Slavery in The 21st Century

transporting, providing or obtaining a person for compelled labor or commercial sex acts
through the use of force, fraud, or coercion". Besides these, a number of different terms
are used in the US federal Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000
and the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially
Women and Children, including "involuntary servitude", "slavery" or "practices similar to
slavery", "debt bondage", and "forced labor".
According to American professor Kevin Bales, co-founder and former president of Free
the Slaves, modern slavery occurs "when a person is under control of another person,
who applies violence and force to maintain that control, and the goal of that control is
exploitation". According to this definition, research from the Walk Free Foundation
based on its Global Slavery Index 2016 estimated that there were about 70 million
slaves around the world in 2016, with 58% of them living in the top five countries—India,
Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, and Uzbekistan. Of these 45.8 million, it is estimated that
around 10 million of these contemporary slaves are children. Bales warned that,
because slavery is officially abolished everywhere, the practice is illegal, and thus more
hidden from the public and authorities. This makes it impossible to obtain exact figures
from primary sources. The best that can be done is estimate based on secondary
sources, such as UN investigations, newspaper articles, government reports, and
figures from NGOs.
Causes
In slave labor, the slave-owner only needs to pay for sustenance and enforcement. This
is sometimes lower than the wage-cost of free laborers, as free workers earn more than
sustenance; in these cases, slaves have a positive price. When the cost of sustenance
and enforcement exceeds the wage rate, slave-owning would no longer be profitable,
and owners would simply release their slaves. Slaves are thus a more attractive
investment in high-wage environments, and environments where enforcement is cheap,
and less attractive in environments where the wage-rate is low and enforcement is
expensive.
Free workers also earn compensating differentials, whereby they are paid more for
doing unpleasant work. Neither sustenance nor enforcement costs rise with the
unpleasantness of the work, however, so slaves' costs do not rise by the same amount.
As such, slaves are more attractive for unpleasant work, and less for pleasant work.
Because the unpleasantness of the work is not internalized, being borne by the slave
rather than the owner, it is a negative externality and leads to over-use of slaves in
these situations. Slaves can also be forced to do illegal work such as picking pockets or
cannabis production.
Modern slavery can be quite profitable and corrupt governments tacitly allow it, despite
it being outlawed by international treaties such as Supplementary Convention on the
Abolition of Slavery and local laws. Total annual revenues of traffickers were estimated
in 2004 to range from US $5 billion to US $9 billion, though profits are substantially
lower. American slaves in 1809 were sold for around the equivalent of US$40,000 in
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