Book Review Symposium: Slavery In and Around Organizations

The promise of neoliberal capitalism is that it would unleash us all, offering ultimate freedom based on our freedom to act in the marketplace (Harvey, 2005). Capitalism and liberalism, which are compatible ideals, go hand in hand. Today’s owners and dealers of capital—the tech gurus, the Wall Street wizards, the influential industrialists, the investor class—famously tout the access that seemingly all have to economic autonomy, in such varied guises as entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship, free agency, gig work and the continuous development of the enterprising self (Fleming, 2017). In reality, many of the participants in the global neoliberal capitalist systems are by no means free. Many in the system are, at best, indentured servants to organizations or contractors (e.g., “wage slaves”) or, at worst, literal slaves. Most workers are the less-free and the un-free. The handcuffs of neoliberal capitalism are, akin to the hand that guides it, invisible to many of us, in the sense that we cannot see the constraints of the broader system on our freedoms (Perelman, 2011). But the handcuffs and their effects are also, horrifically, clearly visible to many.

A report released in September 2017 by the UN-affiliated International Labor Office (ILO) and the Walk Free Foundation estimates that, in 2016, there were 40.3 million people in some form of modern slavery around the world, in every country, on any given day. Females account for an estimated 28.7 million of enslaved people, about 71 percent of the total. In addition, one in four victims of modern slavery are below the age of 18 (Taylor, 2017). Modern slavery tends to occur under conditions of labor intensity, in low technology industries and low-skill service industries, situations where slavery presents an opportunity to abolish labor costs and drive profit (Crane, 2013). Susceptible work includes garment workers in the fast fashion industry, migrant workers in nail salons, small-scale construction and renovation workers, security staff who have been outsourced, seasonal employees in the hospitality industry, meat and poultry processing, and domestic and sex work (Lawrence, 2018). Such work is often characterized by distance between management and workers, whether subcontracted or gigged out, creating a grey space that allows diffusion of economic and moral responsibility. Threats of violence, debt bondage, physical abuse, constraints on mobility, and exploitive underpayment are but some of the practices that inhabit that space (Crane, 2013).

Governments are beginning to become more serious about addressing contemporary slavery. The United Kingdom has taken the lead, passing the Modern Slavery Act of 2015 requiring that British companies with a turnover of over 36 million pounds report incidences of slavery within their supply chain. Just in the last year, reported incidents in the UK rose 35 percent (Lawrence, 2018). France recently passed a law which requires companies with more than 5,000 employees in the country, or 10,000 worldwide, to publish plans outlining steps to identify human rights and environmental violations from their supply chains. Similar laws are pending in the Netherlands, Australia and Hong Kong, among other countries. Moreover, the UN Security Council adopted a resolution to crack down on human trafficking and modern slavery worldwide, calling on countries to adopt anti-trafficking laws, ramp up efforts to investigate and dismantle criminal networks, and provide greater support for survivors of slavery (Reuters, 2017).

In the realm of civil society, the Fight for $15, Jobs with Justice, Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Fair Trade, World Social Forum and Free the Slaves are but some of the movements that have gained traction in recent years. Even the elites at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year made a show of commitment, announcing a global fund with support from governments and businesses aimed at raising $1.5 billion to halve the number of slave workers in global supply chains (Guilbert, 2018). Despite these initiatives, however, governments and civil society groups lack the resources and systems for fully understanding and tracking the incidences and circumstances of the perpetrators and victims of modern slavery (Syal, 2018).

Where is the field of management and organization studies on these extreme and abominable forms of labor exploitation? Admittedly, modern slavery tends to be hidden, illegal, and thus difficult to research (Crane, 2013). But even theory and conceptualization of exploitive labor practices is lacking. Given the gravity of the issue, our intention with this book review symposium was to bring the topic of slavery in and around organization more prominently to the readership of this journal. This seems highly relevant, since a search for the keyword “slavery” as reflected in both title and abstract in Organization Studies yields a surprising score of “zero” (although it features in the main text of several articles). Still, this lack underlines the need for more systematic and dedicated attention to slavery as a key conceptual or empirical component within and beyond our discipline, a point we have already indicated before (Lindebaum, Pérezts, & Andersson, 2018). To this end, we invited four leading scholars, all working in the spaces of labor exploitation and approaching the task from different backgrounds, to offer their assessment of Siddarth Kara’s recent book, Modern Slavery: A Global Perspective.

Modern Slavery is the culmination of Kara’s sixteen years of field research, including interviews with oppressors as well as with those enslaved, in more than fifty countries around the globe. He takes a data-driven approach to understand the various manifestations of modern slavery (e.g., debt bondage, labor dehumanization, sex trafficking, etc.) and its tremendous scale in our global supply chains. Perhaps surprisingly, Kara finds that slavery is a much more profitable enterprise today than in the “old” world. Today, although illegal, slavery requires a very low capital investment and yields a very fast return. Hence, the expendability of human life is tacitly accepted by the current global economic order. Beyond Kara’s heart-wrenching portrayal of the inhumanities endured by the enslaved, he identifies numerous forces that allow slavery to persist today, and lays out a framework for addressing these forces and eradicating slavery.

The scholars we have invited to review Kara’s book have experience and passion in researching modern slavery. Jean Jenkins’ work has focused on industrial relations in insecure, low-paid working environments, with a specialty in the international garment sector, where the distinction between forced and voluntary labor is increasingly blurred along a complex and opaque global supply chain. Lidia Greco has published two books on global value chains and labor, both of which consider the implications of the new global organization of production on marginal workers. Michael Rowlinson’s research explores how companies use historical knowledge of the past in the present. He is particularly interested in the dark side of corporate history, and how organizations deal with their past involvement in war, slavery, and racism. Andrew Crane has been researching, writing, and advising about business and modern slavery since 2010, with dozens of scholarly and popular media articles as well as service on the Data Strategy Board of Transparency in the Supply Chain Report and the Development Committee of the Slavery and Trafficking Risk Template.

There is unanimous appreciation by the reviewers of Kara’s deep immersion into the lives of his subjects and his desire to expose these systems of cruelty. That said, each reviewer brings their own perspective on the text. Greco admires Kara’s forceful storytelling, but asks Kara to better problematize the issues that co-occur with modern slavery—poverty, depravity, cultural and religious traditions, among others—and dig further into the root causes of these issues. Jenkins applauds Kara’s powerful presence as a researcher, but also asserts that he could do better in placing his experiences and findings among those of his contemporaries, albeit reassuring him that he is not alone in his pursuit of justice. Crane pegs Kara as one of the “new abolitionists,” a label implying a belief that the eradication of modern global slavery is a moral crusade to be fought by heroic figures. From there, he challenges what he perceives as Kara’s neocolonial stance as a researcher and the implications of this stance on his research contributions. Nonetheless, he considers Kara’s work genre-bending and important. Rowlinson, too, is disenchanted with Kara’s self-involvement and tone, but instead highlights the political ramifications of Kara’s employment of the term “modern slavery” (rather than, say, “workers”) in terms of feasibility of change in the situation. Ultimately, there is an overarching question that prevails throughout each of the reviews: Can the issue of modern slavery be truly understood and remedied if it is individualized and framed as interpersonal domination by some over the many rather than viewed as an inherently functional aspect of the neoliberal capitalist system? To bring this functional systemic aspect of modern slavery to the fore, we see considerable opportunity for organization studies scholars to “follow the money”—in the spirit of “investigative social science” (Marinetto, 2015)—from sites of extraction or production to the sale of final products and associated revenues. In so doing, we can better understand—and counteract—the vast web of capitalist domination in and around modern slavery in all its forms.