Modern Slavery...And Our Complacency

The word “slavery” tends to conjure up images in our minds of southern plantations, or Africans in chains being hauled across the Atlantic Ocean. Close your eyes and you can likely recall some black and white images you once saw in a documentary or history textbook. Maybe you think about Roots, or Amistad, or some other film. That history is important, but it has nothing to do with modern slavery. Slavery exists today, in every corner of the globe. That should bother us, but for most people it’s just a data point divorced from any real contemplation. And taking real action on the matter is even less common. 

Bricks for Simon Legree

If you’ve read Uncle Tom’s Cabin you’re familiar with the character Simon Legree, one of literature’s most notorious villains. Legree was everything you would imagine in a cruel slave master, even manipulating slaves to harm one another for preferential treatment. Today, there are a lot of Simon Legrees out there, though you’ll rarely ever hear about them unless you go to the places where they live and meet the people they subjugate. Today’s slavers deal in sex trafficking (of all ages, even babies), run sweatshops making t-shirts or sneakers, run shrimp boats, or manage plantations harvesting chocolate and a dozen other popular commodities. 

One such slave population resides in Pakistan where they toil every day, for years on end, making bricks. Day in and day out, brick by brick, they work in order to pay off a once modest debt like a medical bill they couldn’t afford to pay. The problem is that that debt never decreases, because as they work they also need fed and housed. This incurs more debt that their “wages” can never satisfy.

In this manner you could say they are in a debtors’ prison, but it’s not just them; their entire family is sometimes in there with them. In fact, whole families have been born into slavery, multiple generations even, a crime that the Pakistani government doesn’t seem to care much about. However, the slavers and the government officials do care about money. And if you’ve got $1500 you can purchase the freedom of one of these slaves. If you’ve got $3500 you can purchase the freedom of an entire family, and even provide them a rickshaw so that they can maintain an income.

But Pakistanis aren’t the only slaves turning out bricks for slave masters. And chances are, you’ve purchased some of the bricks they sell.

Made In China...By Slaves

Back in the early 2000’s my wife and I learned of the plight of Christians in China through publications like Voice of the Martyrs, and novels like Safely Home. At that point in history with the internet still in relative infancy and smart phones and social media still in the distant future, the Chinese government had a free hand to enslave millions of “dissident” citizens into forced labor factories. We lobbied companies like Big Idea (Veggie Tales), asking them to stop using slaves in making Larry the Cucumber dolls. We asked our local Christian shops and toy stores to carry more products not made by slaves. Fortunately we discovered that Lego manufactured all of its products in Denmark, and became lifelong fans of those little plastic bricks.

Two decades later not much has improved. China still enslaves its population, American companies still utilize their factories, and we still buy those products. Even Lego quietly began producing some of their elements in China.

Of course the CCP denies it, just like they deny every human rights violation, and we’re supposed to just take their word for it. China claims their forced labor program was terminated in 2013, after the spotlight turned on them in the wake Chinese political prisoner Sun Yi, bravely sneaking a plea for help into an Oregon mother’s package of Halloween decorations.

A recent book, Made in China: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter and the Hidden Cost of America’s Cheap Goods by Amelia Pang, tells the story in greater detail about how Yi  spent 2½ years at Masanjia Labor Camp in China. One would hope that this kind of exposure — first-hand accounts of tortured prisoners, undercover investigations from Australian journalists, and bestselling books —  would wake Americans up. It hasn’t. In fact, the modern slave trade has only gotten worse as demands for cheap, same-day delivered goods have skyrocketed. Chinese manufacturing and the big American stores that infuse them continue to box everyone else out of the market. You’ve supported the slave industry, and so have I.

It’s a sad commentary on modernity that even though we live in the most connected era in history — where every corner of the world has high definition cameras and cellular networks available to expose whatever is happening in real time — that slavery is still largely ignored.

Perhaps it’s just a matter of us not wanting to admit we consumers compose an essential link in the modern slave chain, but we do. Walk around your house and pick up some toys, turn over boxes of every product you buy, and read the fine print on every smokin’ deal on Amazon Prime you’re contemplating. You’ll almost always find the words Made In China (or maybe Bangladesh, or Cambodia) printed in small font. Chances are that product was made or packaged by slaves.

These slave manufactured products are everywhere you go. Visit your church’s book store, or any store (especially toy stores) — almost every trinket displaying scripture, every toy, and most of the journals are made (at least partially) by slaves in China.

All of those cheap plastic toys at the doctor’s office, those five-packs of crayons given to keep kids occupied at the restaurant, those plastic eggs and gift bag contents we just handed out on Easter — they’re often made by slaves.

The phone you’re reading this on may have been made by Chinese dissidents (Christians, Uyghur and Turkic Muslims) kidnapped from their families for teaching doctrines not sanctioned by the CCP. Their children are sent to communist indoctrination centers. Their families are told lies about their whereabouts. The media is shown carefully selected footage to mask this reality.

The laptop I’m writing this article on is no exception. So was the replacement screen I used to fix it last year, and the motherboard I swapped out once upon a time. Slaves helped make my computer.

And here’s one that should hit close to home for all of us: Slaves may have even made those communion cups your church just ordered. Many are, some aren’t. Take a look at the box.

Complacency Is A Choice

I don’t write all of this to make us feel condemned. I don’t write it to shame us. If you just ordered a new gadget or some necessary household items and saw that Made in China label, don’t fret. It’s incredibly hard to keep your hands clean in the modern era of slavery because practically every corporation on earth supports it, tacitly or overtly. Often the corporations themselves don’t even know that their suppliers are using slave labor. With no oversight into Chinese manufacturing how could they? Pinky swears?

But whether a particular factory in China is using slave labor or not is a nuance that detracts from a larger point: Why are we doing business with a communist country that subjugates its own people in the first place? Money, obviously.

Why do we turn a blind eye to American companies like Costco, Target, Walmart, and Apple openly consorting with slavers? The answer again is money. We like saving a buck, and don’t want to think to much about the literal devils in the murky details. That’s not how we make America great again; that’s the formula for making it worse.

If you’ve spent money on goods made in dubious locations (and there are many), no shame. But that doesn’t mean we need to continue the practice. I for one don’t want to keep feeding the market that enslaves our brothers and sisters. We have other options.

I’ve written before about practical ways we can avoid businesses that mock our values. Probably the easiest thing we can do regarding modern slavery is to take a few extra minutes before we make a purchase.

Turn over that box and see where it’s made. If you’re not confident about that country’s labor practices, pick a different item.

If you can’t find anything on the shelf not made in China, that should tell you everything you need to know about that store’s ethics. Get out of there and find a store that cares about modern slavery. Or, go online and pay a few dollars more for an alternative. You’ll often find that the products made in free countries are far superior to those made in slave markets anyway. You get what you pay for. Every brand of work gloves available at Lowe’s may be made with slave labor, but there are long established companies still making superior products in the free countries — North Star Glove Co. Bialetti, My Pillow, and Stockmar to name just a few — and they need our support now more than ever.

Be An Abolitionist

Cassius Marcellus Clay was one of the wealthiest slave owners in Kentucky in the antebellum era. When his father died, he freed his inherited slaves. It cost him a fortune, along with his reputation, and his safety. His story (and it’s a good one) is an article for another day, but it underscores the reality that if we’re going oppose slavery with more than mere words, we will incur a cost. We’re going to have to dig deep and see how we may be perpetuating the practice of human bondage. It may cost us a little extra time, and maybe a lot of money. Is it worth it, though?

The alternative is to simply say, “Screw it, I’ll just order it from Amazon; they’re fast and easy.” Using slave labor usually is.

The American Civil War ended slavery as we tend to understand it, but setting slaves free in 2024 doesn’t take a war and half a million dead soldiers. We can do it by tossing a few bills into the collection plate to free some slaves on the other side of the world.We can also do it by rejecting cheap products in favor of locally produced or honestly manufactured ones. That shift in our purchasing habits would only cost us pennies on the dollar. Our continued addiction to slave-produced imports, on the other hand, costs us so much more.

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Here is a list of companies selling Made in USA products, broken down by catagories.

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My latest book, Those Who Face Death, is now available online wherever books are sold. This is the fourth book in the Modern War series.

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Photo by Khashayar Kouchpeydeh on Unsplash