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Modern Slavery
Video

Modern Slavery

Kevin Bales
ideacity, 2015
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Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Eye Opening
  • Overview
  • Inspiring

Recommendation

Many may find Kevin Bales’s presentation disturbing and difficult to watch. Although most countries had abolished slavery by the end of the 19th century, the practice persists in every nation, bar none. Bales, an antislavery campaigner, relates several harrowing stories of contemporary slavery at work and describes the destruction such cruelty wreaks on communities and the environment. getAbstract suggests Bales’s account to policy makers and philanthropists, as well as to consumers, who have a social responsibility to be informed and to make ethical purchasing decisions.

Take-Aways

  • Cases of slavery exist in every country of the world, bar none. As of 2015, some 39 million people are enslaved.
  • Historically, slaves were expensive, long-term assets, so slave masters treated them accordingly. Nowadays, acquiring slaves is cheap, and slave masters regard them as “disposable inputs in economic processes.”
  • Slave labor renders tremendous environmental damage. If slavery were a country, it would rank third on a list of carbon emissions by nation, following China and the United States.

About the Speaker

Author Kevin Bales co-founded Free the Slaves, a lobby group that campaigns against slavery.

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