Geoffrey Heptonstall - Servitude: the way we work now
Exploitative work contracts have become the norm. Casual, ill-paid or unpaid work creates servitude. In such a climate actual slavery, though illegal, flourishes.
A contingent of labourers climbed down from the lorry to
begin work on some road repairs. The foremen hurried them up gruffly,
contemptuously. I was surprised none of the men responded in kind. Why did they
take it? And I looked again at the men. They were not used to labouring. They
had the look of clerks. They were office workers who had lost their jobs in one
of the repeated waves of recession. This one was the early Eighties when
industry was vanishing. The effects on an industrial town were traumatic. I was
discovering this reality teaching in a Midlands college. And what I saw was a
group of proud men humiliated on some back-to-work scheme. Nobody should
consider ordinary work beneath them. I certainly haven’t. But this was awful.
Far from being sympathetic, the foreman was more like a gang master. The men
were not in chains. The foreman had no whip. But emotionally that was how it
looked.
These men had rights, but they were limited. Refusal to work
meant loss of benefits. So they accepted the taunts of a rough-tongued
supervisor. I saw in that man how slavery works. Cultures that accept slavery
have no difficulty finding overseers with whips. Regimes that use torture
easily recruit torturers. There is no question that human nature (something we
all share) contains its potential element of cruelty. In certain conditions we
can all display selfishness and spite for their own sake. We can take pleasure
in hurting others who have done us no harm.
The justification is that it has to be done. We are dealing
with lesser beings, beasts that respond only to the whip. We are taking savages
from their barbarity and offering them the chance of civilisation. Or we are
meting out punishment to those who deserve it. Or we are doing it from economic
necessity, for the greater good of society. The great engine of civilisation
needs its machines. There are those whose destiny is to be a machine.
To justify the condition of the slave you must take away the
slave’s humanity. I remember talking to some (supremacist) white West Indians
who could not accept that some slaves in the Americas were white. It was to
have been the fate of David Balfour in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped.
That was fiction with a basis in reality. But no, slaves were African. Most
were, but the point is that some were European. That brings the condition of
slavery closer to home. It becomes more imaginable.
They are no longer the
anonymous other, but people like ourselves. Not everyone can accept that.
That slavery is beyond the moral boundary is now universally
accepted. No legal system in the world accepts slavery. That is an advance. But
a moral precept is not a description of reality. Slavery exists in the world.
One does not need to travel to remoter parts of the world to find it. There are
several thousand slaves in our country now. It is a fact well reported but not
absorbed into the general feeling. People are aware of the incidence of forced
labour on remote farms. Popular police dramas like Scott and Bailey do
good work in this regard. But forced labour is not a rare occurrence in out of
the way places. There are slaves in the cities. They are not chained, nor are
they free.
Perhaps you have passed them in the street. One sign of
their servitude is the lack of English. They have no easy means of association
with society at large. Some are here legally, but only to work for a particular
employer. They cannot withdraw from their contracts. Others are here illegally.
They have been trafficked across international borders. Without the correct
documentation to reside and/or work in Britain their rights are limited or
non-existent. They do not appear in official statistics. They do not exist.
They work, often as prostitutes, but also in domestic drudgery and heavy labour
for survival rations and basic shelter alone. There are an estimated 13,000
such people in Britain today.
It occurs to me that some slaves may not understand their
actual condition. ‘Rescued’ from dire poverty and squalor in their home
country, in Britain they are fed and clothed. A cold attic is better than a hot
tin shack. Some, of course, will be hopelessly demoralised. Prostitutes,
punished for being pretty, punished for being poor, may be too ashamed to
escape. They may be too frightened with a well-founded fear. Where do they go
for help? How do they know they can trust uniformed officials in a foreign city
whose language they barely speak, in a country where they have no right to be?
I have seen passport control suspicious and contemptuous of ethnic minority
fellow citizens, British-born. What trust can you place in uniforms, especially
if you come not from a Western democracy but from chaos and violence?
Fear is perhaps at the core of the problem. How many of us
know what real fear is? The woman in hiding from a violent husband is fearful
of all men, and petrified that her husband is going to find her. Fear distorts
perceptions and magnifies problems. It isolates the individual. In your cell
you wait for the interrogator. You are utterly alone. ‘They have abandoned
you,’ is the interrogator’s taunt. The runaway slave, yes even in Britain 2015,
is truly afraid, afraid that there is no refuge, no rescue.
Slavery is more than a means of exploitation, of labour at
minimal cost. It is a means of controlling human beings... read more:
