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| Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy | 
 enlarge | Author: Kevin Bales
Publisher: University of California Press
Category: Book
List Price: $17.95
Buy New: $6.54
You Save: $11.41 (64%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (22 reviews)
Sales Rank: 437916
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Edition: original
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 298
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 0.8
ISBN: 0520224639
Dewey Decimal Number: 323
EAN: 9780520224636
ASIN: 0520224639
Publication Date: September 28, 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Slavery is illegal throughout the world, yet more than twenty-seven million people are still trapped in one of history's oldest social institutions. Kevin Bales's disturbing story of slavery today reaches from brick kilns in Pakistan and brothels in Thailand to the offices of multinational corporations. His investigation of conditions in Mauritania, Brazil, Thailand, Pakistan, and India reveals the tragic emergence of a "new slavery," one intricately linked to the global economy. The new slaves are not a long-term investment as was true with older forms of slavery, explains Bales. Instead, they are cheap, require little care, and are disposable.
Three interrelated factors have helped create the new slavery. The enormous population explosion over the past three decades has flooded the world's labor markets with millions of impoverished, desperate people. The revolution of economic globalization and modernized agriculture has dispossessed poor farmers, making them and their families ready targets for enslavement. And rapid economic change in developing countries has bred corruption and violence, destroying social rules that might once have protected the most vulnerable individuals.
Bales's vivid case studies present actual slaves, slaveholders, and public officials in well-drawn historical, geographical, and cultural contexts. He observes the complex economic relationships of modern slavery and is aware that liberation is a bitter victory for a child prostitute or a bondaged miner if the result is starvation.
Bales offers suggestions for combating the new slavery and provides examples of very positive results from organizations such as Anti-Slavery International, the Pastoral Land Commission in Brazil, and the Human Rights Commission in Pakistan. He also calls for researchers to follow the flow of raw materials and products from slave to marketplace in order to effectively target campaigns of "naming and shaming" corporations linked to slavery. Disposable People is the first book to point the way to abolishing slavery in today's global economy.
All of the author's royalties from this book go to fund anti-slavery projects around the world.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 17 more reviews...
 Excellent - It'll make you understand how we are all part of this. October 23, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
It is almost impossible to find a corporation with international reach that has not been somewhat involved in any sort of human rights abuse in a wide range of industries: Manufacturing, Telecommunication, Extractive, Food and Beverages, Infrastructures, Pharmaceutical and Composite of all the above. In each of these industries, there has been a wide range of human rights infringements in the form of: torture, disappearances, hostage-taking, harassment of human rights defenders, forced labor, bonded labor, child labor, relocation, denial of women's rights, arrest and detention.
The vendors and all consumers, to a certain extend, are also responsible because they are complicit by purchasing the products. If we haven't participated by investments, we have by consumption. Kevin Bales writes it entirely on page 243 of his book, and at the end, : I believe that when people know that their purchasing and investing can actually help free slaves, they will do the right thing. Unfortunately, today most of us are in ignorance about slave/made goods or how our pensions or stocks and shares may be investments in slavery. (This is part true. I still have my doubts about whether people would really do the right thing. They know about Global Warming but it doesn't stop them from driving huge cars. Every pack of cigarettes says that "Smoke causes cancer" yet they still smoke!...)
However, this book will shed light into your lifestyle. It'll make you realize and hopefully change your ways, slowly, but surely.
Globalization's step children July 19, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I had no idea of the extent of "modern" slavery. This book reveals some of globalization's losers: how people become slaves and what keeps them enslaved. Jesus wept . . .
The book was delivered quickly and on time. Read it and find out how multi-national corporations, unregulated markets, and greed propigate the new slavery. >Sam
 Good, but some information is out of date January 8, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a great book, although some of the information is a bit dated, but it's still a good read if you want to know about modern day slavery. The website listed probably has updated statistics.
The Archetype of Liberal Problem Solving December 30, 2007
3 out of 9 found this review helpful
This emotional, very heart-wrenching piece is easily recognizable for what it is, the prototypical "liberal reformer" solution to all complex social problems: Wave your hands a lot, shout loudly and then look for the most gradual, most ineffectual, and most incremental and containable solution to the problem available. Ignore theory and the root causes as long as you can, and don't worry about whether your solution actually works or even alleviates the problem; the overall goal is to keep the party going.
Surely it is improper to attack the messenger as I am currently doing, but it is equally improper for the author to raise the issue of "disposal people" at only one end of a mean-spirited global economic chain that is connected by the same economic logic and societal arrangements that produces disposable people all along its path - and not just in the Third World. To do so is as hypocritical as my unkind attack, and masks, rather than reveals, the true root causes of the problem.
The ghettos of America and of its Native American Reservations, for instance, while not engaged directly in the kind of slavery the author describes going on in other parts of the world - at least not in any formal sense -- are no less engaged in the kind of skewed economic processes that produce the same dead-end imperatives that lead directly to disposable people in India, Thailand, or Brazil.
It is the rationing of intangibles, and the rationing of access to the things that make people free, productive and their lives worth living that is the root cause of the problem. At the end of the logical chain, it is societal rationing that produces disposal people. And each nation is free to call the process any name it chooses. The point is that when examined closely, no one can argue, as the author would have us do, that the difference between the two is not simply just one of degree, rather than of kind.
American ghettos and Native American Reservations are also engaged in the same kind of human disposal processes as is true of Pakistan, India, Thailand, and Brazil. Those who doubt it probably have never heard of Katrina or watched New Orleans on CNN News. The tried and true liberal formula is to point a finger at one end of a long interconnected chain of logic that begins with some egregious sin like slavery in some "god forsaken" Third world country -- a chain that always ends in middle-class consumer goods, comfortable living and profitable investment portfolios in some equally far off First World Nation. Then one is required to pretend that there are no connections between the two poles; and worse yet, he must also pretend not to understand that it is "relative poverty" and "relative class status" that produces the sins no matter where one is along the chain. Slavery never exists in a social and economic vacuum as the author's arguments would lead us to believe.
The trick to the "liberal solution" is to sub-optimize the problem (otherwise know as to compartmentalize and remain in denial): Raise the issues, but not loudly enough to disturb either the existing global or societal arrangements, or that would probe too deeply into the economic systems and machinery that sustain the production of such disposal people. For if one probes too far, he is likely to find himself full-circle, staring himself in the mirror.
The beauty of the liberal solution outlined in this book however is that it offers much needed solace in reduced guilt for doing absolutely nothing. It keeps the game going. But in the end it is all a parlor trick, a mind game that yields benefits at both ends: Liberals get to feel good about what they are saying, but not doing, by offering piecemeal ineffective solutions, and the system of which they too are mere cogs in the wheel, continues to issue them benefits. And, most of all, the game moves along undisturbed.
As the Frederick Douglas' speech that the author cited in the last chapter of the book suggests, there can be no compromises with the kinds of evils as great as those that produce disposable people, whether one calls them "slavery," "bonded laborers," "indentured servants," "contract workers," "au pairs," "domestic servants." or "underpaid factory workers." Slavery is, as the author so carefully noted in this same section, just a matter of semantics.
Surely the author knows that there are no sub-optimal solutions short of revamping both the American and the global economy, both of which thrive on disposable people like a baby thrives on mother's milk.
Four Stars
 book review November 28, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A sensational and touchy topic being told in a powerful fashion. It's sad to see such catastrophic things are happening in such modern societies.
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