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Authors: Kevin Bales,Ron. Soodalter

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and they flow into the global market and mix with products of free

workers. While the criminals may justify their use of slaves by pointing

to economic pressures to reduce labor costs, they never pass the savings

from slavery to the consumer, with the possible exception of the Chinese

prison factories and the cheap goods they sell to the United States.

Normally, the slaveholder just pockets the market price for his slave-

made goods—a price set in a market that reflects the presence of free

workers. So if slaveholders are feeding on our purchases, it would seem

that we should just stop buying those goods. In fact, that may be exactly

the wrong thing to do.

We feel a strong revulsion when we think we are eating something or

wearing something that comes from slave labor. Our reaction is to push

that crime away from us, to distance ourselves, to boycott slave-made goods.

The last thing we want to do is support slaveholders. Yet for every criminal

using slaves to grow cocoa or cotton or sugar, hundreds or thousands of

farmers are producing the same crops without using slaves. Great

agribusinesses are involved, as well as individual farmers with just a few

acres and every size of farm in between. Small farmers in the developing

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world have enough problems competing against the vast subsidies given

to U.S. and European agribusiness; if the consumers turn against them as

well, the result could be the destruction of poor family farms. So while

our disgust says, “Boycott,” the truth is that boycotts can hurt the inno-

cent more than the guilty. We think of ourselves as consumers. We want

to vote in the marketplace for the things we believe in. But this problem

usually can’t be fixed at the point of purchase.

Of course, there is a place for a carefully targeted boycott. As we saw

in chapter 3, the Coalition of Immokolee Workers organized boycotts of

Taco Bell and Burger King when these fast-food chains refused to nego-

tiate the punishing wages paid to the workers that picked their tomatoes

and other vegetables. Here the boycott had a clear target and a precise

aim—to increase the amount paid to workers for every bucket of toma-

toes by a single penny, to establish responsibly monitored working con-

ditions, and to ensure that buyers refused to purchase any produce

harvested by slave labor. The success of the Taco Bell boycott occurred

exactly because its aims were clear and directed at a company that could

actually take the needed action. Shareholder pressure, divestment cam-

paigns, demonstrations, and boycotts are all ways to make companies

understand our concerns as consumers. But at the same time we have to

guard against knee-jerk reactions that can hurt the very people we hope

to help. The trick is to be smart about direct action, like the Coalition

of Immokolee Workers.

Given the nature of the global economy, however, if we don’t want

slavery in the things we buy, the best place to stop slavery is not at the

cash register but where it happens—on the farm, in the quarry, or in the

sweatshop. The $30 you
don’t
spend boycotting the purchase of a shirt

is worth little or nothing in the fight against slavery in most parts of the

world. The slaveholder has already made his profit, and if a boycott

leads to a collapse in cotton prices, the slaveholder just moves his slaves

to another job or dumps them, or worse. Meanwhile, the boycott drives

the poorest farmers, mill hands, and other people out of work, into des-

titution and vulnerability, and even into a risk of enslavement. A boycott

is a blunt instrument that can sometimes be exactly the right tool but

can also run the risk of creating more suffering than it cures. What

seems to be the immediate and obvious answer isn’t always the best one.

Part of the solution is a mental adjustment that Americans can make.

It is very easy for consumers to blame corporations, especially big cor-

porations, for many of the world’s problems. When we learn that the

things we eat, wear, and drive are made with the products of slavery we

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feel angry, and the companies that sold us those goods are usually the

ones we’ll blame first. Movies and TV programs often feature the heart-

less corporate executive as a villain, and certainly companies like Enron

don’t do anything to dispel that image. In most cases, but not all, slavery

is many steps removed from the American companies that sell us things.

Should they know their product chain well enough to keep slavery out?

It may take some time for companies to dig deeply into their supply

chains, but the answer to that question is yes. And consumers should do

their best to be aware as well. The moral responsibility for the things we

buy does not end at the cash register; every consumer is the last link in

the chain that leads back to an enslaved worker. Consumers have to share

responsibility with retailers, wholesalers, producers, and the importers

of goods and raw materials, all the way back to the ultimate, damning

culpability that falls on the criminal who uses slaves. For the average cit-

izen this responsibility is uncomfortable, but the truth is that there would

be no slave-made goods in the shops unless people were ready to buy

them. Given that most American consumers like a bargain but hate slav-

ery, how do we clean up our product chains? As it turns out, old tools in

the form of national laws are ready to break those chains, and new ways

of working together offer the hope of an economy unpolluted by slave

products. America has a long tradition of banning slave-made goods and

an equally long tradition of not enforcing those rules.

A L O N G T R A D I T I O N O F D O I N G N E X T T O N O T H I N G

The United States has laws and regulations that forbid the importation

of any slave-made goods, including those made in prison factories.

These laws date back more than one hundred years, and they have been

tested and ruled on by the Supreme Court. But somehow, as slavery

slipped into the darkness and Americans came to believe it was finished

forever, these laws fell into disuse and were virtually forgotten.

At the very beginning of the American republic the founding fathers

were desperately split over slavery. In the 1787 Constitutional

Convention that established the U.S. government, a great deal of effort

went into forging two key compromises between the free and slave

states. These compromises maintained the fragile unity of the emerging

republic but planted the seeds for much greater suffering later. The first

compromise was a provision in the Constitution that the government

would not be allowed to ban the slave trade until twenty years had past.

The second compromise addressed congressional representation by

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population. The North wanted slaves to be considered chattel, along

with horses, mules, and pigs, and not counted as people, whereas the

South wanted their slaves to be categorized as humans—not out of a

sense of humanity but in order to gain more votes in the House of

Representatives. A compromise was hammered out; it ordered that a

slave would be counted as three-fifths of a person. Both of these provi-

sions crashed headlong into the ideals of democracy, and both were

seen as a price to be paid to keep the new nation together.

While the institution and legality of slavery were not threatened, and

the slave trade had a twenty-year reprieve, the new Congress soon began

to chip away at slavery in ways that were allowed by the Constitution. In

1790, a law banned U.S. citizens from engaging in the slave trade in for-

eign ports (almost impossible to enforce), and in 1794 it became illegal

to build or equip slave ships within the United States (also difficult to

enforce). As the twenty-year deadline approached, Congress passed a

series of laws to come into effect on January 1, 1808. One made it ille-

gal to bring slaves into America, another banned supplying ships to the

slave trade and allowed slave ships to be confiscated, and another

allowed the U.S. Navy to seize slave ships. While on paper these laws

virtually wiped out the trans-Atlantic slave trade to America, in reality

they were rarely enforced.

Only at the time of the Civil War did the government really address the

slave trade. By 1860, the shifting political winds, the swelling abolitionist

ranks, and the coming to power of the Republican Party meant that the

1808 law was taken seriously for the first time. For the entire fifty years

leading up to the Civil War, the anti–slave trade laws were almost entirely

ignored. If a slave ship’s captain was arrested and came to trial, he would

generally be let off on a technicality or with a derisory fine of just a few

dollars. Then in the summer of 1860 a ship’s captain from Maine named

Nathaniel Gordon was caught red-handed, leaving Africa with 897 slaves

packed on board his ship. When he was sent to New York for trial, a new

federal prosecutor pressed for the full punishment of the law. Legally,

slave trading carried the same penalty as piracy—death; but since the

trade had been tolerated for decades, the call for Gordon’s execution was

extremely controversial. The trial and its aftermath dragged on through

the first year of the Civil War, and it came to President Lincoln to decide

whether Gordon would be executed or not. Lincoln decided an example

had to be made, and Gordon was hanged in 1862.24

In 1864, the seizure of more slave ships led to a Supreme Court ruling

clarifying the law on bringing slaves into the United States. The Court

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ruled, citing the 1794 act, that it was not required that U.S. companies

actually transport slaves to be liable—just building a ship that was likely

to be used in the slave trade was a crime. Essentially, the Supreme Court

ruled that it was illegal for an American company or person to profit

from the slave trade, no matter where that slavery occurred. What’s

more, the Court allowed the seizure and sale of a ship even if there was

no direct evidence that it had been used to carry slaves, only circum-

stantial evidence that the ship was
likely
to have been used in the slave

trade. That ruling has enormous implications for slavery in the United

States today, since it suggests that any car, truck, aircraft, ship, or boat

or, for that matter, any house or building that is
likely
to have been used

in human trafficking can be seized and sold.

The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 freed only those slaves

behind enemy lines in the Confederate States, so these Supreme Court

rulings came before legal slavery was finally and completely banned in

1865. When the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution came

into force, it stated simply that “neither slavery nor involuntary servi-

tude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have

been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place

subject to their jurisdiction.”
Legal
slavery ended with the Thirteenth

Amendment; actual slavery did not. Since slavery has never disappeared

from America, the Supreme Court has had to rule a number of times on

whether other forms of slavery came under the Thirteenth Amendment.

The Court has always decided that if a person has lost his or her free

will, is under violent control, and is being economically exploited, then

the Thirteenth Amendment ban on slavery applies. “Peonage” of

African American, white, and Mexican workers, and other forms of

debt bondage, have all been ruled to be slavery.

What’s important here is that America’s most fundamental law, the

Constitution, and its interpretation in statutes and by the Supreme

Court make it clear that it is forbidden for an American individual or

company to take part in slavery in any form or to profit from slavery.

This applies wherever in the world the slavery occurs. The implication

of this for the situation today, with the products of slavery from all over

the planet entering our country, is staggering. What’s more, another law,

the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, bans “all goods, wares, articles and

merchandise mined, produced, or manufactured wholly or in part in

any foreign country by convict labor or/and forced labor or/and inden-

tured labor under penal sanctions,” which perfectly describes the

Chinese prison-factories. If the Constitution, the Supreme Court, and

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Congress all say that profiting from, or bringing into the country, slaves

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