Slave Laborers Under Nazis". The New York Times. Retrieved 20 March 2013.
  24. ^ "Forced Labor — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum".
  25. ^ Zhifen Ju, "Japan's atrocities of conscripting and abusing north China draftees after the outbreak of the Pacific war", 2002
  26. ^ Library of Congress, 1992, "Indonesia: World War II and the Struggle For Independence, 1942–50; The Japanese Occupation, 1942–45" Access date: February 9, 2007.
  27. ^ Convict Records 2009-05-27 at the Wayback Machine, Ancestry.co.uk
  28. ^ Lewis, Aaron (October 5, 2005). "Inside the Lao Gai[dead link]". Special Broadcasting Service 2008-09-13 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved on 2008-10-16.
  29. ^ . 3 July 2009. Archived from the original on 3 July 2009.
  30. ^ "Belgian Doctors Answer Call‐Up". The New York Times. 13 April 1964. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 14 June 2022.
  31. ^ "CIVIL CONSCRIPTION - Eurofound". www.eurofound.europa.eu.
  32. ^ "Greek gov't to issue 86,000 'civil mobilization' orders for teachers …before the strike". Keep Talking Greece. 11 May 2013. Retrieved 14 June 2022.
  33. ^ . 4 March 2016. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 14 June 2022.
  34. ^ ume (13 May 2022). "Personalmangel: Pflicht-Feuerwehr für Friedrichstadt - shz.de". shz.
  35. ^ NDR. "Nachrichten aus Norddeutschland". www.ndr.de.
  36. ^ "Home :: Swissfire Feuerwehrverband". www.swissfire.ch.
  37. ^ National Research Council (2004). Monitoring International Labor Standards: Techniques and Sources of Information. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. p. 137. ISBN 0-309-52974-3.
  38. ^ "§ 10 GemO - Rechtsstellung des Einwohners - dejure.org".
  39. ^ "Art 12 GG - Einzelnorm". www.gesetze-im-internet.de.

Sources

  • Allen, Theodore W. (1994). The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control. New York, NY: Verso Books. ISBN 978-0-86091-480-8 (cloth) -- ISBN 978-0-86091-660-4 (paper).
  • Allen, Theodore W. (1997). The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America, 1997. New York, NY: Verso Books. ISBN 978-1-85984-981-1 (cloth) -- ISBN 978-1-85984-076-4 (paper)
  • Bales, Kevin. (1999). Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-22463-9
  • Brass, Tom, Marcel Van Der Linden, and Jan Lucassen. (1993). Free and Unfree Labour. Amsterdam: International Institute for Social History. ISBN 978-3-906756-87-5.
  • Brass, Tom. (1999). Towards a Comparative Political Economy of Unfree Labour: Case Studies and Debates. London, England: Frank Cass Publishers. ISBN 978-0-7146-4938-2 (cloth) -- ISBN 978-0-7146-4498-1 (paper)
  • Brass, Tom and Marcel Van Der Linden. (1997). Free and Unfree Labour: The Debate Continues. New York, NY: Peter Lang. ISBN 978-0-8204-3424-7 (cloth)
  • Brass, Tom. (2011). Labour Regime Change in the Twenty-First Century: Unfreedom, Capitalism and Primitive Accumulation. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-20247-4.
  • Brass, Tom. (2017) Labour Markets, Identities, Controversies: Reviews and Essays, 1982-2016. Leiden, South Holland: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-32237-0.
  • Blackburn. (1997). The Making of New World Slavery From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800, London: Verso Books. ISBN 978-1-85984-195-2 (paper).
  • Blackburn, Robin. (1988). The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848. London, England: Verso Books. ISBN 978-0-86091-188-3 (cloth) -- ISBN 978-0-86091-901-8 (paper).
  • Hilton, George W. (1960). The Truck System, including a History of the British Truck Acts, 1465-1960. Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons Ltd. [reprinted by Greenwood Press, London, 1975. ISBN 978-0-837-18130-1]
  • Lewis, James Bryant. (2003). Frontier Contact Between Choson Korea and Tokugawa Japan. London, England: Routledge. ISBN 0-7007-1301-8
  • Guijarro Morales, A. El Síndrome de la Abuela Esclava. Pandemia del Siglo XXI (The Enslaved Grandmother Syndrome: a 21st-century Pandemic). Grupo Editorial Universitario. Granada, oct 2001. ISBN 978-84-8491-124-1.
  • Ruhs, Florian: , in: aventinus nova Nr. 32 [29.05.2011]
International Labour Organization
  • ILO Minimum Estimate of Forced Labour in the World. (2005)
  • The Cost of Coercion ILO 2009
  • A global alliance against forced labour
  • Operational Indicators of Trafficking in Human Beings 2009 ILO/SAP-FL
  • Lists of indicators of Trafficking in Human Beings 2009 ILO/SAP-FL
  • Eradication of forced labour—General Survey concerning the Forced Labour Convention, 1930 (No. 29), and the Abolition of Forced Labour Convention, 1957 (No. 105) — ILO 2007
  • Forced Labour: Definition, Indicators and Measurement 2004 — ILO
  • Stopping Forced Labour 2001 — ILO

External links

  • UN.GIFT 2012-12-01 at the Wayback Machine — Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking
  • eliminating Forced Labor 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine — Bureau of International Labor Affairs, U.S. Department of Labor
  • Slavery in the 21st century—BBC
  • Sex trade's reliance on forced labour—BBC
  • The ILO Special Action Programme to combat Forced Labour (SAP-FL)
  • Alleging Captive Labor, Foreign Students Walk Out of Work-Study Program at Hershey Plant Democracy Now!, September 1, 2011.
  • Migrant Workers as Non-Citizens: The Case against Citizenship as a Social Policy Concept, by Donna Baines and Nandita Sharma. Studies in Political Economy 69. Autumn 2002, p. 75.
  • Seafood from Slaves - Associated Press investigation of the international Pacific fishing fleet, 2015–2016, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service

forced, labour, this, article, needs, additional, citations, verification, please, help, improve, this, article, adding, citations, reliable, sources, unsourced, material, challenged, removed, find, sources, news, newspapers, books, scholar, jstor, february, 2. This article needs additional citations for verification Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources Unsourced material may be challenged and removed Find sources Forced labour news newspapers books scholar JSTOR February 2023 Learn how and when to remove this template message Forced labour or unfree labour is any work relation especially in modern or early modern history in which people are employed against their will with the threat of destitution detention violence including death or other forms of extreme hardship to either themselves or members of their families note 1 Clergy on forced labour by Ivan Vladimirov Soviet Russia 1919 Unfree labour workers from Plovdiv during WW2 Unfree labour includes all forms of slavery penal labour and the corresponding institutions such as debt slavery serfdom corvee and labour camps Contents 1 Definition 2 Payment for unfree labour 3 Industrial involvement 4 Modern day unfree labour 5 Trafficking 6 Forms of unfree labour 6 1 Slavery 6 2 Blackbirding 6 3 Serfdom 6 4 Truck system 6 5 Mandatory services due to social status 6 5 1 Corvee 6 5 2 Vetti chakiri 6 6 Penal labour 6 6 1 Labour camps 6 6 2 Prison labour 6 7 Indentured and bonded labour 7 Permitted exceptions of unfree labour 7 1 Civil conscription 7 1 1 Temporary civil conscription 7 1 2 Recurring civil conscription 7 2 Conscription for military service and security forces 7 3 Mandatory community service 7 3 1 Community services 7 3 2 De facto obligatory community work 7 3 3 Hand and hitch up services 8 International conventions 9 See also 10 Notes 11 References 11 1 Citations 11 2 Sources 12 External linksDefinition EditMany forms of unfree labour are also covered by the term forced labour which is defined by the International Labour Organization ILO as all involuntary work or service exacted under the menace of a penalty 1 However under the ILO Forced Labour Convention of 1930 the term forced or compulsory labour does not include 2 any work or service exacted in virtue of compulsory military service laws for work of a purely military character any work or service which forms part of the normal civic obligations of the citizens of a fully self governing country any work or service exacted from any person as a consequence of a conviction in a court of law provided that the said work or service is carried out under the supervision and control of a public authority and that the said person is not hired to or placed at the disposal of private individuals companies or associations requiring that prison farms no longer do convict leasing any work or service exacted in cases of emergency that is to say in the event of war of a calamity or threatened calamity such as fire flood famine earthquake violent epidemic or epizootic diseases invasion by animal insect or vegetable pests and in general any circumstance that would endanger the existence or the well being of the whole or part of the population Payment for unfree labour EditSee also Labour economics Wage slavery Labor theory of value and Productive and unproductive labour Convict labourers in Australia in the early 19th century If payment occurs it may be in one or more of the following forms The payment does not exceed subsistence or barely exceeds it The payment is in goods which are not desirable and or cannot be exchanged or are difficult to exchange or The payment wholly or mostly consists of cancellation of a debt or liability that was itself coerced or belongs to someone else Unfree labour is often more easily instituted and enforced on migrant workers who have travelled far from their homelands and who are easily identified because of their physical ethnic linguistic or cultural differences from the general population since they are unable or unlikely to report their conditions to the authorities 3 Industrial involvement Edit Trenching with hand tools and scant protective gear in rail construction early 20th century In many contexts the use of unfree labour is prohibited under the law and is mainly associated with the underground economy In other contexts established industries have embraced the use of unfree labour as a socially accepted practice in that time and place Use of compelled labour is especially common when the labour involved can not be performed without risk of death disfigurement disability or diminished life expectancy in the extreme these detriments render the voluntary labour market uneconomic and the industry in question is forced to either adopt compelled labour or discontinue operations altogether Industries which continue to employ unfree labour worldwide include agriculture domestic work manufacture and hospitality 4 Mining defence the merchant marine and transport infrastructure which employed questionable practices during the heyday of railway track construction often involving the use of high explosives or constructing high wooden trestle bridges in sheer mountain canyons and of canal excavation sometimes in conditions of permafrost also have historical ties Modern day unfree labour EditUnfree labour re emerged as an issue in the debate about rural development during the years following the end of the Second World War when a political concern of Keynesian theory was not just economic reconstruction mainly in Europe and Asia but also planning in developing Third World nations A crucial aspect of the ensuing discussion concerned the extent to which different relational forms constituted obstacles to capitalist development and why During the 1960s and 1970s unfree labour was regarded as incompatible with capitalist accumulation and thus an obstacle to economic growth an interpretation advanced by exponents of the then dominant semi feudal thesis From the 1980s onwards however another and very different Marxist view emerged arguing that evidence from Latin America and India suggested agribusiness enterprises commercial farmers and rich peasants reproduced introduced or reintroduced unfree relations However recent contributions to this debate have attempted to exclude Marxism from the discussion These contributions maintain that because Marxist theory failed to understand the centrality of unfreedom to modern capitalism a new explanation of this link is needed This claim has been questioned by Tom Brass 2014 Debating Capitalist Dynamics and Unfree Labour A Missing Link The Journal of Development Studies 50 4 570 82 He argues that many of these new characteristics are in fact no different from those identified earlier by Marxist theory and that the exclusion of the latter approach from the debate is thus unwarranted The International Labour Organization ILO estimates that at least 12 3 million people are victims of forced labour worldwide of these 9 8 million are exploited by private agents and more than 2 4 million are trafficked Another 2 5 million are forced to work by the state or by rebel military groups 5 6 From an international law perspective countries that allow forced labour are violating international labour standards as set forth in the Abolition of Forced Labour Convention C105 one of the fundamental conventions of the ILO 7 See also Global Slavery Index According to the ILO Special Action Programme to Combat Forced Labour SAP FL global profits from forced trafficked labour exploited by private agents are estimated at US 44 3 billion per year About 70 of this value US 31 6 billion come from trafficked victims At least the half of this sum more than US 15 billion comes from industrialized countries 8 Freedom from forced labour by country V Dem Institute 2021 Trafficking EditMain article Human trafficking Trafficking is a term to define the recruiting harbouring obtaining and transportation of a person by use of force fraud or coercion for the purpose of subjecting them to involuntary acts such as acts related to commercial sexual exploitation including forced prostitution or involuntary labour 9 Forms of unfree labour Edit Illustration of Native woman panning for gold Slavery Edit Main article Slavery The archetypal and best known form of unfree labour is chattel slavery in which individual workers are legally owned throughout their lives and may be bought sold or otherwise exchanged by owners while never or rarely receiving any personal benefit from their labour Slavery was common in many ancient societies including ancient Egypt Babylon Persia ancient Greece Rome ancient China the pre modern Muslim world as well as many societies in Africa and the Americas Being sold into slavery was a common fate of populations that were conquered in wars Perhaps the most prominent example of chattel slavery was the enslavement of many millions of black people in Africa as well as their forced transportation to the Americas Asia or Europe where their status as slaves was almost always inherited by their descendants citation needed The term slavery is often applied to situations which do not meet the above definitions but which are other closely related forms of unfree labour such as debt slavery or debt bondage although not all repayment of debts through labour constitutes unfree labour Examples are the Repartimiento system in the Spanish Empire or the work of Indigenous Australians in northern Australia on sheep or cattle stations ranches from the mid 19th to the mid 20th century In the latter case workers were rarely or never paid and were restricted by regulations and or police intervention to regions around their places of work In late 16th century Japan unfree labour or slavery was officially banned but forms of contract and indentured labour persisted alongside the period s penal codes forced labour Somewhat later the Edo period s penal laws prescribed non free labour for the immediate families of executed criminals in Article 17 of the Gotōke reijō Tokugawa House Laws but the practice never became common The 1711 Gotōke reijō was compiled from over 600 statutes that were promulgated between 1597 and 1696 10 According to Kevin Bales in Disposable People New Slavery in the Global Economy 1999 there are now an estimated 27 million slaves in the world 11 12 See also Global Slavery Index Blackbirding Edit Blackbirding involves kidnapping or trickery to transport people to another country or far away from home to work as a slave or low paid involuntary worker In some cases workers were returned home after a period of time Serfdom Edit Serfdom bonds labourers to the land they farm typically in a feudal society Serfs typically have no legal right to leave change employers or seek paid work though depending on economic conditions many did so anyway Unlike chattel slaves they typically cannot be sold separately from the land and have rights such as the military protection of the lord Truck system Edit Main article Truck system A truck system in the specific sense in which the term is used by labour historians refers to an unpopular or even exploitative form of payment associated with small isolated and or rural communities in which workers or self employed small producers are paid in either goods a form of payment known as truck wages or tokens private currency scrip or direct credit to be used at a company store owned by their employers A specific kind of truck system in which credit advances are made against future work is known in the U S as debt bondage Many scholars have suggested that employers use such systems to exploit workers and or indebt them This could occur for example if employers were able to pay workers with goods which had a market value below the level of subsistence or by selling items to workers at inflated prices Others argue that truck wages were a convenient way for isolated communities such as during the early colonial settlement of North America to operate when official currency was scarce 13 By the early 20th century truck systems were widely seen in industrialized countries as exploitative perhaps the most well known example of this view was a 1947 U S hit song Sixteen Tons Many countries have Truck Act legislation that outlaws truck systems and requires payment in cash Mandatory services due to social status Edit Corvee Edit Main articles Corvee and Socage Though most closely associated with Medieval Europe governments throughout human history have imposed regular short stints of unpaid labour upon lower social classes These might be annual obligations of a few weeks or something similarly regular that lasted for the labourer s entire working life As the system developed in the Philippines and elsewhere the labourer could pay an appropriate fee and be exempted from the obligation 14 Vetti chakiri Edit Main article Veth India A form of forced labour in which peasants and members of lower castes were required to work for free existed in India before independence This form of labour was known by several names including veth vethi vetti chakiri and begar 15 16 Penal labour Edit Main article Penal labour See also Convicts in Australia Katorga and Devil s Island Labour camps Edit Main article Labour camp See also The Holocaust Japanese war crimes Slavery in Japan Gulag Laogai Kwalliso Arbeitslager Nazi concentration camps Forced labor of Germans after World War II and History of Germany 1945 90 Forced labor reparations Jewish forced laborers in Mogilev July 1941 Political prisoners eating lunch at a Gulag 1955 Another historically significant example of forced labour was that of political prisoners people from conquered or occupied countries members of persecuted minorities and prisoners of war especially during the 20th century The best known example of this are the concentration camp system run by Nazi Germany in Europe during World War II the Gulag camps 17 run by the Soviet Union 18 and the forced labour used by the military of the Empire of Japan especially during the Pacific War such as the Burma Railway Roughly 4 000 000 German POWs were used as reparations labour by the Allies for several years after the German surrender this was permitted under the Third Geneva Convention provided they were accorded proper treatment 19 China s laogai labour reform system and North Korea s kwalliso camps are current examples About 12 million forced labourers most of whom were Poles and Soviet citizens Ost Arbeiter were employed in the German war economy inside Nazi Germany 20 21 More than 2000 German companies profited from slave labour during the Nazi era including Daimler Deutsche Bank Siemens Volkswagen Hoechst Dresdner Bank Krupp Allianz BASF Bayer BMW and Degussa 22 23 In particular Germany s Jewish population was subject to slave labour prior to their extermination 24 In Asia according to a joint study of historians featuring Zhifen Ju Mark Peattie Toru Kubo and Mitsuyoshi Himeta more than 10 million Chinese were mobilized by the Japanese army and enslaved by the Kōa in for slave labour in Manchukuo and north China 25 The U S Library of Congress estimates that in Java between 4 and 10 million romusha Japanese manual labourer were forced to work by the Japanese military About 270 000 of these Javanese labourers were sent to other Japanese held areas in South East Asia Only 52 000 were repatriated to Java meaning that there was a death rate of 80 26 Kerja rodi Heerendiensten was the term for forced labour in Indonesia under Dutch colonial rule The Khmer Rouge attempted to turn Cambodia into a classless society by depopulating cities and forcing the urban population New People into agricultural communes The entire population was forced to become farmers in labour camps Prison labour Edit American prisoner chain gang labourers 2006 Notice the shackles on the feet of the prisoners Convict or prison labour is another classic form of unfree labour The forced labour of convicts has often been regarded with lack of sympathy because of the social stigma attached to people regarded as common criminals Three British colonies in Australia New South Wales Van Diemen s Land and Western Australia are examples of the state use of convict labour Australia received thousands of convict labourers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were given sentences for crimes ranging from those now considered to be minor misdemeanors to such serious offences as murder rape and incest A considerable number of Irish convicts were sentenced to transportation for treason while fighting against British rule in Ireland citation needed More than 165 000 convicts were transported to Australian colonies from 1788 to 1868 27 Most British or Irish convicts who were sentenced to transportation however completed their sentences in British jails and were not transported at all It is estimated that in the last 50 years more than 50 million people have been sent to Chinese laogai camps 28 Indentured and bonded labour Edit Main articles Indenture and bonded labour A more common form in modern society is indenture or bonded labour under which workers sign contracts to work for a specific period of time for which they are paid only with accommodation and sustenance or these essentials in addition to limited benefits such as cancellation of a debt or transportation to a desired country Permitted exceptions of unfree labour EditAs mentioned above there are several exceptions of unfree or forced labour recognized by the International Labour Organization Civil conscription Edit Main article Civil conscription Some countries practice forms of civil conscription for different major occupational groups or inhabitants under different denominations like civil conscription civil mobilization political mobilization etc This obligatory services on the one hand has been implemented due to long lasting labour strikes during wartimes or economic crisis to provide basic services like medical care food supply or supply of the defence industry On the other hand this service can be obligatory to provide recurring and inevitable services to the population like fire services due to lack of volunteers Temporary civil conscription Edit Between December 1943 and March 1948 young men in the United Kingdom the so called Bevin Boys had been conscripted for the work in coal mines 29 In Belgium in 1964 30 in Portugal 31 and in Greece from 2010 to 2014 due to the severe economic crisis 32 33 a system of civil mobilization was implemented to provide public services as a national interest Recurring civil conscription Edit In Switzerland in most communities for all inhabitants no matter if they are Swiss or not it is mandatory to join the so called Militia Fire Brigades as well as the obligatory service in Swiss civil defence and protection force Conscripts in Singapore are providing the personnel of the country s fire service as part of the national service in the Civil Defence Force In Austria and Germany citizens have to join a compulsory fire brigade if a volunteer fire service can not be provided due to lack of volunteers In 2018 this regulation is executed only in a handful of communities in Germany and currently none in Austria 34 35 36 Conscription for military service and security forces Edit Main articles Conscription and Impressment Beside the conscription for military services some countries draft citizens for paramilitary or security forces like internal troops border guards or police forces While sometimes paid conscripts are not free to decline enlistment Draft dodging or desertion are often met with severe punishment Even in countries which prohibit other forms of unfree labour conscription is generally justified as being necessary in the national interest and therefore is one of the five exceptions to the Forced Labour Convention signed by the most countries in the world 37 Mandatory community service Edit Community services Edit Community service is a non paying job performed by one person or a group of people for the benefit of their community or its institutions Community service is distinct from volunteering since it is not always performed on a voluntary basis Although personal benefits may be realized it may be performed for a variety of reasons including citizenship requirements a substitution of criminal justice sanctions requirements of a school or class and requisites for the receipt of certain benefits De facto obligatory community work Edit During the Cold War in some communist countries like Czechoslovakia the German Democratic Republic or the Soviet Union the originally voluntary work on Saturday for the community called Subbotnik Voskresnik or Akce Z became de facto obligatory for the members of a community Hand and hitch up services Edit In some Austrian and German states it is feasible for communities to draft citizens for public services called hand and hitch up services This mandatory service is still executed to maintain the infrastructure of small communities 38 39 International conventions EditILO Forced Labour Convention 1930 No 29 ILO Abolition of Forced Labour Convention 1957 No 105 ILO Minimum Age Convention 1973 No 138 Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention 1999 No 182 See also EditCoolie Trade Construction soldier Critique of work Employee abuse Debt bondage Exploitation Forced labor in Germany during World War II Forced labor of Germans after World War II Involuntary servitude Indentured servitude Labor army Labor battalion Labor trafficking in the United States List of concentration and internment camps NKVD labor columns Refusal of work SAP FL the ILO Special Action Programme to Combat Forced Labour Sexual slavery Shanghaiing Sweatshop Trafficking in human beings Trafficking of children Wage slavery Workfare WorkhouseNotes Edit forced labour under German rule during World War II through Service du travail obligatoire of Vichy FranceReferences EditCitations Edit Andrees and Belser Forced labor Coercion and exploitation in the private economy 2009 Rienner and ILO Convention C029 Forced Labour Convention 1930 No 29 www ilo org Thailand Sea Slavery TheOutlawOcean Youtube Retrieved 26 October 2020 Wilder Danyella 19 December 2018 Top 5 Industries using Forced Labor dressember org Dressember Retrieved 25 May 2020 Forced labour Ilo org 15 February 2013 Retrieved 20 March 2013 Trafficking for Forced Labour in Europe Report on a study in the UK Ireland the Czech Republic and Portugal Archived 2012 01 13 at the Wayback Machine November 2006 Abolition of Forced Labour Convention 1957 No 105 International Labour Organization Retrieved 24 October 2013 Forced Labour and Human trafficking Estimating the Profits What Is Human Trafficking Department of Homeland Security 24 May 2013 Retrieved 6 March 2017 Lewis James Bryant 2003 Frontier Contact Between Choson Korea and Tokugawa Japan pp 31 32 Slavery in the Twenty First Century Un org Retrieved 20 March 2013 Millions forced into slavery BBC News 27 May 2002 Retrieved 20 March 2013 Ommer Rosemary E 1 January 2004 truck system The Oxford Companion to Canadian History Oxford University Press doi 10 1093 acref 9780195415599 001 0001 ISBN 978 0 19 541559 9 retrieved 10 June 2022 Agoncillo Teodoro A 1990 History of the Filipino people 8th ed Quezon City Philippines Garotech Pub p 83 ISBN 971 10 2415 2 OCLC 29915943 Shah Ghanshyam 2004 Social Movements in India a Review of Literature 2nd ed New Delhi SAGE Publications ISBN 978 81 321 1977 7 OCLC 1101041666 Menon Amarnath K 29 December 2007 The red revolt India Today Retrieved 14 June 2022 Gulag Encyclopaedia Britannica The Gulag Collection Paintings of Nikolai Getman Archived 2007 10 31 at the Wayback Machine The original memorandum from 1944 signed by Morgenthau Fdrlibrary marist edu 27 May 2004 Retrieved 20 March 2013 Final Compensation Pending for Former Nazi Forced Laborers Dw world de Retrieved 20 March 2013 Forced Labor at Ford Werke AG during the Second World War Archived from the original on 14 October 2007 American Jewish Committee 2000 German Firms That Used Slave Or Forced Labor During the Nazi Era webpage of Jewish Virtual Library Retrieved October 21 2007 Roger Cohen 17 February 1999 German Companies Adopt Fund For Slave Laborers Under Nazis The New York Times Retrieved 20 March 2013 Forced Labor United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Zhifen Ju Japan s atrocities of conscripting and abusing north China draftees after the outbreak of the Pacific war 2002 Library of Congress 1992 Indonesia World War II and the Struggle For Independence 1942 50 The Japanese Occupation 1942 45 Access date February 9 2007 Convict Records Archived 2009 05 27 at the Wayback Machine Ancestry co uk Lewis Aaron October 5 2005 Inside the Lao Gai dead link Special Broadcasting Service Archived 2008 09 13 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved on 2008 10 16 Bevin Boys BIS 3 July 2009 Archived from the original on 3 July 2009 Belgian Doctors Answer Call Up The New York Times 13 April 1964 ISSN 0362 4331 Retrieved 14 June 2022 CIVIL CONSCRIPTION Eurofound www eurofound europa eu Greek gov t to issue 86 000 civil mobilization orders for teachers before the strike Keep Talking Greece 11 May 2013 Retrieved 14 June 2022 Greek government proceeds with conscription of maritime workers 4 March 2016 Archived from the original on 4 March 2016 Retrieved 14 June 2022 ume 13 May 2022 Personalmangel Pflicht Feuerwehr fur Friedrichstadt shz de shz NDR Nachrichten aus Norddeutschland www ndr de Home Swissfire Feuerwehrverband www swissfire ch National Research Council 2004 Monitoring International Labor Standards Techniques and Sources of Information Washington DC National Academies Press p 137 ISBN 0 309 52974 3 10 GemO Rechtsstellung des Einwohners dejure org Art 12 GG Einzelnorm www gesetze im internet de Sources Edit Allen Theodore W 1994 The Invention of the White Race Racial Oppression and Social Control New York NY Verso Books ISBN 978 0 86091 480 8 cloth ISBN 978 0 86091 660 4 paper Allen Theodore W 1997 The Invention of the White Race The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo America 1997 New York NY Verso Books ISBN 978 1 85984 981 1 cloth ISBN 978 1 85984 076 4 paper Bales Kevin 1999 Disposable People New Slavery in the Global Economy Berkeley CA University of California Press ISBN 0 520 22463 9 Brass Tom Marcel Van Der Linden and Jan Lucassen 1993 Free and Unfree Labour Amsterdam International Institute for Social History ISBN 978 3 906756 87 5 Brass Tom 1999 Towards a Comparative Political Economy of Unfree Labour Case Studies and Debates London England Frank Cass Publishers ISBN 978 0 7146 4938 2 cloth ISBN 978 0 7146 4498 1 paper Brass Tom and Marcel Van Der Linden 1997 Free and Unfree Labour The Debate Continues New York NY Peter Lang ISBN 978 0 8204 3424 7 cloth Brass Tom 2011 Labour Regime Change in the Twenty First Century Unfreedom Capitalism and Primitive Accumulation Leiden Brill ISBN 978 90 04 20247 4 Brass Tom 2017 Labour Markets Identities Controversies Reviews and Essays 1982 2016 Leiden South Holland Brill ISBN 978 90 04 32237 0 Blackburn 1997 The Making of New World Slavery From the Baroque to the Modern 1492 1800 London Verso Books ISBN 978 1 85984 195 2 paper Blackburn Robin 1988 The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776 1848 London England Verso Books ISBN 978 0 86091 188 3 cloth ISBN 978 0 86091 901 8 paper Hilton George W 1960 The Truck System including a History of the British Truck Acts 1465 1960 Cambridge W Heffer amp Sons Ltd reprinted by Greenwood Press London 1975 ISBN 978 0 837 18130 1 Lewis James Bryant 2003 Frontier Contact Between Choson Korea and Tokugawa Japan London England Routledge ISBN 0 7007 1301 8 Guijarro Morales A El Sindrome de la Abuela Esclava Pandemia del Siglo XXI The Enslaved Grandmother Syndrome a 21st century Pandemic Grupo Editorial Universitario Granada oct 2001 ISBN 978 84 8491 124 1 Ruhs Florian Foreign Workers in the Second World War The Ordeal of Slovenians in Germany in aventinus nova Nr 32 29 05 2011 International Labour OrganizationILO Minimum Estimate of Forced Labour in the World 2005 The Cost of Coercion ILO 2009 A global alliance against forced labour Operational Indicators of Trafficking in Human Beings 2009 ILO SAP FL Lists of indicators of Trafficking in Human Beings 2009 ILO SAP FL Eradication of forced labour General Survey concerning the Forced Labour Convention 1930 No 29 and the Abolition of Forced Labour Convention 1957 No 105 ILO 2007 Forced Labour Definition Indicators and Measurement 2004 ILO Stopping Forced Labour 2001 ILOExternal links Edit Look up forced labour in Wiktionary the free dictionary Wikimedia Commons has media related to Unfree labour UN GIFT Archived 2012 12 01 at the Wayback Machine Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking eliminating Forced Labor Archived 2016 03 04 at the Wayback Machine Bureau of International Labor Affairs U S Department of Labor Slavery in the 21st century BBC Sex trade s reliance on forced labour BBC China s Forced Labour Camps Laogai Research Foundation The ILO Special Action Programme to combat Forced Labour SAP FL Alleging Captive Labor Foreign Students Walk Out of Work Study Program at Hershey Plant Democracy Now September 1 2011 Migrant Workers as Non Citizens The Case against Citizenship as a Social Policy Concept by Donna Baines and Nandita Sharma Studies in Political Economy 69 Autumn 2002 p 75 Seafood from Slaves Associated Press investigation of the international Pacific fishing fleet 2015 2016 winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Forced labour amp oldid 1147028638, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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