Discussion Prompt: Despite international agreements and national laws banning slavery, it continues in all parts of the world in many different forms. Slavery today includes: Debt bondage or bonded labor – poor people, with no other source of help have to take out loans from their employer to meet their basic needs and get trapped in an unending cycle of loans and impossible repayments; human trafficking – transporting or receiving people, who have been abducted or deceived with offers of good jobs, and then forcing them to work in exploitative conditions that they would not have chosen; descent slavery – some people are born into slavery because they belong to a group discriminated against by their society, their rights are ignored and they are treated as property; forced domestic service – Hidden away from public notice in private homes, domestic workers can suffer a range of abuses at the hands of their employers; and the worst forms of child labor – this may include debt bondage to pay off parents’ debts, commercial sexual exploitation or forced recruitment into armed forces.
As a consumer of international, and national, products that may or may not have been made at the hands of an enslaved individual, what are your responsibilities, if any?
