Slavery is not a thing of the past. There are still millions of people who are, in effect, enslaved: 'prostitutes, farm laborers, factory workers, or domestic servants'. Siddharth Kara thinks that dealing with the issue will be advanced by analysing slavery as a business.
Traditionally, sex trafficking has been treated as a human-rights issue, and fought by addressing the poverty and gender inequality that make people vulnerable to being enslaved in the first place. But Kara believes that an economic approach is the most efficient way to undermine the industry.
Obviously, one must welcome any new approach that helps to eliminate modern slavery, but analysing it as a business - at least judging by what Kara says here - leaves things, to my eye, in a rather familiar state.
Contemporary forms of slavery... all function on a simple economic premise: maximize profit by minimizing or eliminating the cost of labor.
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The minute [you] pull someone out of a sex slave condition, [you've] cut off all future cash flows. In terms of a sex slave it's 10, 15, 20, transactions a day, a week, a month, year after year. You've got to pull people out, care for them... and then prosecute and convict effectively. That means several things: fast track courts, judicial review, and an economic penalty regime that makes it uneconomic to be in this business. If you start to alter the landscape, then the perception by the offender is: This business doesn't pay. Right now the perception is: Huge profit, almost no risk, I'm there. This is about money: It's not cruelty for the sake of cruelty. I've met traffickers. Some of them are just mundane opportunists.
What is said to be the economic premise could surely not surprise anyone: minimizing costs. As for ways of dealing with the problem, they seem to involve one very traditional mechanism: intervention in markets by the law in order to protect people in their fundamental rights. So, yes, analysis of the business model comes into it, but the solution requires political and legal constraints on certain kinds of business. It relies, one could say, on the logic of a social control of markets.