Book Review Symposium: Slavery In and Around Organizations

Abstract

The promise of neoliberal capitalism is that it would unleash us all, offering ultimate freedom based on our freedom to act in the marketplace (Harvey, 2005). Capitalism and liberalism, which are compatible ideals, go hand in hand. Today’s owners and dealers of capital—the tech gurus, the Wall Street wizards, the influential industrialists, the investor class—famously tout the access that seemingly all have to economic autonomy, in such varied guises as entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship, free agency, gig work and the continuous development of the enterprising self (Fleming, 2017). In reality, many of the participants in the global neoliberal capitalist systems are by no means free. Many in the system are, at best, indentured servants to organizations or contractors (e.g., “wage slaves”) or, at worst, literal slaves. Most workers are the less-free and the un-free. The handcuffs of neoliberal capitalism are, akin to the hand that guides it, invisible to many of us, in the sense that we cannot see the constraints of the broader system on our freedoms (Perelman, 2011). But the handcuffs and their effects are also, horrifically, clearly visible to many. A report released in September 2017 by the UN-affiliated International Labor Office (ILO) and the Walk Free Foundation estimates that, in 2016, there were 40.3 million people in some form of modern slavery around the world, in every country, on any given day. Females account for an estimated 28.7 million of enslaved people, about 71 percent of the total. In addition, one in four victims of modern slavery are below the age of 18 (Taylor, 2017). Modern slavery tends to occur under conditions of labor intensity, in low technology industries and low-skill service industries, situations where slavery presents an opportunity to abolish labor costs and drive profit (Crane, 2013). Susceptible work includes garment workers in the fast fashion industry, migrant workers in nail salons, small-scale construction and renovation workers, security staff who have been outsourced, seasonal employees in the hospitality industry, meat and poultry processing, and domestic and sex work (Lawrence, 2018). Such work is often characterized by distance between management and workers, whether subcontracted or gigged out, creating a grey space that allows diffusion of economic and moral responsibility. Threats of violence, debt bondage, physical abuse, constraints on mobility, and exploitive underpayment are but some of the practices that inhabit that space (Crane, 2013). 789380OSS0010.1177/0170840618789380Organization StudiesBook Review Symposium research-article2018