Like capitalism itself, the proletariat have no country. This fact intensifies the more concentrated capital becomes, as workers and their labor power are traded and bartered across borders like so many commodities. As capitalism expands and bursts the bonds of national boundaries, so too is labor internationalized and made fluid so that it may follow capitalism’s market requirement of a cheap, transitory, and available workforce. - Karl Marx, London, 1867
I’m no different than anybody else doing a job. They sell their brains and their bodies, I sell my cunt. Everybody’s for sale and you follow the money. - Deanna Stephenson, sex trade worker, Vancouver, September 12, 2008
Tom McGrath was barely five feet tall, but he was a human powerhouse. The diminutive Irishman routinely stormed aboard the ships that docked in Vancouver harbor and searched for slave laborers shanghaied in the Philippines or Hong Kong. All the bedraggled seamen who were cheated of their wages knew they had a friend and ally in Tom McGrath, who ran the waterfront local of the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway and Transportation Workers.
I first learned about human trafficking from Tom, who dealt with it all the time. One night when I was eighteen, the feisty union man told me the story over beers at the Lotus Pub.
“We find ‘em all the time in the fake hulls of the big liners and steamships that dock here,” he said matter of factly.
“It’s a big, moneymakin’ business. Whole families of ‘em are shipped in from Malaysia, China, all the islands. Lots of hill people from Thailand, their women and kids go cheap. Everybody’s in on it: the shippin’ companies, the Triad mob, hell, even the fuckin’ Catholic Church and Rotary Club. They know there’s a big demand for sweatshop labor and kiddy porn films over here. The Mounties and transport inspectors turn a blind eye on the whole thing after they get their cut from the mob. You see this?”
Tom pointed to a red scar on his neck.
“I got that from a goon when I came across some of the poor bastards chained together in a hold. They’re traded here like cattle and everybody knows it. And there’s not a fuckin’ thing anybody will do about it ‘cause it’s all good business.”
Fifty years later, nothing has changed.
I think about Tom McGrath whenever people talk about human or child trafficking as if it’s an unusual or criminal practice. In fact, like child rape and genocide, the trafficking of human beings is not just business as usual but a bulwark of our so-called civilization.
After all, doesn’t the United Nations define the practice in benign terms as “The recruiting and transferring of persons for the purpose of exploiting them”? By that measure, any worker who gets hired and bussed to a job is being trafficked, and every employer is a human trafficker. Such a broad definition serves to camouflage and decriminalize a plethora of wrongdoing, like when the extermination of entire peoples is referred to as “abuse”.
Let’s be realistic: since when has the trading of human beings ever been a crime? Indeed, according to the World Economic Forum, the unrestricted and cheap transport of labor across borders is increasingly required by the modern global economy. The US economy would nosedive and lose at least $20 billion every year if “illegal immigration” was stopped, since all those undocumented laborers keep the agricultural, construction, hospital, and service industries afloat.
It’s been said that the depth of our moral outrage is a function of the degree of our naivete about the world. Those folks who passionately protest “human trafficking” would no doubt object if the price of fruit and vegetables suddenly tripled because growers stopped employing slave laborers trafficked from Mexico.
The point is, we’re all riding a monster that feeds off the weakest among us. And as Leo Tolstoy observes, what the wretched of the earth require is not that we feel sorry for them but that we simply get off their backs.
It’s true that human trafficking does more than provide cheap labor to a ravenous corporate system. The sex trade is as globally lucrative and politically useful as arms and drug trafficking, and for that reason is never curtailed and rarely prosecuted. Why would any of it be stopped, when every government in the world relies on and is complicit in it? Or as Tom McGrath put it so colorfully,
“The cops are never gonna bust up the downtown whorehouses ‘cause they might burst in on the Mayor and Chief of Police.”
It’s precisely because human trafficking is such a mainstay of our sick world that its practitioners and official guardians routinely make a show of “investigating” the issue through trite Commissions that describe the problem but ensure that nothing is ever done about it. For if our society and history teach us anything, it is that if even the worst crime against humanity is turning a profit, it is treated not as a liability but an asset to be harvested and protected.
So what is to be done? The answer was obvious to my eighteen year old self, and it still is. We need to get rid of the entire profit-based system of wage slavery that exploits human labor and requires trafficked men, women and children.
Tom McGrath put it more simply. On his office wall he had pinned a quote from Mother Jones, the legendary union organizer who battled child labor and gun thugs in the coalfields of West Virginia. Her words read,
“Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”
And I would add to that, no doubt with Tom’s approval,
“... by ripping off the head of the thing that’s oppressing them.”
