Abstract
To the vast literature on labour bondage in South Asia, there is a new contribution—a treatise by a newcomer to this field of study. Siddharth Kara is a former investment banker who changed track to set himself up as a world expert on forced labour—as we come to know from a Q&A interview published in The Economist. 1 The author has apparently earned his credentials by roaming around the subcontinent over the last 11 years in order to map the wide diversity practised in human servitude. So far, he has abstained from going public on his field investigations, although not all the way. The book under review is part of a larger research project and was preceded a few years ago by another work focused on sex trafficking (Kara 2009), now followed by this one on, what Kara labels, ‘modern slavery’. As he clarifies right from the start of his odyssey, he is a man with a mission that took him all these years to complete. Moral outrage is the driving force of his crusade. There is nothing wrong with that banner—not being able to dispose freely of one’s labour power is a loud and clear signal of relationships of exploitation and subordination. In addition to acclaims from civil rights activists, several other endorsements on the book jacket also warmly commend the author’s academic ‘rigour and discipline’, his ‘meticulous research’ and ‘in-depth analysis’. When I beg to disagree, it is because I find insufficient substantiation for these judgements of praise about his scholarly exploits. Let me explain.
In the first place, the investigations carried out are not accounted for in rigorous and grounded empirical detail. Going for the broad sweep, the author has documented his investigations over a stretch of 11 years in 504 cases of labour bondage spread over the whole of South Asia and covering a wide range of employment avenues, such as bricks, agriculture, construction, carpets, stone breaking, bidis, shrimp, domestic, tea and one-and-half dozen more classified as ‘other’. The list, the author readily acknowledges, is not exhaustive and bears no relationship to the proportionate size of these industries in the total workforce. Of the selected cases, we do not learn how many are adults (males, females), children or their age, whether they are recruited individually or as a household, off and on (seasonal), for a longer duration or even indefinitely. Neither are we informed about the social identity and place of origin of labour held captive, number of hours at work, the pay rates and how wages are settled (advanced versus postponed payment modalities), when there is a middleman and when there is not, etc. The regional variation, which has to do with the way the state machinery has responded or not to bondage, remains much understated in Kara’s overview. The problem does not only lie in the lack of painstaking elaboration. We come to know that there were 18–20.5 million bonded labourers in the global economy by the end of 2011, of whom 84–88 per cent were in South Asia. This estimate is a possible International Labour Organization (ILO) statistic, but any source reference to back up and question this figure is lacking. Elsewhere, the number of ‘slaves’ in the same year for the world at large is stated to be ranging between 22.4 and 30.5 million, again a fake precision without even an attempt at specification. Too much is missing in these headcounts to accept the tally without further scrutiny. 2
In the second place, the data presented are not contextualised in a wider setting. Today’s bondage runs the whole gamut from rather mild to extremely harsh, in the former case by allowing the bonded worker a modicum of space to manoeuvre around and in the latter case, none at all. The nuances in categories and grades of labour attachment have wide-ranging repercussions for terms and conditions of employment as well as for how and when, by whom and to whom, wage settlement takes place. The need for contextualisation has another dimension, which is the distinction between past and present. In the non-capitalist peasant economy and society that South Asia was in the pre-colonial and colonial era, bondage had a different connotation than the one that has come to dominate after the fight for freedom from foreign rule was won. 3 While features such as power and status were crucial in the master–servant relationship of the agrarian past and attachment used to pass on from generation to generation, the bondage highlighted in Kara’s narrative is, first and foremost, an economic contract aimed to procure and tie down labour at the lowest possible price for as long as the work continues. It is what I have called the standing practice of neo-bondage today.
Bondage is an employment modality of the last resort to which workers at the bottom of the informal economy fall prey when they are unable to earn an income minimally sufficient to sustain themselves and their household throughout the year. Their predicament is the combined outcome of extremely low pay and not enough days of work for their subsistence all around. The contract may arise out of the need for consumption loans in the slack season, to cope with adversities (illness, death, loss of shelter), to pay for cost of life cycle events (marriage in particular) or redemption from debts incurred earlier. The bondage starts when proletarianised workers sell their labour power in advance to an employer or his agent and by going into debt, lose the bargaining power that they otherwise might have exercised to strike a better deal. The conclusion that the underclass of workers who lose their mobility to shop around are usually not forced into the unfree labour contract by brutal coercion, is an important one. But Kara does not endorse the argument that workers do so out of their own free will. He falsifies the assumption, quite rightly so, that voluntary engagement in a relationship of duress is based on a rational choice logic. To sell one’s labour power in advance and by doing that, to forfeit freedom, is to escape from a worse plight which Friedrich Engels (1957: 307) paraphrased one-and-half century ago saying that when labour is free now, it basically means free to starve. 4
The setting of bondage is an ideology of inequality, which makes subaltern communities, in particular, susceptible to systematic discrimination and denigration. While in other parts of the world, the underclasses could get emancipation and redemption from subordination, in South Asia, millions of people at the bottom of society have remained in servitude until today. Kara essentially blames the civilisational heritage of the region for keeping servile labour alive and points to the pivotal role of caste in the ancient record of slavery throughout the subcontinent. No doubt, the history of inequality is made manifest in the disenfranchisement of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes but, in that school of thought, the continuity from past to present tends to become overstated—as Kara does when he suggests that being beyond the pale has become internalised in the mindset of the subordinated. In his words:
In speaking with numerous dalit bonded labourers, many told me that bondage and servility were their divinely ordained fates, which they must perform dutifully if they hoped to accrue a positive karmic balance that may elevate them upward in the next life. The sedimented and centuries-old fatalism inherent to the caste system of ancient India is a deplorable anachronism in modern times (p. 20).
My comment is that bondage does not have its origin only in a doctrine of superiority versus inferiority and does not happen to be less prevalent in regions on the subcontinent where the Hindu social order is not the organising principle for social hierarchy. Missing in this explanatory frame is the fact emphasised throughout Kara’s discourse that ‘…the persistence of bonded labour in South Asia is driven by the ability to generate substantial profits at almost no real risk, through the exploitation of an immense underclass of systematically impoverished and vulnerable people’ (pp. 37–38). The argumentation implies a shift from civilisational exceptionalism to a discussion of the emerging political economy. The change in perspective means that the focus is now on the large contingents of land-poor and landless peasants being driven out of agriculture without opportunities of proper jobs with decent pay in other sectors of the rural or urban economy. On the basis of his broad overview, the author highlights 20 forces promoting labour bondage as it exists today in South Asia, and follows those up with 10 initiatives required to eliminate this inhuman employment regime. Next come a number of case studies that have the common feature that bondage is a very lucrative business. While the industrialists complain about the greed, indolence and other defects of their captive workforce, accusing them of lack of faith and breach of contract, the latter are fully aware of their exploitation. They seem increasingly willing to leave the ‘weapons of the weak’ stage behind them and prepare to fight over being severely underpaid and overworked.
While Kara’s narrative offers enough to draw this conclusion, it is clear that for all his empathy with the downtrodden, he has not become intimately familiar with the milieu of the bonded workers, neither in their habitat nor at the work sites where they can be found as long as their presence is required. The author’s meetings with them are incidental and fleeting, a series of short encounters providing him with useful information but which does not go beyond the level of instantaneous intelligence. What he calls field research—lasting for a total of 10 months spread out over a period of 11 years—is the outcome of passing by, or one-time visits, for which he has toured the whole subcontinent. He keeps his readers abreast with the details of his travels, for example, his camel trek for one week through the Thar Desert, venturing over the border with Pakistan in the hope to come across hari nomads. Kara is also not shy to share with us the discomforts he was made to endure:
After a dark, sweat-drenched night, the next morning I hired a driver with an air-conditioned car to take me to a few meetings in Dhaka, but the driver showed up in a car without air conditioning and said that the other car could come for twice the agreed price. I opted for a different driver whose car had air conditioning, but as fate would have it this car broke down in the middle of the street halfway through the day (p. 105).
Passages like this one give the book the imprint of a travelogue and not of a scholarly study published by a serious academic press. A product of investigative journalism is probably the best way to qualify his work.
No doubt, all his travails have been for a good cause: to bring the fate of bonded labour to the public notice. Or at least to reach out to American readership, an attempt made easier by calculating all prices, cost, profits, etc. in dollars. It may explain why Kara has not troubled himself to discuss how the theme of his research has been dealt with in the social science literature of South Asia during the past decades. Certainly, he does not omit to pay tribute to major activists in the landscape of human bondage, men such as Swami Agnivesh who have campaigned to broadcast and alleviate the plight of labour kept in servitude. The modesty shown in the company of these giants does not detract Kara from his missionary zeal, his acclaimed role as messenger of a story that, so far, has remained unheard.
I knew that one day I might be writing this story in a book and that very little good would have come to Ranaji and the other bonded labourers who contributed this narrative, other than some faint hope that one day, years from now, things may change for the better as a result of people learning about how they were being mistreated. It did not seem fair, or remotely good enough, given how much they had shared with me and how little I could offer in return (p. 83).
It is this mixture of a humble-cum-naïve posture which taxes my readiness to grant the author the dues he claims for putting on open record a tale that has, so far, remained covered up in a conspiracy of silence.
That verdict is a gross negation of the struggles that generations of bonded labourers have waged against the regime to which they are exposed. While busy writing this review (end of December 2012), I have kept track of a strike declared a few days ago in the brickfields around Haripura village in Rajasthan. Almost 1,000 workers took part in the agitation led by a union set up to improve terms and conditions of employment. Two days after the strike was called and had gathered strength, brick kiln owners came in vehicles and attacked the workers and their leaders. In preparation for violence, the petty industrialists had lodged a complaint against the union with the police and the local administration and they forced the workers to resume duty. In response, the strike organisers handed a list of 15 workers who wanted to be released from bondage to the district collector. It looked like a defeat. In many kilns, work had started again after the owners cajoled their workers with promises of higher wages. The district-level authorities were hand-in-glove with the owners and tried to pressurise the union to back down, blaming the activists for spreading unrest. But then a turnaround came, due to the intervention of some top-level bureaucrats. In a meeting called by the police department, the owners and union leaders settled the dispute and agreed to a major wage hike. 5 Cases such as this one are numerous and they show, in contrast to Kara’s narrative, that bonded workers also have agency and are not hesitant to confront their exploiters and oppressors. Indeed, the resistance has often met with failure, an outcome which results not only from the state machinery teaming up with the owners of capital, but also because the supply of workers who have to roam around for bare livelihood is much larger than the off-and-on demand for their labour power.
The overall recommendation Kara has for ending the rampant practice of bondage in South Asia is to change politics and policies in favour of the poor masses and to create space for them in mainstream society. Fair enough, in all its simplicity, a sensible advice but one that gives his crusade the character of a Don Quixote tour de force. Capital is a word missing in Kara’s description and analysis. His suggestion that the legal enforcement of a minimum wage and land redistribution are important building stones for better livelihood stands rejected out of hand. The ruling classes and state governments on the subcontinent, along with the transnational agencies, keep these countries relentlessly driving along the neoliberal road of market fundamentalism. It is clear that without a major change in the overall economic regime, both at the national and global levels, labour bondage is bound to stay. But is that really so? After all, time and again, we are reminded that the extent of poverty has come down and that, looking back on the misery in which their parents lived 30 years ago, many of the people close to the bottom of the economy would agree that they are somewhat better off today. Somewhat, and that is the problem because whatever trickle down of growth benefits can be observed, it is overshadowed by the ever-widening gap between the haves and the haves-not. As Reddy (2012) 6 has recently pointed out, using a more meaningful set of indicators than what the poverty line arithmetic is based on, the underclasses afflicted by multidimensional poverty stood at 470 million in 2004–05 or more than two-fifths of the total population in India at the time. My problem with the tale of a decline in deprivation is a different one. Underlying the spread of that happy news, seen as evidence that the promise of inclusive growth is being realised, is the assumption of a linear decrease in impoverishment. The suggestion is that slowly but steadily, the share of people being lifted out of destitution is going up. What I would like to foreground is the interrelationship between the increase in well-being higher up, which is inclusive also of the lower middle classes, and the sustained exclusion of large segments of the workforce which remain firmly stuck at the bottom of economy and society. Taking the low road to capitalist growth means keeping the cost of rough-and-ready labour not much above survival level. Bondage is the price paid for that route by substantial segments of the South Asian population which, because of their vulnerability, can least afford it.
In his documentation, Kara, for good reason, is preoccupied with the most squeezed part of the workforce: the people who have to mortgage their labour power to remain alive and while doing that, accept that they will be unable to redeem themselves and often also the next generation from the spiral of indebtedness. Brick kiln workers tend to be the offspring of parents who toiled likewise. Still, in highlighting their ordeal, a further contextualisation in the landscape of labour is required. Setting the men, women and children (who are the victims of bondage) apart from other categories coping at the broad underside of the informal economy would be to understate the dismal fate of an infinitely larger multitude of workers. Women slaving at home from early morning to late night, with on-and-off helping hands of other members of their household, in order to manufacture bidis, incense sticks, toys, garments, bangles, etc. are just a bit better off. These home-based workers may have some more bargaining space but their dependence on the middleman, from whom they get the raw material and to whom the finished commodity is delivered, is featured in a debt–credit relationship, which pre-empts the exercise of agency from below. It would not be difficult to identify other segments at work in a similar precarious condition. All said and done, there is no good reason to consider bonded labourers as a contingent in isolation from a vast mass of people exposed to a work regime of predatory capitalism that does not acknowledge the basic human right to a decent and dignified way of life. 7 The remedy against bondage and unfair labour practices at large is political struggle, the mobilisation of countervailing power to build up pressure against exploitation and subordination. That fight has a variety of stakeholders and the action they take or fail to take needs to be closely monitored.
The book under review at least can alert us to the need to wage the fight against labour bondage in the wider setting of globalisation. In his interview with The Economist, in response to the question whether bonded labour is an issue also in the global context, Kara’s apt answer is that due to the complexity of supply chains, consumers in faraway markets often do not realise that imported goods may be produced by labour tied down in debt. Although I am rather sceptical that raising awareness about such practices at the tail end of the supply chain will promptly result in a buyers’ boycott of these commodities, such campaigns could nevertheless be part of the multi-level struggle against labour bondage.