Political Science

In Disposable People, Kevin Bales wrote that a new form of slavery is spreading like wildfire among nations who are deeply-entrenched in poverty as the world embraces globalization.  As an eye-opener about a phenomenon that remains a fixture no matter how hard humanity tries to hide or bury it, the book remains unequal in trying to underscore hopefulness in spite of the unavoidable pessimism that such difficult subject matter evokes.

In this lengthy discourse on modern slavery, Bales examined five cases of modern slavery where in four of these nations  Thailand, Brazil, Pakistan and India  poverty and globalization were the root cause.  Except for one, Mauritania, chattel slavery here remains a dominant socio-cultural part of their society.  In other countries like Thailand, prostitution or sex trade is another name for slavery here.  Charcoal makers, brick-makers and farmers tied in debt-bondage are the modern slaves of Brazil, Pakistan and India, respectively.  He was able to pool information about the current state and condition of slavery and poverty in these nations with the help of local people, who themselves are slaves, whom he interviewed for the purpose of his study.            

Today, slavery has a far wider extent more than any previous time in the slave history, and the book indicates that there are an estimated 25 million slaves globally (as of 2004) around 600,000 to 650,000 slaves were trafficked in America to work in farms, plantations, factories and more, accounting all these as a direct result of globalization and the need to survive.  Bales notes that the kind of change to stop poverty through globalization was neither fully realized nor fulfilled as these figures would attest.      

Moreover, Bales compares and contrasts the old and modern kinds of slavery.  Unlike modern slavery, the old was based largely on legal ownership and division on the basis of ethnicity or race.  According to him, people who later on become slaves today are the ones who are gripped by extreme poverty and not the result of any particular ethnic lineage.        

The issue of slavery is a phenomenal one and any willing writer may easily be tempted to sensationalize and exaggerate the experiences of slaves, blow up their stories, and become more subjective than objective.  Bales, however, succeeds in using the stories of the slaves to examine his assumptions about the new face of slavery and to analyze problems that remain unresolved over the years.

His tone and style of writing were clear from any trace to pontificate about the cause of the dilemma and identify who or what are to blame.  It may just be easy for Bales to become hopeless in writing the book, but he has mustered enough courage to reveal what are the causes of slavery in order to confront the challenges at hand.  He identified these as poverty, population explosion, globalization, and the chaos of greed, violence and corruption.  However, he remains faithful to his conviction that this form of barbarism can still be stopped though not an easy task.

The latter part of the book discusses some of the writers suggestions or recommendations to end the vicious cycle of slavery. As an advocate for change, the book hopes that education as a key to ending slavery must be a concerted effort which may be initiated not just by the government, but by almost all sectors of the society.  Education is indeed a big factor, however, there are needs to promote and campaign that change is still possible to eradicate slavery and increase the publics awareness of this social malaise.

Through the suggestion of this book that public education about slavery must be bannered, this book may be useful in opening peoples eyes about the reality that slavery is real and happening today in the world around us.  Public awareness, as suggested by Bales, must be coupled with action and concerted effort by people to become more vigilant and courageous in expressing what they feel about this global problem.  Increasing public awareness may help put pressure on government from domestic to international levels in order to address this issue.

Slavery may be here to stay for long or for perpetuity if people will not do something or if the different sectors of the society will not work together towards increasing action to fight slavery than merely lip service.  Although the subject matter discussed through the recommendations by Bales to solving the problem are exemplary for their depth, comprehensiveness and criticism of the worlds negligence why this issue continues to persist, Disposable People seems inflexible to adjust his assumptions about the extent of poverty and globalizations role in the rise of slavery in our times. Notwithstanding all this, it may well be regarded that his book will for long be used in furthering research on modern slavery and in investigating further how this social stigma may be stopped.