Our part in combating slave labor

We’re all complicit in modern-day slavery. At the very least, we should acknowledge this fact.
In December, the Associated Press released an article which horrified supermarkets and seafood eaters: shrimp produced using slave labor is being sold at most major grocery chains, from Kroger to Whole Foods to Wal-Mart. According to the article, shrimp has become one of the most popular seafoods in America in recent decades. The labor-intensive processes of gutting, veining and peeling are done manually by hundreds, if not thousands, of facilities in Southeast Asia.
These facilities are unregulated and don’t have the best environment. They often use human trafficking victims or children to do the work in brutal conditions. Workers peel for 16 hours a day, are beaten if they work too slow and threatened with execution if they want to leave the facility. The de-humanized workers are assigned numbers in place of names. The child laborers are known to cry for days on end as they toil away helplessly.
The facts presented in the article are appalling, and as someone who has purchased seafood (the problem isn’t just limited to shrimp) from a number of the companies mentioned above, I can’t help but feel nauseated thinking about it. In a small way I feel like I’m responsible for contributing to the suffering and misery.
Unfortunately, slave labor is not limited to the seafood industry. The Department of Labor maintains a list of commodities known to be produced by forced labor and the countries in which they are made. As of 2014, the list contained 55 items and included things like coffee, beef and clothing, which majority of people use. However, it is difficult to know for sure the product you’re using has been produced through slave labor. Not all clothes are made with slave labor. Even with the labor department’s warning that, for example, clothing made in Vietnam is produced with slave labor; it seems extremely unlikely that all Vietnamese clothing is made by slaves.
We justify our purchases by giving them the benefit of the doubt and assume they weren’t produced from slavery. If there isn’t definitive proof that something is made with slave labor, then why assume that it is? The problem with that type of thinking is that supply chains are extremely complicated and slavery is difficult to detect when it is occurring. For example, seafood needs to be caught, cleaned, processed, transported and packaged before it’s sold to a retailer. Each step involves different companies who do not necessarily answer to each other and who may each be using slave labor. Even when a major retailer does invest the resources to verify that a product is being sourced ethically, conditions are always changing so a supplier might begin using slave labor and go undetected for quite some time.
To add to the problem, it seems that many companies do not invest in proper resources to ensure ethical and moral boundaries aren’t being crossed. A number of tech publications reported in 2014 that among large producers of smartphones, only Nokia could prove that its supply chain did not involve forced labor. As for the others, there seemed to be strong indications that forced labor was being used in the manufacture of their devices.
Given how widespread slavery is and how common most of the products of slavery are, I think all of us need to recognize our complicity in the process. Even when we make efforts to shop ethically, the complexity of the global economy prevents us from making truly informed decisions.
From an individual’s perspective, it would be completely unrealistic for all of us to make significant lifestyle changes by not buying certain products to help prevent slave labor. In other words, everyone isn’t about to simply give up their phones and stop buying clothes.
It might seem futile to even acknowledge our complicity in slavery given the enormity of the problem. However, even at least realizing there is a problem is a start. Acknowledging we’re part of the problem does not mean we’ll all make significant changes. But we will start thinking of ways to change things. As a society we may come to demand the regulation and oversight necessary to reform a “free market” that is run on slaves.
Kyle Novak is a masters student of philosophy.