Slavery is by no means a thing of the past; it’s very much alive in the present, and it may be an even bigger part of the future. That’s the view of John Bowe, a journalist who has spent the better part of the last decade studying the bonds, visible and invisible, that keep workers exploited. The result is Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy (Random House).

Bowe follows Mexican migrant workers who cross the border illegally before being shipped to southern Florida, where they work 15-hour days, six days a week, picking the tomatoes that end up on trays at Taco Bell. When a worker is shot dead while trying to escape the barracks, the ensuing court case reveals a sordid operation that forces undocumented workers into debt peonage and controls every aspect of their lives. Bowe tells of a Tulsa steel company that lures Indian workers with the promise of luxurious living and a high paying job. Instead, the workers, who have spent their life savings and more to pay for the trip, find themselves in crude barracks, eating spoiled food, and receiving a pittance in wages. In Saipan, a U.S. commonwealth located in the middle of the Pacific where Bowe spent three years, an entire island economy depends on the exploitation of textile workers from China and Bangladesh.

Detailing their social and economic causes, these cases, says Bowe, are more than the result of “mean people being mean to their workers”. Modern slavery is structural, the byproduct of the current global economic system, the prevailing conceptualization of modern laborers, and, perhaps most disturbingly, a product of human nature itself.

Nobodies outlines three separate cases of what you describe as “slave labor.” However, in each case, there is some question as to whether the laborers were physically unable to leave their place of employment. Regardless, you maintain that physical coercion has been replaced by a different kind of coercion. How would you describe current methods of coercion?

I think it varies from one case to the next. In the United States, temporary workers or illegal aliens don’t have the right to a trial by a jury of their peers. They don’t have the right to vote. That’s like branding “non-citizen” on their foreheads, and that makes them ripe for abuse at the hands of employers. On a global scale, when you look at Chinese and Bangladeshi workers, they’re like an inch away from starvation half the time, so it’s not like there are a wide range of choices that they can make. There’s a great quote I once heard from a labor activist: “For most of these people the choice is between desperation and poverty. Poverty is a palpable step upwards.” If that’s the level of choice we’re offering these people, and we’re calling that freedom, that seems like kind of a pervasion of language.

With that in mind, what separates slavery from free workers?

For me it is helpful to think of a sliding scale from freedom to slavery. In each of these situations, there are ingredients that make conditions go toward slavery and make it go toward freedom. Because by understanding those ingredients, maybe you can be more conscious about how we can make conditions better for people around the world.

What ingredients did you see leading to more or less freedom?

Well, it’s very funny, because I’ve always been outside of mainstream politics. I hate politicians. I hate experts. I hate corporate types who talk about “freedom and democracy” you know: we’ve heard all that stuff so many times, it’s hard not to be jaded about it. But when you hear somebody talking about what it is like to be a slave, you come to understand all of those things. You understand why the Declaration of Independence or the French Revolution or the Enlightenment was such a big deal. You all of a sudden understand that most people ever born were slaves. And, I think that does enable you to start understanding the tools that make for freedom.

Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom to organize allow individuals some freedom to determine the content of their lives. So when we see cases where people, because of the language or citizenship or education, don’t have the power or the awareness to perform like equal members of society, there is tremendous potential for slavery.

Sweatshops and other labor conditions are widely considered to be determined by the workings of the global economy. You argue that there is a more fundamental element that determines how well workers will be treated: the prevailing ideology.

Right now, most Americans are walking around with an idea of the free market as something akin to Newtonian physics: it just does what it does, a force of its own. I think that the truth is actually the complete opposite of that. It is our ideology that creates policy that creates economic conditions. The economy is a thing that we design, just like we design our highways and our cities, our methods of production. We may not be conscious of it all the time, but we design who are the economic winners and losers of the society, and we decide how well or poorly the losers are going to be treated. It is our ideology that creates our policy, and our policy that shapes our economy.

What, then, is the modern ideology that leads to the creation of slave labor?

I think you can trace it through history. You know originally when one tribe went to war with another they, killed the people. They didn’t have the surplus of food to support extra captives around, so they killed them. And then when agricultural society came around, you could keep captives around and enslave them. You could justify it by saying, “We did you a favor; we could have killed you.” With the colonists, they were “bringing the glories of civilization” to people from “the jungles of Africa.” And the Spaniards, likewise, said, “We’re bring Christianity to the poor heathensof North America.”

So now, it’s globalization. Now we say we’re creating an “entrepreneur society” where everyone can “buy in.” We present this idea that the hundreds of millions of Chinese workers that are working in factories — that we’re doing them a big favor. But I have not seen a lot of news stories or television shows with those workers on the show talking about how psyched they are about their lives under globalization. I see Thomas Friedman. I see Lawrence Summers. I see other aging white guys who have a lot of money in the bank telling us all that this is great, but I smell a rat when I don’t see a more democratic process. I think everyone who’s involved in this thing called globalization should be on the TV show, talking about how great it is. Otherwise, why should I believe that this isn’t just a repeat of that same history?

You detail some cases in which the coercion of labor is not even profitable. If they aren’t going to profit from it, why do employers mistreat their workers?

I think the urge for control over other people plays out in so many ways that we’re conscious of or not conscious of. It’s like a boss who has a very good employee but the boss can’t stop riding the employee, demanding more and more and more until the employee burns out or gets pissed off or starts sabotaging the boss. It’s like Wal-Mart trying to save more and more and more until it drives companies out of business or until it runs afoul of the law. It’s like a jealous boyfriend or girlfriend demanding more. It’s not rational. Most of the time it’s not even conscious. And so we don’t now say, “Oh, Blacks are going to be the slaves or South Americans are going to be the slaves, now we just say, “We want cheap prices.” But I would argue that it is very much the same mechanism at work.

You quote George Orwell: “Economic injustice will stop the moment we want it to stop, and not a moment sooner.” If such a new mindset were to take hold, what practical actions do you think they would take?

There’s a group called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, and they have teamed up with a bunch of student groups and a bunch of church groups to found the Fair Food Campaign. They have exerted public pressure on corporations to pay their workers more — not by filtering it down through their organization, but by giving it directly to the workers. They succeeded in getting corporations a penny a pound more for tomato pickers. They have succeeded by doing boycotts and public awareness campaigns. They’ve succeeded in getting Taco Bell and the rest of Yum! Foods, which includes KFC, Pizza Hut, and all these other huge chains, and they’re now following suit. First they were totally unwilling, but then they got religion, and now they’re doing more than they needed to do.

This public pressure created an economic incentive for these corporations to change their practices. Do we need government regulation, too?

You do want government enforcement. You need government to protect people from being taken advantage of and exploited. I guess I’m just interested for now in ways that people can do it directly, and not sit around waiting for the government. As we’ve seen in the last 30 years, government can be bought and paid for.

You admonish middle- and upper-class Americans for the global system that they perpetuate could come around to haunt them. You go so far as to say, “Your ignorance and your lack of a program will likely equal the squalor of your grandchildren’s existence.” What leads you to believe that?

If you look at history, most people who have ever been born weren’t born free. They were born into slavery of one type or another. Labor freedom is a fairly recent development when viewed on the scale of human history, and there’s no reason to believe it will continue. There are winners and losers in our system, and there are more and more losers, even in America. It’s not just labor jobs that are being outsourced; it’s x-ray technicians and accountants. You want to make conditions as well as they can be for the losers because odds are, sooner or later, you, or your children, or your grandchildren are going to be among them.

[Appearance]

John Bowe speaks Tues., Oct. 2 at 7:30 p.m. at Town Hally, 1119 Eighth Ave. Tickets are $5 at the door. For more informataion, see http://www.townhallseattle.org