Editorial: Forced labour legacies and modern slavery

Abstract

2 | International Union Rights | 28/3-4 EDITORIAL Editorial: Forced labour legacies and modern slavery This edition was envisaged as an opportunity to bring to the pages of this journal a long overdue historical reckoning, focusing on the history of forced labour and the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. It was a theme that concerned me during the editorial process for the 7th edition of the reference book Trade Unions of the World back in 2015. At that time I added this period of history wherever possible to all country profiles in the book. In earlier editions (which I did not edit) it was almost entirely absent. As I worked to add even more of this history to the 8th edition of the book in 2020 the eruption of interest in colonialism and slavery associated with the Black Lives Matter protests confirmed in my mind that there should be a special double edition of IUR journal addressing these issues. Wilf Sullivan opens this edition and questions the exclusion from narratives of Empire and colonialism of the acts of resistance that would later find echoes in the nascent trade union movement. He considers the anger expressed by Black lives Matter protestors and asks what needs to happen to resolve these deep grievances. Steve Cushion takes the discussion over to the financial exploitation of slavery and how legacies of inequality established at that time persist between peoples and between nations. He urges a united working class response that could link the issue of reparations to contemporary demands for climate justice. IUR uses its world map of labour rights to illustrate the global level of support for international legal instruments that outlaw forced labour practices. We zoom in with a region-by-region approach to consider the historical and contemporary issues in each region. The obvious outlier is China, one of very few countries and the only major industrialised ILO Member State that has not ratified either of the fundamental Conventions. Ratifications throughout Asia, however, are surprisingly poor compared to elsewhere. We hear from Masaomi Akiyama about the prospects for ratification in Japan and look at the recently repealed prison labour sentences for strike organisers that were until this year a barrier to that ratification. The question of forced labour in cotton production dominates across central Asia and in the Xinjiang region of China. Ultimately the story of cotton everywhere has been thick with human misery and exploitation for centuries. This was the crop that built the United States of America. Those who picked that crop were firstly slaves and later a discriminated minority trapped in cotton production under an apartheid system. By the 1960s US cotton was fully mechanised and the Civil Rights era had dawned. The crop has remained important to the US, which is still the world’s biggest exporter of cotton. US companies, NGOs and even the State Department are at the forefront of activism around forced labour in overseas cotton. Rocio Domingo Ramos explains the work to put pressure on the Turkmen, Uzbek and Chinese governments and the impact of the various ‘pledges’ to end sourcing in these regions while forced labour violations are thought to continue. There are signs of progress in Uzbekistan, ‘the law changed and now forced and child labour is considered a crime’ and ‘in the 2020 harvest, for the first time, the Uzbek Forum did not document any cases of forced labour’. But the Cotton Campaign (led by a former US State Department official) is unconvinced and the various boycotts continue. There are intriguing parallels with the rivalry between West and East India interests in the 19th Century, which urged customers to prefer ‘free made’ over ‘slave made’ sugar, which is the focus of the latter half of Eric Williams’s landmark book, Capitalism and Slavery, cited by several contributors to this volume. The East India interest was - of course – ultimately on the right side of history in that, but Williams showed to never ‘abandon [..] scholarship to sentimentality’ and to recognise that naked competition played its part even in that great struggle. His ability to celebrate the abolitionists as ‘a brilliant band’ alongside his acid takedown of hypocrisy in the abolitionist era...