 Okay everyone, let's get going if we can. Good afternoon and welcome. My name is Michael Watts. I'm an emeritus professor here on the Berkeley campus and along with a couple of other people are on the OneTrop Committee. This is the second day of the OneTrop lecture. Some of you, I suspect most of you were here yesterday to hear Kevin Bale's outstanding lecture. What one of the audience yesterday referred to is a bracing lecture about the 45 million people currently enslaved and Kevin offered a both provocative and original accounting of the, not just the scale of slavery, of modern slavery, but what he referred to as the importance of understanding slavery in terms of intersectionality. I don't know whether he took that from Kimberly Crenshaw, but either way, it was referring to the ways in which slavery cannot be understood outside of its relationship to, among other things, gender, violence, the environment, and I suppose what we might call capital flows, contemporary capitalism, if you like. All of these forces intersect in a way that amplify the significance of modern slavery and he gave us a remarkable insight as regards what the footprint of modern slavery is if one looks at the types of activities which slaves are involved in and their environmental consequences in particular. So it was a very provocative talk and as is customary, we on the second day usually have a round table discussion where we draw upon some of the expertise of the Berkeley campus to, as it were, prime a conversation on the basis of that lecture and we're extraordinarily lucky today to have three people who I'll introduce in just a second. Let me say I'm going to not speak at length about each of the three interlocutors. All of them deserve much praise singing and their accomplishments deserve much more time than I'm prepared to give for the simple reason that you don't want to hear me talking about what they've achieved in their careers but rather what they have to say about Kevin's talk. So I'm gonna give you, as it were, a haiku version of their multiple accomplishments, so to say and I'm going to introduce each interlocutor in the order in which they speak. Beginning with Professor Arlie Hochschild, who's a professor emerita in sociology on this campus. Arlie, I'm sure, is known to all of you here. She's one of the great American public intellectuals. Her multiple books have all won numerous national awards for their significance addressing questions as a sociologist of the importance of particular sorts of challenges confronting modern societies. Her works, I think it's fair to say, are canonical books such as The Managed Heart on the Commercialization of Human Feeling, The Second Shift on Working Parents and especially, of course, a book that has now become foundational to understand Trumpism, namely strangers in their own land based on really, I suppose, what we would say, ethnographic work she conducted in rural Louisiana. Second speaker will be Enrique Lopez Lira, who is the director of the low wage work program in the Center for Labor Research and Education on this campus. Enrique's a labor economist and, of course, comes at the sort of content of Kevin's talk from that vantage point. But he's also an advocate and an activist and prior to coming to Berkeley, he worked for one of the largest Latinx civil rights organizations, Unidos US, but he's also been deeply involved in policy in various levels, including director for policy research in an organization, a hugely important organization called Western Progress. And for those of you who are regular watchers of CNN or Univision, he's often been recruited to speak on these labor issues on those and other public media. Eric Stover, co-faculty director of the Human Rights Center and an adjunct professor of law and public health on this campus where he's been for almost 30 years. Sorry, Eric, you don't look a day over 80. Eric is, of course, a major figure in the field of international human rights. He worked previously before coming here with Amnesty International, but his work in particular, I think, of in relationship to the breakup of Yugoslavia and the human rights atrocities that occurred there in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and so on. He was involved in the forensic DNA work, but his work has extended beyond that to questions of landmines in Cambodia. He's worked on human trafficking in California and he's made a couple of co-produced, a couple of hugely important PBS documentaries, one on Tulsa and the other on the war on terror. So three incredibly distinguished people coming at the modern slavery question from rather different, but complementary vantage points. The remarks will be delivered from the frontier in a more informal setting. We'll begin with Arlie followed by Enrique followed by Eric, Kevin will respond, and then we're gonna open it up to questions from the floor. Arlie, all yours. What a pleasure, what a pleasure, both Kevin and the company. You know, the last time that I think Kevin and I were together was when he was giving a talk on his book, Disposable People. And I remember there was a man in the audience who said, well, it's a very brilliant book and it's an important topic, but there are 689 million people in the world that are into our poverty. And why are you just focusing on this, and this 27 million modern slaves? And Kevin was very, very humane, very circumspect. I understand, yes, there are a great number of people in need, but these are my 27 million. I love that, I love that because it spoke to his dedication and that actually when we are dedicated and we really do effective work, we do have to focus. And I'd say, oh, there's so many problems, but no, this one I can work on and here's how. So I think we have a lot to learn from this, this my, and I understand his talk, which I wasn't actually able to be at, but I've seen, I had to give talk on my own yesterday, but that he is in fact taking this focus and broadening it, not letting go of it. But he's looking at its connection to everything else. And his 27 has now moved to 35, 45, 45. And so just to recap what he's telling us here is that this is a lot of people who are enslaved, it's today, they are everywhere. And not just one locale, they are connected to their captive, they're in unlikely places, protected forest areas and they are connected to industries that we know in the form of products that we, buildings that we move and live in and cat food that we buy at the store and shrimp, frozen shrimp that we eat for dinner, charcoal that heats the steel mills in the Brazilian Amazon. And the charcoal is harvested from there. Prostitution, the prostitute next door that you don't know. So what he is doing is I think lifting a veil over something that is not known or focused on and he's showing its connection to the place where we live and the issues that we care about. And I think his focus here is to take the idea of intersectionality from an analysis of where it is and how it operates. But to take that idea back into movement making, what are the different movements in the West and non-West that we could tap into to create a larger geography of empathy as we were talking about it, dinner last night. So I have three questions I wonder about that I love your wisdom on. The first has to do with actually causal links between the growth of domestic slavery and the decline of the price of the slave. So you gave us the figure that an 1850 and 19 year old field worker would be worth, what would be $45,000 in today's money, which is a lot of money, but that later today would only be like a hundred dollars. So what we have is a cheapening of the labor, but a growth of laborers. And so as I always learned about the cause of slavery, always had to do with those slaves being worth so much. So the higher the price or the higher the worth of the laborer, the more exploiters exploit. But what you're saying is actually these things are not related that actually as the laborer becomes cheaper and in way less of an incentive to exploiters. The exploitation still goes on. So that's a disconnect, I'd love to conundrum, love to hear you address. The second thing is, and I hope this doesn't overlap with what Rick can be raising, but even if we do free all the slaves, have we gotten them? Because the slaves could be liberated tomorrow, but then they would just be moved into low paid workers. So maybe I'll leave it there, but you're the expert on this. But that's something that occurred to me. And the third question is about activism. And I think it's an amazing idea to take slave labor as a problem to focus on, but to look at its connection to climate. So there we have climate activists, which are among young Americans, for example, as a group, prime issue, and pollution related to climate, but not the same. That too, there are people concerned about that, that could become concerned about slavery once they learn about it. Exploitation of women. Again, there's a constituency, feminists and others that could be tapped and child protection advocates. So what one sees is a bunch of different moral constituencies and the question is how to pull them together. So after you've succeeded, let's, and what they would do is try and get a UN declaration, let's say, and some kind of international treaty. You can each nation could make declarations of opposition to this. So you would need this collection of people addressing in one way or another, anyways, these issues. So I've been working in my own recent research with the far right and I was thinking, well, what would they make of this? They would be against it, human slavery actually, especially evangelicals and especially female, prostitution, forced prostitution. So that's a group that would have nothing else in common with all the other groups that I mentioned, but it's a possible, I mean, would take some high creativity, but that's an interesting thing. There are people I've met who would, who were the last people you would meet here in Berkeley, but who have genuine concerns for this? But what would they do with climate? No, they would say that's for another, no, the left made that up. Contamination, they would say, no, that's the right, we're tough, Mother Nature's tough, you got it, jobs, jobs, jobs. And what they would do with child protection, they would say, yes, close to home. So you've got one kind of constituency, but I guess what I would love is your thinking on how to bring this group together. And I got to thinking, what are the models we have for a kind of come together activism? And I can think of quite a few who bring things together. There is a man named Sakit Soni who works with undocumented laborers who clean up after hurricanes in the South and West among people who vote against him for the wall and who come to appreciate these experts now and he puts them in special uniforms and sets resilience workers and there's respect for them. So he's working in that way. So we need to look at the heroes. People who've done this thing, who don't just stick in their bubble but who get cross-liens is going. There is Deborah Gould at Santa Cruz, who's gotten gay and lesbian activists together with conservatives on homelessness. And if we look at history, there are feminists and anti-slavery activists who've gotten together. And Thomas Clarkson, my husband, Adam has written a book, Buried the Chains, in which two formerly disparate religious groups that the mainstream Protestants and the Oddball Quakers, you know, that would take their hats off unless it was before God. And got these groups together. And together they were dynamite in a way they separately, they were not. So that would be my third question for you. Thanks, Arlene. Thank you. Thanks everyone for being here and thank you for having me. I agree with Michael, it was amazing presentation, sobering, but very important work. I had a chance to have dinner with Kevin and others last night. And so we talked a little bit about this but I'm gonna make the points again because I want the audience to hear them and part of our role is to get the audience thinking about this thing and engaged. And so they can have some interaction with Kevin. So I'll repeat some of those points, but and what I have really are thoughts, not really questions for you, but thoughts and trying to tie it to some of the work that we do at the labor center, particularly in my program at the Low-Wage Work Program. So first I'll start with a couple of things that surprised me about Kevin's lecture. One was the map, right? Just the global scale of this problem, no country is free of this problem. It's just a matter of magnitude of the problem but it's a problem everywhere. And that was really astonishing to see. The second is the drop in the price of slaves and I may have some thoughts in your question also. And so I'm gonna talk about some of these thoughts in light of those two things that surprised me but then also in terms of other dimensions. So I wanted to start with the slavery definition that you mentioned yesterday and I think I have it right, but correctly. It's a relationship in which one person is controlled by violence through violence, the threat of violence or psychological coercion has lost free will and free movement, is exploited economically and paid nothing beyond subsistence. That's not fair. That's the old one. Yeah, okay. Okay, the one that I mentioned yesterday as well is especially the one that's based on the 1926 League of Nations. This one has become the generalized accepted definition which focuses, it's not, none of that is negated but the key concept is that whether a person can be treated as if they are property according to the indicia of property law. So if you can buy someone, if you can sell someone, if you can control, if you can leave them to your children, if you can take out a loan against them or anything that we actually is our property, we can destroy if we choose to. Thanks for clarifying that. I don't think it negates sort of the odds that I have which are some of the workers that you mentioned and that we deal with don't fit every single aspect of those either of those definitions but there's enough overlap that I think that you can think about the problem a little broader than just the property definition or the physical threat definition, right? It's I'm thinking about migrant farm workers, home care workers, workers that meet packing plants, even restaurant workers, right? So in particular the back of the house, there's a lot of focus about restaurant workers at the front of the house, the waitresses and the hostesses but the dishwashers on the cooks and during COVID, there was talk about the great resignation but a lot of the back of the house was not resigning they had no option but to go to work anyway. So I'm thinking about the domestic workers, landscapers, farm workers here in the North Bay in 2019 when the fires came and thousands of residents fled but those domestic workers stayed to do the work and the farm workers stayed to the work under very dangerous conditions. The question is why, why did they stay? I think of the farm workers now in Monterey County with the Power River flooding, right? And they've lost everything because of the floods including their housing but yet they're expected to go to work the next day. And so I think about a lot of these workers especially the undocumented migrant workers, you can think of the broken immigration laws as that coercion that's keeping them in that kind of work, right? So a lot of these workers are victims of violence when they cross and then once they're here but also the psychological coercion from the immigration system that allows their economic exploitation and earning subsistence wages, if at that. I'm also thinking about low wage workers who are deemed essential like I said during the pandemic without an option to work from home without health insurance, forced to raise their lives and their families every day and is the system we have in place that also does not provide guaranteed health coverage so everybody, many states they believe is not available to everybody and these are the, these serve as a stick the psychological stick that keeps them in some of this work. Think about right to work laws in some states, state fiscal policies that reduce social safety net, the inadequate care system we have all of these serve as those coercion sticks that allow these workers to continue to be economically exploited during the pandemic and today. I also think about the unintended consequences as an economist have to do this the unintended consequences of economics particularly in the plastic economics and their influence in the 1890s especially in terms of public policy with regard to free trade. And I wonder that free trade push of the eighties and nineties what role it played in the current state of the modern slavery that you talk about and I think this gets some of your thoughts, right? These trade agreements are okay and I think we talked about this last night these trade agreements are often sold as a false choice. Well, if not for that swept shop what would these workers do in these countries, right? And this free trade expands and the expansion I think has increased the demand for slaves. So Kevin talks about the price of slavery going down and he talks about the fact that we have a billion people now and so there's more slaves, if you will. So you're talking about the supply has gone up, right? The supply has gone up, if the supply goes up, right? Then the price goes down but the demand for slaves is also going up because when you have these countries that are under develop engaging free trade agreements now there's an opportunity for unscrupulous employers to try to get these workers and treat them as slaves in order to extract their labor so they can make profit in the free trade system. But if the demand is going up and the supply is going up and the price goes down that means that the supply has gone up way more than the demand for slaves. But I raise that point because we should be appalled that the demand has gone up and the cause of these free trade agreements and this neoclassical belief in free markets that has caused some of these situations to occur. I also think about in terms of you had a graph that showed that the higher the prevalence of slavery the lower the GDP. And I think we talked about it last night and there's a lot of research showing that economic growth happens in freer systems than not. But I also wonder, and we talked about this also last night I wonder in your lecture you talked about how small in terms economically small these the country of slavery is but in the countries where it occurs I wonder how what portion of the GDP is that industry then that is having slaves, right? So the 55,000 brick kilns industry, right? What percentage of GDP in those three countries is that? Because that determines the political will to do something about it. I also wonder about the role of technology. Is it a tool to free people from slavery or increase the bondage of workers? So I think about sex workers. You can make the case that because of the internet some of these sex workers were able to free themselves from their camp and other entrepreneurs and have their own website, right? But you can also think about the way employers are increasing using algorithms and data to lower wages, worsen working conditions, increased rate of race and gender inequities and decreased worker power. So I'm curious on your thought about technology's role in this. And then the last point I'll make is that the work Kevin and the right lab has been fantastic, amazing. But given the global scale of the problem in your math, we need a hundred or a thousand Kevin's and a hundred, a thousand right labs producing this research that will move not just the Bill Clinton's of the world, but will also move the local officials who many times are the ones who have the power to do something about it, but they turn a blind eye to it. Yeah, wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. Well, Kevin, get ready for an, I'm gonna add more to the avalanche here for you. Thank you. First of all, I wanna thank Michael Watts and the organizing committee. It really was an exceptional talk yesterday. We went into the Never Never Land. It was quite overwhelming, but really important. I also wanna mention that at the Human Rights Center tomorrow, we are going to have lunch at 1235 where Kevin will come and be at the center. We're at 224 Piedmont Avenue right across from the stadium. It's an old house, and we wanna bring students in particular. So if you know any students who wanna come and meet and meet with Kevin, that'd be great. So first of all, full disclosure. Kevin and I go back actually to 2003 where we first met. And we worked with a colleague in the law school and a team of students here at Berkeley and conducting the first study of human trafficking in the United States. And it was quite an exercise. We got it done. And one of the, our report which you can look up online is called Hidden Slaves. And it was the Human Rights Center with Free the Slaves, Kevin's organization at the time. The reason I mentioned this is kind of interesting because yesterday Kevin's focus was so much on labor, less on sex trafficking. And it would be interesting to talk about that too. One of the things we did when we began the study was we realized this was under the Bush administration. And if you recall, there was a lot of chest pounding about sex trafficking, but not about other labor sectors that were being affected. And so we really wanted to focus on those other sectors. Why? Because it's often the hidden trade here in the United States. You will get trafficking that's coming up from Central America that goes to Florida. It's just citrus where you can hide people away. You can hide people away on poultry farms here in the United States as well. So this idea of exposing that this issue is touching on so many aspects. So also I wanted to mention that at the center we continued to do, we did a study in Los Angeles and one in the Bay Area looking at human trafficking. And we did, if I can shout out, that we helped write the California Human Trafficking Law, which was passed. And this was in 2004. Today, one of our colleagues at the center is focusing on sex trafficking. She's focusing on San Francisco, Julie Richero. And what she's looking at, and this is something to think about in the trafficking slavery area, the way in which these traffickers, it's something we found, the traffickers themselves, are very good psychologists. And they are aiming at foster care, particularly group foster care. That is a big issue. And the question becomes, how can you work with the foster care system to protect particularly those young women and young men who can get brought into sex trafficking? One last thing that happened actually before I came yesterday to Kevin's talk, had a conversation with somebody who works under the Flores Agreement. The Flores Agreement was passed in the late 1990s, which gave access to a group of lawyers here in the Bay Area, access to migrant children in detention. And we're talking about some possible, perhaps PBS news hour pieces we might work on. And it was very interesting because she mentioned, her team actually goes into detention facilities around California, along the border, states, and so on. And there, I just thought it passes to you, Kevin, as well, is that what they're starting to see of the migrants they're visiting in detention facilities are indigenous migrants that are coming up from Central America. And the big question is, is this an effect of climate change? So we're even seeing that those communities in Altiplano and Guatemala, the people, these young people are now coming to the United States because they can't work in the fields like they could there. And you may have seen there was a very good New York Times article recently about the surge in migrant, young migrant labor trafficking going on. So I may, I want to just end with three questions. And these are kind of practical things, but I thought since at the Human Rights Center, we have an open source investigations lab as well, and hope to collaborate with the rights lab. Is the rights lab where you're doing this work, are you able to work in the countries where you're seeing slavery with universities or groups there to train them in using these open source investigation techniques? Is there any effort there? Cause I think this is really important that while a lot of our tech expertise is coming from here, except for the banks closing of course, but it's how can we work in with local, with universities in countries or NGOs in countries where slavery is taking place? The second is kind of shifting too, is asking how have you thought about do you work with law enforcement? And it's easy to think, well, we show how terrible this issue is, the problems and so on, but at some point you're going to have to engage with law enforcement and what are the challenges there? Have you had any experiences, anything to regain? My last question and of course that goes to this point that Arlie was mentioning, the geography of sympathy, can you work with law enforcement on these issues and so on? The third question is one of packaging and that is all this wonderful research you've done it's something we all face is, and this comes actually from the Logan symposium that we have here on campus with the journalism school. We had a speaker and he was a journalist from Sao Paulo in Brazil and he focuses on the Amazon basin and his journalism, his team, they work on this, but one of their biggest challenges is how do you get people in the cities in Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo or wherever to really care about what happens in the Amazon basin? And so what have you learned? What are the challenges? What can you share with us about how you package this information and not only so it appears in the Guardian of the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, but how do you package it to take it to government officials? How do you actually move into that geography of sympathy and go to politics and persuade people? So that, I'll end my last question. Thank you. I think I'll go back the other way. If that's okay. This is a lot guys, thank you, this is a lot. But I'll try to hit most of the things we've been talking about and probably in reverse in some ways, packaging for one. That wasn't Leonardo Sakamoto, wasn't it, that you were working with in Brazil? No, okay, he's also a key player with us and has been doing anti-slavery work there and environmental work in Brazil for a very long time. Talk about an old chestnut if you're a university professor is how do you turn your work into something that reaches everybody? In the UK, they beat us over the head with this because every university is competing against every other university and they actually measure our sound bites, our newspapers and all this kind of stuff. So we have people within the lab that push this information out all the time trying to get it out there. But does it click, does it bite? And particularly does it bite as the winds of politics keep blowing back and forth? So when you say do we work with police, the answer is yes, we work extensively with police and very senior police. And you may have heard of Teresa May who was the prime minister. She's now a member of the rights lab. And she was of course the home, before she was prime minister, she was home secretary which is the head of law enforcement and the head of courts and all that kind of thing. And was the person who made, brought in the modern slavery laws some years ago. But she's not of that current government today and the government today is one that she's standing up as a conservative and denouncing over and over in parliament because even though she's right wing, she's not a lying bastard like the prime minister, right? This is the short answer, right? And because there's a corruption that's occurred there. So I think the tricky answer is the one that I don't know the answer to except that we just keep plugging at it. I know you plug at it, we plug at it, we plug at it. And in some ways, maybe we need to be reaching out to donors to say, can you buy us the best possible public relations outfit to take us on or something? Because most of us don't know how to do it any better than we do, if that makes sense. I mean, I'm not bad at it I think because I can push popular readable books out I hope but can I go on all the talk shows and swing people? No, I'm not sure I can do that. Now I can't spend that much time on maybe seeing one of these questions. But one of the things I wanted to mention is that you were talking about how sex trafficking is a very important zone and people are still hooked on it and like that and it runs parallel and that's absolutely the case. But one of the things that we pushed hard and we've pretty much achieved on the other side is to stop using this term sex trafficking because it sounds a bit racy. It's always given this impression of abused lovely young women or something like that and we talk about people who are enslaved into commercial sexual exploitation. It's more syllables but we try to say no, this is about the enslavement of human beings into commercial sexual exploitation so that we get the point across as opposed to a funny picture. And it helps, it helps. And I have to say that it also helps when we talk to the police and to government about kids in foster care who are also in the UK being targeted by groups. And there's something in the UK at the moment that's called the county lines problem but what it's all about are primarily drug gangs who lure children into their ambit and then use them for drug delivery, drug transport. They're basically little mules that cross from county to county in England and they're used in that way. So it's, and they're sometimes out of foster care or out of state care and like that. I think the right side has a long way to go in terms of we do a good job now but we're all facing that ability to translate everything that we do especially some of the crazy ideas that we might have and some of the ones that are really tough because I have colleagues who are so far ahead of me and things like machine learning and the heading toward artificial intelligence and working out projects that I don't understand unless I sit a long time with them and have them simplify it for me and I think how do we tell people about that as well? That's a tough one. The notion that migrant kids would be coming up from Central America because of environmental change doesn't surprise me in the least. We see this in Europe as well and we see this across Africa and certainly places, well, you've worked in Africa, I've worked in Africa, but I remember seeing places in Burkina Faso where desertification meant based on global warming where literally a tide of sand was moving across grasslands. The desert was simply a true sand desert, it was moving and moving and then it would engulf a village and then it would engulf another village and I met people from those villages in the Ivory Coast over the border who were then being caught up in highly exploitative agricultural work and like that. So yeah, I'm certain of it and not least as well because we've talked a lot about how people who are enslaved and certainly in the Americas and certainly in South America in highly destructive work in cutting down protected forests. I mean, that's the most obvious when you have enormous protected forests like the Amazon which is now after Bolsonaro right on the edge. It's right on the edge in terms of its ability to be the great carbon sink of the Western Hemisphere. There's been so much cutting under Bolsonaro that the climate scientists are saying, this is close, it may obviously it'll still absorb carbon but it won't absorb the amount of carbon that we needed to absorb to actually reduce and keep things in the balance that we want. Now, which ones am I leaving out of what you were asking about, I wonder? Oh, I'm thinking about that ILO report we did together. That was so interesting and I learned so many lessons from it and some of the lessons had nothing to do with what I learned from you and from Laurel and others but was in the politics of it because one of the things that was mentioned was what about these international political zones? That piece of work was originally commissioned by the International Labor Organization and there was a chap who I had known at Anti-Slavery International who had been a worker in international labor for a very long time, his name was Roger Planch. He'd gone to the ILO and had taken hold of their forced labor space and he'd begin to commission this kind of work and we carried out this work and then he handed this into the head of the ILO who put it in a drawer and tried to suppress it and it was the first clear portrait and what is this about? And they said, well, the United States is our largest funder and the head of the ILO said to Roger there but passed to us, if we offend the United States of America and its government they'll cut off our money and if they cut off our money the International Labor Organization will collapse which simply takes us into that space where you have to actually try to do these things at a very large scale but if you do you end up running it head on into groups like the World Bank or the ILO sometimes they're behind you sometimes they're not and so forth. I actually got two senators to call him. One left, one right, right? Sam Brownback from Kansas, Paul Wellstone from Minnesota about as far apart as you can get and didn't do a thing but I had worked with the UN and the ILO before and I had put something into the contract they sent us that said if they didn't publish it we would have the right to publish it separately when we put that in there and that's how we got that out but it's a very, one of the things is that somebody last night was saying, well, what the UN we've got to get the UN behind us but the UN is like the feudal system, you know it's a bunch of little duchies and fiefdoms and they are constantly struggling with each other and that makes it harder to truly mobilize the kind of mobilization we need. Now let's look back to Enrique the drop in price. It's so blatantly obvious how deeply the price has fallen that it's actually hard sometimes to grasp but you're touching on all and it varies from place to place, you know it's not just about the glut of human beings but it's about the glut of people neglected within societies as well, right? So if you're in a context where people are literally treated as if they have no rights and India is a great example of this, right? We have what seems to be a constitutional democracy in India but we have this caste system that is one of the most racist things you could ever believe in and we're not even talking about the people on the caste system not the people at the bottom we're talking about the people who are in the group below the bottom and then the people who are below that there's two more layers below below, right? When you get down to what are called the tribals right and so forth, yeah and below what used to be called the untouchables the Dalits, they're lower but there's even lower and I was working in that space just recently and I found people were shocked to learn that in just the way it was in Mississippi in 1955 you know, a Dalit can't drink from a water fountain public water fountain without being assaulted if they've seen to do it, they'll be meeting on this I mean, we're at that level of racism and we think that's in the past but it's not and what it means is that that population is systematically pushed lower and lower and lower and nobody literally politicians don't care about what happens to them so it's easy to say we can put them there and they can have those problems and we can build up in the other direction but also there's something about mechanization in all this as well because a lot of the people who are caught up in these lowest jobs that require no thought or they're grim, they're dirty, they're dangerous, they're demeaning jobs and well, I'm gonna tell you the thing that clicked this in my mind quite a few years ago but it was when I went to a quarry and I saw families that were enslaved and they were making sand with hammers out of sandstone and I thought and it wasn't, I mean, that's horrible but I thought also how can you make money out of handmade sand? I mean, sand is ubiquitous, right? There's enough sand in the world we don't need to have children beating stones to make sand and I realized, well, you can only do this if labor is free, is fundamentally free but just a tiny input of food and you've got it. Now in those zones where you can still do that and you can get away with it if there's impunity and you can just run roughshod over a group of people who have been chosen to be run roughshod over and then you can make that happen and of course, one of the things that we see is that occasionally there are these land-owning families and I'll go back to Indi again who's when the sun comes along and he's been off the university or something, he'll say, dad, we don't need to do this anymore. We can actually buy a Japanese sand crusher machine for $2,000 and we don't have to have all these people anymore. Now then they'll just dump them, yeah. But, and it's the same with bricks and all that kind of stuff. You can actually buy this equipment but then it's also true that we've now crossed to 8 billion people on the planet and you have these vast numbers of people who have been excluded economically and from the education and political and representation system what can, or are you gonna be able to do to lift them up? Right. Get them to replant. Yeah. Trees. Pardon me. And the free trade part of it is absolutely the great part of this as well. You see this all over South Asia, Southeast Asia, down into places like Malaysia and Borneo and Guinea and I'm thinking about fishing and forestry and then the free trade where they've removed the crucial forest that are the carbon sinks and then replaced them with some of these basic crops that are just highly depleting of the soil. They are not doing any carbon exchange to speak of and so forth. And they use the indigenous labor to do that. And there's virtually no control over wages or required laws and things like that. I mean, sadly, we're the ones who get to benefit from that because of the things that the palm oil for example that is both ecologically damaging and tough on the workers and the cost of, one of the reasons it permeates the foodstuffs in North America is because it's so inexpensive. And it's inexpensive in part because the labor cost is close to zero. So tech, good and bad, right? And, but one of the things you won't find is people who are enslaved actually like building computers, right? I mean, the work done by people in slavery is virtually all at the lowest possible level. And it's about really bringing a lot of that to an end but also having the right types of response about how do you bring it to an end in a humane way? When I was a small boy, it was right at the end and I come from the South and it was right at the end of when the mechanization of cotton occurred. And because when I was a wee, wee lad, there were, and there were black schools and white schools. The black schools would be shut at harvest time and the white schools stayed in session and all the black kids would be moved out into the fields to pick all the cotton. But then the combines came and all of those families were, in, you know, they were just impoverished even more than the impoverishment they had before because they couldn't even have that work. They didn't, it was literally weren't needed. And then of course part of that was the great push that meant where I was from, my family were from, that toward Chicago because that was directly north and the movement and the migration. But it didn't happen until much later that any government tried to reach in there, actually it was Clinton who tried to reach into places like the Mississippi Delta and say those people who had been under that total control, let's now find a way to at least build housing that's worth living in for the people who stayed behind and so forth. You know, they've asked a number of questions to the point that I could talk for three or four hours and I don't think that's what you want me to do. So I'm just gonna quickly go to Arleigh and try to think about, in some way you're asking, how do we build the united way of anti-slavery? Or, and of course if it were the true united way, it wouldn't be the united way of anti-slavery. It would be the united way of the liberation of the planet because it would be about liberating our ecology and how we do our education. And it would be a much wider, larger kind of push and pressure along. And I'm not sure. And I think I have to read your book, which I haven't yet, the one about the right wingers in part because one of the things that I've often felt a little bit of dismay about is how the fragmentation of ideas and the polarization of ideas have made me feel like how on earth are we going to crack through to this space to at least a point where there's enough generalized acceptance, understanding a kind of central kind of thinking that would help us move in a direction that would be about fostering rights, sustenance, growth and all those things, right? And I honestly don't know. I honestly don't know. And I said last night, I'm pathologically optimistic to the point that my love life alone has been chaotic, right? But that's over a long time, say. But the point being that I'm normally completely ready to take on and be positive in all directions. And yet this context that you were writing about, I find just so challenging and hard to think through. So I'm hoping you're gonna lead us there. It was kind of what you were saying about the people who have stuck at this space a long time. And it's interesting that in fact, you mentioned Thomas Clarkson and he's in some ways a hero of mine. And you won't have known him unless you've read Barry the Chains, but he was a university student and had won this special prize and he was an orphan in a way. His father died and he was about to launch on this fantastic career and go straight up British society. This is in the year 1785. And then he's this prize that he's won is because the essay, it was an essay contest. And the essay question was, is it moral to enslave others against their will? And he took that on and didn't know much about it, but and this is remember slavery is legal. Britain is making the equivalent of billions from the transatlantic slave trade. It's all over the planet, but he studies hard. He works hard. He wins the prize and which is would lift him into the government positions and church positions and realizes he can't, he can't take those jobs. He's got to listen to his heart and his mind and his conscience and he goes and meets up with some Quakers and some other Anglicans. And before you know it, they founded the very first NGO in human history, this committee for the abolition of the slave trade. And there's 12 people sitting around a table in a bookshop and they invent the non-governmental organization, the very first one. And which is now grown over the years and is still with us. And now it's called Anti-Slavery International and it's still based in London and all like that. But the thing with Clarkson was that he was, he was 21 years old when he made that decision. And he was, he stuck at it until he died at 86 or seven and became friends with Frederick Douglass. He came to the United States. He went to other countries. He's one of the most boring writers I've ever read in my life, but he could talk and he could organize and he stuck with it and he rode his horse more than 40,000 miles a year to go to teach and train and inspire and so forth. Now. He got off his horse on his way to London to meet the Quakers and that's when he thought, I've got to spend my life on this. And he spent his life on it. He absolutely spent his life on it. There's something about it, right? That when you say, there's something so fundamental and basic about slavery, right? It's just so simple, you know, it's like being against, you know, deal pickles when you don't want them or something. I mean, it makes it easier to make it happen. And I think that's one of the reasons that we hold on to us and like that. But there have been others like that, absolutely. And I just hope if we could all feel a little bit of that same notion, even if we don't have to live it out every moment, but every day we have that like inside us a little bit and we say, oh gosh, these shrimp. I've heard about this, right? Maybe I won't buy these shrimp, right? Maybe I'll make sure they're from somewhere else and all of those little tiny things that we could do, they would kind of make those turn into little streams and into rivers and all that. I barely touched what you talked about, but I can see the body language saying, we only have two and a half hours left to..(audience laughs and coughs loudly.) Castro length lecture. Thank you, that's great. I'm gonna suggest that we take two or three questions from the floor and anyone should feel open to observing, commenting in any way possible and then we can maximize our time if that's okay. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So questions, please. So we have a person to look, thank you. Charles Woods. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. But my question is, I think if we agree that everything is connected and the bug that we rest on is the ripple effect going all the way to the inverted pyramid in the form of suicide, deaths of despair, for instance. Is there a way to say we're all connected and yes, there are people in the sewers but you may be up on the top of the mountain but nonetheless, the emotion reaches you in the form of suicide rates. Is there a connection? Yes, what is the rate of suicide in the 45 million compared to China and the US, for instance? Oh, that's an interesting question. Can I just take, I'm gonna take two or three questions and then you don't have to answer, respond to each of them but it means that we can get more feedback. Sir, please. Sometimes when you're trying to solve a problem, the best way to solve it is to make the problem larger and not smaller because you begin to bring in other constituencies, I think Arlie was going in that direction if you somehow figure a way to bring in the right and is there some? I mean, when you said for a few hundred dollars a person you can open a school and, you know, liberate 500 kids right off the spot from slavery but you haven't really solved the problem except that you've taken 500 kids out of the equation and then that's room for 500 new kids in the equation. There's gotta be some kind of a larger gestalt that you could go after for which the impact of resolving that somehow gets us to the problem of slavery rather than focusing on the problem of slavery hoping that you'll somehow get to the impact, somehow bootstrap your way into the larger things. It could be climate, it could be capitalism, these are things that are not gonna go away all that easily but it could be that that's the way to get it, not to narrow your focus. Run, yes, not narrow your focus. Thank you. Question here and then we'll throw it back to Gene here. So every two minutes a girl is married, are child brides considered slaves in your scholarship? Yes. I just wondered if you could expand on that. Yeah, okay. There was another question in the back, why don't we take that one too and then we'll turn it back. Right, you're good, you need the. Thank you so much. I don't hear much about overpopulation and this ties in to religion. I think you mentioned yesterday, Kevin, something about the negative impact without religion and the Templeton report. I haven't been a student in a long, long time so my notes aren't that good. Does that ring a bell? Yes, I was actually talking about the negative impact of religion. A negative impact of religion, it seems. Of certain. So much of this is tied to the fact that we have no moral compass. I mean, to live with slaves in this modern day, I don't know what you can speak about that. And no religion tied to population. I think of the Catholics just having a bunch of children to work the land in Ireland. They don't do that anymore. Thank you very much. Thank you, let's do with those four and we'll start with you, Kevin, but other people should feel completely comfortable jumping in adding to it. A quick one, I want to direct straight back to you because that system of liberation that occurs at the community level is not just about removing a few people temporarily. Those villages, once they go through the process, never go back and they are dramatically transformed and the more we can expand those sorts of programs of liberation, because it's permanent, it's absolutely permanent, they never go back. Who drives the fish? Well, the fish drive, that's in a different country, but that fish drying was absolutely illegal occurring in an illegal place and wasn't supposed to be happening anyway. And it can be done by adults if you go up the rivers in that space, you actually have adults catching the fish and putting them on themselves. It's the criminal slaveholders. But I think the key thing that I wanted to say to you is that over the last 25 years, we've worked so hard to find our way to processes of liberation and solidification of that liberation so that that particular model in that particular space in Northern India, which is, we're up to two or 300 villages now who are talking thousands and thousands of people who are in hereditary slavery and now they're not. And when they break out of that space, there's a freedom dividend. The economy immediately goes up. And in fact, even the ex-slaveholders do better economically, which is kind of horrific because they should be in jail but they won't put them in jail but they won't treat them as criminals. But even they do better economically because there's so much more economic activity in the local area. Okay. Anybody? Yeah, yeah. Arlie, please. Well, in a way, we're all, I think, focusing here on how to build a constituency. Right? Well, we know this is some very bad thing as you've described. And I, a moral constituency and to get enough of one, you have to put a bunch together, I think. And that's done partly through microphones. That is public people who pick up a cause. And some of them are in Hollywood. I, for example, Jane Funga has what she calls fire grill Fridays. And she's now going down to Louisiana to Cancer Alley and interviewing people there and interviewing activists. And going to Texas where there's extra American activist working in oil. Rigging. And so, you know, let's not turn that away. It's not the only thing. But if we could just kind of inspire certain people who have a microphone and aren't doing anything with it, that would add, it wouldn't be a total solution, but it would help. Yeah. Well, I just add, in answering that too, is I think one thing this is what we've learned in our research at the Center, I'm sure Kevin has as well. We worked in Northern Uganda with what was called the Padere Girls Academy. And what happened during the years of the Lord's Resistance Army was they were going in and they were abducting children and the younger children were armed. But the teenagers, the girls, were given up as sex slaves to the commanders and they were in the bases across in South Sudan. What happened when the Lord's Resistance Army started losing and moving out is many of those young women came down with children. And there were nine child reception centers around Northern Uganda. And we actually worked with the Mark MacArthur Foundation to get the Padere Girls Academy established. So, and this was local women who ran this organization, who gave, you could have their training for these women with children because they wouldn't be accepted back into their families as the cultural issue was going on. And they were able to either get training to become bakers or to go on and go to college. So I also think when we think about forced labor, we think in the big scale, we've got to do something about it. We also have to remember that you have to work with those survivors. And that is something that is going on at a level all around in these countries and needs to be supported as well. We can also try to, we've got to work to end it. We also need to respect that work at the community level. I just wonder if I could follow up from your mind on this issue. What you described yesterday, Kevin, were cases in which slave labor was in the business of producing commodities that entered sometimes directly into global trade, shrimp, sometimes into quote, or indirectly into global trade, charcoal to steal, to steal implements. That doesn't include all of slave type activities. But my question is, as you all know, because you were part of that movement, going back to the 1990s, a series of advocacy groups, I'm thinking of Global Witness, for example, began to tag particular commodities, blood diamonds, Kimberley agreement over gold, which involved working with businesses. On top of that, you had, again, this is the company focus. You had, for example, shareholder activism. I had been working in the oil and gas area. That was one. And then you had something as dramatic as Dodd-Frank and Dodd-Frank 1502 and the conflict minerals legislation, voluntary, in which companies that sourced from A, B, and C had to disclose to the SEC. My question is, given those types of, they're usually called transparency initiatives, what's your assessment of what one can learn from those types of activities? vis-à-vis, as it were, trying to attach that type of name and shame to trade or commodities, coltan and sulfones, you know that sort of thing. Is there a parallel there, or could one think about lessons learned from those types of transparency activities? Yes, is the short answer. There's a lot to be learned because they've taken so many different forms. And because I was tangentially involved with Dodd-Frank, but I was very much part of the group that formed the International Cocoa Initiative, which had been driven by the Senate after we exposed slavery and cocoa production and so forth, right? And there were all of these different ways to approach it, but when I say all these different ways to approach it, I literally mean the answer to your question is in a better assessment of which of those forms of response were most efficient. So I've written, for example, in a book some time back about what we did with cocoa and how it changed the situation and how it wasn't about bashing companies, it was actually about creating a situation in which the companies were forced to work together, and then they found that they actually kind of it was okay to work together and then they actually continue to do pretty remarkable transfers of millions of dollars into West Africa to do things on the ground. Is it perfect? No, is it better than almost any of the other types of ways to get the corporations to work together? Yes, it absolutely is. But we live in this world where capitalism, this capitalism's a problem, just for me personally, it's a serious problem. Yeah, but particularly so much of it that people can play fast and loose with it. So yes, you can make things happen, but then you end up with gold, for example, you can have a good thing about it. And then you have the government of Ghana who says we're going to keep people from sneaking out of the country with gold. They're mining it and then they're smuggling it out. So what we're going to do is we're going to establish in every almost village in the gold region a government no questions asked gold buying space. And we will pay 95% of the market price of gold that day, which basically means if you have a criminal gang and you want to enslave people to dig gold in your backyard, there's somebody here from the government who's willing to buy it from you. You don't even have to leave home, right? And that solved a problem, a tax problem for the Ghanaian government, but it created even more government here and stuff like that. I wanted to say something about child brides, if I may. Yes, I'm really glad you talked about that. And we actually, I think again, it's a tiny thing. Especially in the United States, we need to work on the language a little bit. Eric said those young girls were taken as sex slaves. I would say those young girls were forced into marriages which were forced into Indian slavery and into commercial exploitation as well as physical exploitation. I would stretch out those words as long as it because when people talk about sex slaves, it's just a little too much like something you'd find in a dirty magazine. It doesn't help to really fix that. This country's got a big problem with child brides, a big problem. This is the only country in the world that has refused to sign the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which says there must be some age limits for marriage. Now individual states do it. In California has a OK law when it comes to age at marriage and so forth, but there are states that don't. And then there are states that have something and then they don't enforce it. And you can go into rural parts of places like South Dakota and you can find little towns where the girls are getting married at 12 or being taken into in all this kind of stuff. And it's fundamentally, it's right at that space. But the other thing that I wanted to say, and maybe it's to you especially, is that there's an extremely important book that has not been written. And that book is the enslavement of women about the nature of the enslavement of women. Because women can be enslaved in ways, if slavery is the total control of a person, there's a paradox because the enslavement of women means a totality of control that exceeds the totality of the control of men. Because with men you control their outsides and their productive force, and with women you control their outsides and their productive force, and their interior abilities to produce children, to be used in abusive and sexual ways. There's an internal part of the enslavement of women which has never been thought through very carefully and written about, I can't write that book. I can't write that book. It's, you know, it's. That's interesting. Honestly, you've got to hurt her question to the other question about it. Yeah. Or you're coming to the other part of the religion. You're in the US, like where is mostly religion driven, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's certainly some of it is. Some of it's not. And some of it's just people like, you know, that. Yeah, but I think if you think about like some of those Mormon sects. Mormon. The FDLS, yeah. Or the Jewish. Some of the. Yeah. The Hasidim. The religion, which might be why the US is not willing to sign this. Well, originally the reason they wouldn't sign that convention was because it said that you had to, that you couldn't bring people into your military if they were under the age of 18. That was the key reason they didn't sign the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child. Yeah. But they're probably okay with the other two. Jane, we have enough time for another round of questions. Okay, if I could just ask people to be concise in their questions. I need answers. So beginning with you, sir, the new sir and a third person if we have one. So yesterday you said as a slave, you live like mostly in the moment and you can't imagine anything else other than being a slave. And it's like generational. So families upon families have been slaves. How do you think that they can be enlightened to, they can be enlightened to like a different way of life other than slavery? Thank you. Could you pass back to the gentleman behind you? Thank you. I'm sorry, I don't have a short question. All of my questions are probably quite complicated because I'm having a hard time even figuring them out. I have a brief comment I'd like to make for the edification of the group. And I don't have a lot of information about it, but it's recently come to my attention that a number of people have been working for a number of years to get Japan to raise its age of legal consent, which is 13 and today. And that there's a good chance that that's gonna happen this year. Thank you very much. Third question here. Then we'll come back to the group. So I have a question regarding, sir, you're talking about the mental block of the slaves of freeing themselves. Has there been any unifying ideology or group like an international trade union or things like this that have attempted to unite these people who have been fragmented so they can offer greater resistance to this? Thank you very much. Please, anyone can respond. And then we'll, I think we have to begin to ramp up. So Kevin, you can begin if you wish, George. I'll touch on atemporality. We've learned so much from slavery survivors who have joined us in the right slab and who have in fact gone all the way through their PhDs now and have become significant researchers in their own. But people who, one in particular, who grew up right here in San Francisco and went to this university and was used as for child sexual exploitation for quite a long time by her own family. So it's an ugly top, but it was fundamentally enslavement. But here's the thing. They've taught us about the state of mind of people in slavery. And one of the things that I've got to assure you is that if you've lived in freedom all your life, you can't imagine it. You literally just can't, you can learn about it, but you can't know it because there's this state of constant fear, very often, constant violence, leading you to living in an eternal present where you know that if you think about the future, you could be harmed for that. If you think about the past, you could be harmed for that. If you think only about what you want, the person who controls you wants and needs and you stay in that present at all times and in space, you don't move around, then you can at least reduce the amount of pain that comes with being a person in slavery. Oh yeah, absolutely it is. Yeah, absolutely it is. Thank you. Any of the interlocutors would like to say any last words at all of any sort? Just say one comment on that. Going back to the Lord resistance army, while we were working with the Pader Girls Academy, actually went into interview young women who had given back the commercial sexual exploitation. And many of them said they couldn't talk about it because Joseph Coney controlled their minds. And so you can see the profound effect and that what it goes back to, why we also need to support those survivors and help them. Yeah, I know that when you take a person such as you've described, but you put them in a community with other victims as Eve Ensler has done in Africa with the city of hope, they come alive, it doesn't take a lot of time for the weeping to begin and the stories to come and it's not immediate, but there is a recovery that sort of wants to happen. That's on the other side of this. Absolutely. Well, we are coming to the end of our time Alas, but let me remind you that there's another occasion to talk to Kevin tomorrow, Human Rights Center. So let me just thank the interlocutors, Arleigh, Eric, for their wonderful comments and especially you Kevin for coming here and giving so generously of your time and such stimulating and unbelievably important work that you and others are doing. Thank you so much. Yeah.