Badges of Modern Slavery
| Date | 01 September 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12214 |
| Author | Amir Paz‐Fuchs |
| Published date | 01 September 2016 |
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THE
MODERN LAW REVIEW
Volume 79September 2016No. 5
Badges of Modern Slavery
Amir Paz-Fuchs∗
Notwithstanding the 19th century formal abolition of slavery as legal ownership of people,
modern slavery and forced labour have not been consigned to the past. In fact, their existence is
more widespread, and made more difficult to tackle due to the lack of formal, legal criteria. This
article suggests that reference to historical institutions reveals seven ‘badges of slavery’ that are
helpful in identifying occurrences of modern slavery and forced labour. These are: humiliation,
ownership of people, exploitation of the vulnerable, lack of consent, terms and conditions of
employment, limits on the power to end the employment relationship, and denial of rights
outside the work relationship. These constitute modern slavery, and distinguish it from other
instances of exploitative employment relations, however problematic. In addition, even where
the label of modern slavery is misplaced, the identification of particular badges of slavery in
contemporary employment relations may assist in highlighting their troubling facets.
It is hard for us to appreciate that in spite of great efforts made by the emancipators
and their successors, in spite of the revolution in public opinion as regardsall for ms
of slavery, in spite of the plethora of international agreements for the suppression
of slavery (some 300 of them), the problem of slavery in the twentieth century is
as great, indeed greater than it was in the 1830s.1
INTRODUCTION: BADGES OF SLAVERY AND THE LONG
SHADOW OF THE INSTITUTION
In Mohsin Hamid’s novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the narrator muses:
once admitted I hired a charioteer who belonged to a serf class lacking the requisite
permissions to abide legally and forced therefore to accept work at lower pay; I
myself was a form of indentured servant whose right to remain was dependent
upon the continued benevolence of my employer.2
This ‘indentured servant’, it should be immediately noted, was not a member
of an excluded caste working in a sweat shop in a developing country, but
∗Senior Lecturer, School of Law, University of Sussex. Jo Bridgeman, Tom Frost, Judy Fudge and
Lindsay Stirton have offeredvery helpful comments to this paper, for which I am thoroughly grateful.
1Lord Wilberforce, ‘Introduction’ in R. Sawyer, Slavery in the Twentieth Century (London: Rout-
ledge, 1986) vii.
2M. Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (London: Penguin, 2008) 178.
C2016 The Author.The Moder n Law Review C2016 The Modern Law Review Limited.(2016) 79(5) MLR 757–785
Published by John Wiley& Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
Badges of Modern Slavery
rather a Princeton graduate working in New York city for a major investment
firm. So could he seriously be considered an ‘indentured servant’?
The reason this question is not complete hyperbole is because, while trade
in slaves was made illegal in the UK in 1807, and across the British Empire
in 1834,3it is only one particular instance of slavery, namely the legal, formal
ownership of people, which has been eradicated. In fact, it is abundantly clear
that ‘slavery is not a horror safely consigned to the past’.4A few indicators to
that effect may be mentioned. In 2004, the European Parliamentary Assembly
stated that it
is dismayed that slavery continues to exist in Europe in the twenty-first century.
Although, officially, slavery was abolished over 150 years ago, thousands of people
are still held as slaves in Europe, treated as objects, humiliated and abused.5
In Britain, the Modern Slavery Act6(MSA) received Royal Assent on 26
March 2015, and the first prosecution under the MSA was launched in August
2015.7In 2016, the Associated Press won the Pulitzer Prize for its year-long
investigative report on slavery in the seafood industry in Asia.8Slaves were
forced to work 20–22 hours a day, were locked up, drank filthy water and ate
a few spoonfuls of rice, and were not permitted to contact their families. The
report led to the rescue of over 2000 slaves.9
So how we are to reconcile the existence of slavery with its formal abo-
lition? It has become clear that the very abolition of formal, legal slavery,
exemplified in the ownership of an individual by another, has obscured the situ-
ation significantly, particularly in the employment context.10 In fact, the term
modern slavery has been attached to discussions ranging ‘from prostitution to
child labour to illegal immigration to female circumcision to begging to organ
trading’.11 But it holds an even more uncomfortable place for those concerned
3British Emancipation Act 1834.
4K.Bales,Disposable People (Berkeley: University of California Press, rev ed, 2004) 3.
5Parliamentary Assembly Report (Recommendation 1663, Doc 10144) Domestic Slavery: Servi-
tude, Au-Pairs and Mail-Order Brides (2004) para 1.
6Modern Slavery Act 2015 c 30.
7F. Lawrence, ‘Lithuanian migrants trafficked to UK egg farms sue “worst gangmaster ever”’ The
Guardian 10 August 2015.
8 R. McDowell, M. Manson and M. Medoza, ‘Slaves may have caught the fish you bought’
The Associated Press 25 March 2015 at http://www.ap.org/explore/seafood-from-slaves/ap-
investigation-slaves-may-have-caught-the-fish-you-bought.html (all URLs were last accessed
on 31 May 2016).
9E. Htusan and M. Mason, ‘More than 2,000 enslaved fisherman rescued in 6 months’ Associated
Press 17 September 2015 at http://www.ap.org/explore/seafood-from-slaves/more-than-2,000-
enslaved-fishermen-rescued-in-6-months.html.
10 In Britain, the denial of the existence of chattel slavery is associated with Lord Mansfield’s
speech in Somerset vStewart (1772) Lofft 1, 98 ER 499. And yet Lord Manfield’s decision in The
ruling. As T. T. Arvind explains, ‘the entire transatlantic slave trade was based around treating
slaves as if they were chattel’, and Lord Mansfield was not willing to rule in a manner that would
have severe implications for the British economy – ‘“Though it Shocks One Very Much”:
Formalism and Pragmatism in the Zong and Bancoult’ (2011) Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 1, 29.
11 J. O’Connell Davidson, Modern Slavery – The Margins of Freedom (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015) 3.
758 C2016 The Author. The Modern Law Review C2016 The Modern Law Review Limited.
(2016) 79(5) MLR 757–785
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