Slavery and Unfree Labour: The Politics of Naming, Framing, and Blaming

According to the 2017 Global Slavery Index, "On any given day in 2016, an estimated 40.3 million people were victims of modern slavery."¹ Produced by the Walk Free Foundation and International Labour Organization (ilo), in partnership with the International Organization for Migration, the Global Slavery Index provides a country-by-country map of the estimated prevalence of modern slavery combined with information about the steps each government has taken to combat it. Acknowledging that definitions vary, the Global Slavery Index uses the term "modern slavery" to refer

to situations where one person has taken away another person's freedom - their freedom to control their body, their freedom to choose to refuse certain work or to stop working - so that they can be exploited. Freedom is taken away by threats, violence, coercion, abuse of power and deception. The net result is that a person cannot refuse or leave the situation.²

Coined to harness the moral outrage now directed at the transatlantic slave trade, "modern slavery" is a portmanteau that covers a range of practices, including the chattel slavery of the transatlantic slave trade, forced labour, human trafficking for labour exploitation or prostitution, and forced marriage, all of which are outlawed in international, transnational, and national human rights and criminal law instruments.³ The chief of staff of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, George Ramos, claimed that in 2015 the number of modern slaves in the world was "nearly four times the total number of Africans sold in the Americas during the four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade."⁴

In contrast to the United Kingdom and Australia, where there is a robust political debate about modern slavery and strong bipartisan support for legislation to tackle it,⁵ in Canada the political resonance has been much fainter, confined to an incongruous combination of socially conservative politicians in the West, mainly in British Columbia, and migrant rights activists.⁶ Part of the reason Canada was given a mediocre score (a bb) by the Global Slavery Index for its response to modern slavery was its failure to make slavery a stand-alone crime.⁷ However, there is some indication that modern slavery discourse may be gaining ground in Canada. Canadian companies with revenue of at least £36 million in the United Kingdom are required under the UK's Modern Slavery Act, 2015 to publish a statement of the steps they take to ensure that slavery and human trafficking are not taking place in their supply chains or in any part of their business.⁸ Moreover, "modern slavery" is used in news headlines to characterize young women trafficked into prostitution and the exploitation of "foreign workers" who are not paid their wages.⁹

Although the term "modern slavery" has permeated neither Canadian political debate nor academic discussion,¹⁰ there is significant literature on unfree labour, mainly with respect to temporary migration.¹¹ Unlike modern slavery, which functions as both a political rhetoric and a legally defined crime, unfree labour is an analytic category. Sociologists, political economists, and sociolegal scholars have developed the concept of unfree labour to refer to relations of production where direct political/legal compulsion is used to acquire and exploit labour power, as in the case of migrant workers who, because of immigration controls, are not free to circulate in the labour markets of the host countries in which they are working.¹² This understanding of unfree labour has its origins in Marx's central idea that the working class was formed as peasants were detached from the land.¹³ This often-violent dispossession resulted in a double sense of freedom; workers were free of the land, in the sense that they no longer had customary rights to work...