It is true, he says, that many women opt for the sex industry and set the terms of their work lives with some amount of free agency. These people are not enslaved, argues Bales, and neither are those working in exploitative, low-paying sweatshops, even as horrible as those environments are. In Thailand as in most other countries where slavery exists, Bales stresses that modern enslavement is rarely dependent on notions of ethnic, class or religious supremacy. Today the morality of money overrides other concerns. Most slaveholders feel no need to explain or defend their chosen method of labor recruitment and management.
Slavery is a very profitable business, and a good bottom line is justification enough.
Mauritania, just south of Morocco, is one of the exceptions. The lack of overt violence has also allowed many outside observers, like the French and American governments, to deny that this slavery even exists. Valuing its strategic importance as a buffer against Algeria and Libya, Western nations including the U.S. have preferred to ignore the obvious. On paper, Mauritania outlawed slavery in 1980, and the country is regularly held up as a model of African democracy. Doing our part Appealing to the sensibilities of his readers, Bales asks us to recognize that the complicity of our governments in ignoring slavery in countries like Mauritania is but one way that Western nations and their citizens participate in the continuation of slavery.