Nowadays slavery doesn't only come in the obvious form in which one
person owns another person (which is traditionally called 'chattel
slavery'). Other practices that amount to slavery are:
Bonded labour or debt bondage
- This is when a person's work is the security for a debt - effectively the person has not been sold, but they are on 'a long lease' which they cannot bring to an end, and so cannot leave their 'employer'
- The conditions of employment can be such that the labourer can't pay off their debt and is stuck for life, because of low wages, deductions for food and lodging, and high interest rates
- The debt may be inherited by other family members who are then themselves forced into bonded labour
- Many children become bonded labour because of family poverty - one estimate put the number of children in bonded labour in India alone at 15 million at the end of the 20th century
- Migrant workers often become bonded labour to pay off those who smuggled them to the new country - they dare not break free for fear of being deported
- The UN Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery put the total number of people in debt bondage around the world at about 20 million in 1998
