Forced Labour: Coercion and Exploitation in the Private Economy (review)

As clarified by the two editors, Beate Andrees and Patrick Belser, the purpose of the book Forced Labour: Coercion and Exploitation in the Private Economy is "to present an overview of the contemporary manifestations of forced labour and to improve our understanding of why it survives in the twenty-first century and how it can be eliminated" (p. 1). The book offers a panorama on a variety of manifestations of forced labor—as defined by Article 2.1 of the International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention No. 29 (1930)—in the private economy, leaving aside the issues of forced labor imposed by public authorities and the state-imposed one, which can still be found only in a few states of the world. The first part of the book contains five case studies from different parts of the world, while the second one concentrates on actions that should be taken to fight against forced labor. All the five case studies are based on primary research that has been directly conducted by the authors, sometimes with the help of teams of researchers, thus making the results of the various studies extremely interesting.

The first chapter offers a good overview on the internal trafficking of workers aimed at their exploitation into slave labor—term officially used in the Brazilian Penal Code to refer to forced labor—in rural areas of Brazil. According to Leonardo Sakamoto, slave labor is prevalent in those areas of the country that are also affected by violence and deforestation, while other elements, including the role of gatos in recruiting the workers, the debt, and the nonpayment or reduced payment of wages, are used as ways to keep the workers under control. The spread of debt bondage in Bolivia, Paraguay, and Peru is examined in Chapter 2. The multiple-case study methodology is used to examine five case studies in the three mentioned countries. In all of them, the researchers concluded that the bonded workers are predominantly indigenous people, even if in some cases mestizos—those who have mixed colonial and indigenous descent—are also found in debt bondage.

Chapter 3 summarizes the results of research conducted by a Bonded Labour Research Forum in Pakistan with the aim of analyzing two major issues: recruitment and wage systems in the various sectors of the country's economy. The key role of the peshgi system of wage advances that is used in both the agricultural and the industrial sectors to either revitalize a preexisting link or create a new one is clearly emphasized as the fact that the low level of wages, the lack of social security and savings, and the impossibility for illiterate workers to avoid that in certain cases their debts might be unreasonably inflated are all, according to Ali Khan, contributing to the vulnerability of the workers and generating situations of bonded labor.

The next chapter concentrates on the situation of people of slave descent in Niger offering an overview on the results of a qualitative study recently conducted in the country. The authors accurately show that some differences exist between the Nomadic and Pastoral regions and the sedentary ones. As regards the former ones, it seems that time has not passed by: the old institution of slavery still exists and people are still born into slave status and inherited by their masters. The authors describe this situation clarifying that people of slave descent "did not appear to have their own independent personalities and . . . remained entirely at the disposal of their masters for any kind of work at any moment in time" (p. 78). In the other regions, the situation is even more complex and it is sometimes referred to as "passive slavery": racism and discrimination toward people of slave descent, segregation, and situations resembling serfdom are predominant and leave the individuals of slave descent with no or very limited options. The recent case of Hadijatou Mani, a 24-year-old...