Indentured or Bound?
The legal concept of “bond”, or “binding contract” denotes lack of freedom, hardly different from “bonds of slavery”. Generally, we consider a bond ethical if there is consent, and if the person consenting is judged of sound mental state with sufficient information to choose.
It’s a nice concept, but it’s not as simple as declaring a blanket “age of consent” and saying “don’t lie in a contract”. People are crafty enough when it comes to real property exhanges, but when it comes to binding another human’s fealty and freedom of movement, human treachery knows no bounds.
Pope Ratzinger is saying that human trafficking today is worse than it was when the west trafficked (mostly African) slaves. That’s true, of course. But it’s a bit nastier today. Today, many of the slaves will tell you that they are indentured, not bound. Some will talk of severe penalties, risk to their families, etc. if they default on their loans (and these are the ones that the newspapers run stories on). But most feel as if there is at least some element of their own choice (or their parent’s choice) to blame for their desperate situation.
Of course, even if many will argue that it’s their own fault, the Pope is right to call it evil — and comparable to slavery. These people don’t normally have good role models for money management, so they stay in debt indefinitely.
It’s interesting that colonial America was largely populated by white indentured servants, and the practice continues today with H1-B visa. While the Chinese “snake heads“, Mexican “coyotes” and others smuggle in menial laborers at financial terms that often drive their clients into slavery to crime syndicates, the U.S. government signs skilled workers to indenture that leads to mistreatment and drives them to go back to their home countries and start businesses that compete with ours. There is obviously no equivalence between the H1-B situation and the human smuggling — but they lie on the same continuum between consent and compulsion.
November 15th, 2006 at 7:18 am
I choked a bit on “or” because the binding of indenture is so pervasive, present company included!
Maybe the kabal coulld come to the mountain once in a while - just until we can have VR meets. But then the bread-breaking is perhaps a ways off?
I may do a Feb. trek/crusade to a Web Designers’ Standards thingie in Vancouver. The Accessibility Aspect is bubbling up a lot. Strange that CSS has taken this long to permeate!
Love.