Slavery Footprint

Not long after my last presentation on my book and human trafficking, one of my parishioners let me know how horrified she is that she has around 100 slaves working for her.  She figured this out by looking at slaveryfootprint.org, an excellent website to learn more about how we can tangibly reduce our slavery footprint (like a carbon footprint).  My wife said the same thing when she discovered that she had over fifty.  Some of the questions are hard to answer accurately or refer to one-time purchases and may skew the actual result, but the conclusion remains the same: OH NO!

The purpose of slaveryfootprint.org is not to alarm you.  The purpose is to inform you.  Of course, your alarm serves a purpose, too, in that once you see how terrifying your slavery footprint is you’ll be more likely to want to change.  The website then gives you a bunch of detail on what goes into your slavery footprint so that you can adjust your lifestyle and choices accordingly. 

 Even then the number will probably remain high.  I suppose that I am slightly more simplicity-oriented in life and slightly more informed on slavery than the average Westerner, and so I have made slight adjustments to reduce my slavery footprint, and yet I still have thirty-seven or slaves working for me.  At the end of the day, even if we entirely remake our lives to limit our footprint, we probably won’t eliminate our footprint until we also influence society to remake itself.  That’s an unfortunate truth, but we know it’s true looking at how we reduce our carbon footprint.  If we ride our bikes everywhere we go, don’t use electricity or have solar panels that cover our electric usage, and have geothermal systems to heat and cool our homes, we’d still have a carbon footprint (which is sad, considering how expansive and demanding these changes to our lives I’ve listed are).  How?  Well, where do we buy our food?  Is it all local?  If not—and it’s almost surely not because in most places it’s actually impossible to only buy local and still eat anywhere near healthy—then we have a carbon footprint because our food had to be transported.  Dangit!  We’d then have to change the way our society produces and distributes food to completely eliminate our footprint.  One example of at least a handful.  Another example: do we use paper? If yes, is it hemp paper?  If no, and it’s paper made from wood, then we are contributing to the rise in carbon dioxide in the environment because trees breathe on carbon dioxide.  Moral of the story is simple: we must make radical changes to our own lives and also make radical changes to how society operates.

 Moral of the moral: go to slaveryfootprint.org and learn how you can make a difference with, often, simple life changes.  Find out how many slaves are working for you and how exactly you can reduce that number.  Remember, a law of economics is that supply always seeks to meet demand.  If we limit demand then we limit supply.  And when we consider that the supply consists of human beings, each and every one of whom deserve dignity and respect, then we should get to work.  We also see that sometimes a product can look so enticing that having a supply creates demand, but that side of economics relates more to societal changes and that comes later.

 One quick lesson to take away with you, especially if you don’t go to slaveryfootprint.org right after reading this: don’t upgrade your cell phone.  Or, at the very least, make sure that you recycle your phone in a place that will properly reuse the parts of the phone.  All cell phones, the way they are made today, require the use of a metal the mining of which, at the moment, uses slave labor.  Upgrade your phone and don’t recycle the old one and you are using slave labor.  Unless your current phone is broken, why do you need to upgrade it anyway?  What’s up with that?  Take better care of your cell phone in the first place, too.  Even if we recycle our current phones, the rate at which we buy and upgrade our cell phones is not sustainable using recycled product only.  If it works, keep using it; if you’re behind the times, so what?  The “times” aren’t so kind to 27 million slaves.

Slavery Footprint

One of the more common questions that open-minded, liberal-minded, and/or social-justice-minded people first learn to ask is, "Where was this shirt made?"  Chances are that if a piece of clothing that you are thinking of buying is made in China, you are about to buy an article of clothing produced by slave labor.  Indeed, chances are that if you are about to buy anything made in China or India that you are about to buy a slave-labor item.  Some of these open-minded folk search for non-slave-labor items until they find something made in the USA or Europe; others simply don't care at all that certain items like clothing are produced by slaves because, after all, clothing seems essential; still others look around for non-slave-labor items until they realize that doing so is very hard and oftentimes expensive.  I won't bother to point out (though I guess I am now) that the first type of person might be misled by a "Made in USA" label: let's not forget that the United States and Europe, where we'd like to think that civilization reigns and slavery is no more, are still greatly tainted by the worst evil mankind has ever known.

Now, I don't want to depress anyone, because being thoughtful about where our clothes come from is a good first step toward thinking about our slavery footprint.  And that's a good thing.  Once we start thinking about our slavery footprint in the smallest of areas we are likely to see how much of an impact our lifestyle has on slave labor.  Perhaps then we will begin to make changes to the way we live.  All of that is positive and I want to encourage thoughtfulness and lifestyle changes... God knows I, too, could still use a lot of changes to the way that I live if I want to bring down my slavery footprint.

Much like our carbon footprint, our slavery footprint is wide-reaching and can be roughly calculated.  When we do calculate it we might get depressed and greatly frustrated.  To some extent, actually, I do want to depress you, because running around as if everything is jolly won't help you gain insight into the impact your life has on slavery.  Unfortunately depression and frustration must often precede the most glorious transformations.  With that in mind I invite you to calculate your slavery footprint.  If you've done this already, I invite you to do it again and this time be as detailed as possible: take more than five minutes.  As you go through the calculation you will hopefully learn a lot about slavery in the world today but, perhaps more importantly, you will start to see what kind of life changes you need to make if we want to put an end to slavery.

Slavery Footprint