This is the second time a text has brought tears to my eyes. The first was "Where the red fern grows". Read this, it's well written and worth the time.
A well written story. I'd be interested in hearing from any Filipino commentators how common this practice still is/is perceived to be in the Philippines today. It's ranked 33/167 by Global Slavery Index[0] as compared to the US at #52.
Due to all of them having an estimated 0.018% in slavery, which seems kind of arbitrary so they should really mark that as some sort of minimal slavery standard rather than make it look like an estimate actually based on the country.
Site seems pretty good overall but is missing a hard facts and figures section to go alongside the nice graphical interface. They appear to offer a pdf report but they wanted me to request access to get it.
True, but whether inmates are forced to provide cheap labor still makes a lot of difference. After the abolition of slavery in the US, prison labor has been used as a replacement in areas that used to rely on slave labor.
> whether inmates are forced to provide cheap labor still makes a lot of difference
What is 'force' though? "Do this or I hit you with a stick"? "Do this and you go back to your cage"? "Do this or there will be nothing positive in your life"?
The prison gets cheap labour. Slavery is just a border on a map of human exploitation, I think some distinctions need far more qualification to be relevant.
I should have phrased it as a higher ranking rather than a higher number. I assumed 'higher' was clear in the terms of ranks, rather than a larger number.
GP's claim makes it seem like they interpreted as I did.
> ...countries like North Korea (rank #1) are closer to 0...
NK is not close to 0 in relative or absolute slave counts, and I don't see the utility in pointing out that 1 is closer to 0 than 52.
What surprises me is that Netherland, while praised for doing the most to fight slavery, is, at #50, ranked lower than the US, which I believe has forced prison labour.
Maybe it has to do with prostitution being legal here. You'd expect licensed and regulated prostitution to reduce slavery in prostitution, but apparently it's still a serious problem. Still, 17,500 people in slavery? That's a lot. I'd like to know where they got that figure.
I don't know how common it is in the Philippines, but it's very common in rich parts of China and Taiwan [0].
Although they probably do get paid something and have freedom, the situations are very similar. Dropped into a location without the ability to speak the language or financial resources to escape.
A friend of mine has talked about the situation in other island nations nearby where some will have young staff; males as drivers, gardening, running errands, and females for cooking, cleaning and sex. I imagine there would be a serious power imbalance with that last item.
Here in the Philippines you can hire a young female "housekeeper" who doesn't actually do any housework, if you know what I mean. The job title is for the neighbours and the tsismosas (town gossips).
Ethnically Chinese people are hated in Indonesia and the Philippines.[0] As in, during times of unrest and civil disturbance, there is a lot of murder and rape of Chinese people.
Partly for this reason. The addition of ethnic differences to economic inequality is a volatile mixture.
Still a very common practice, especially in the Philippines. I'm making stats here based on my personal observation, but here's how it goes:
- The lower class (below or near poverty line) would usually have relatives (sisters or mothers) helping them out
- The middle class are more likely to employ help, especially once they start their own families.
- The upper class definitely employ help. The number of employed help is sometimes even bigger than their own family. And they are treated as employees -- complete with uniforms etc. It's pretty common to see them eat out at a restaurant, and not have the help sit at the same table as them.
> The number of employed help is sometimes even bigger than their own family. And they are treated as employees -- complete with uniforms etc.
I think it would be helpful to distinguish between a true remunerated employer-employee relationship like what you appear to describe above, and unpaid slavery like what is described in the article. The former is a valued part of the economy in many developing country (if you're wealthy and employ no household staff in some such countries you're considered stingy). The latter is slavery, nothing less nothing more, as the author of the piece was able to recognize at a fairly early age.
You're right. In the middle class, the relationship isn't as distinguished. Usually, the salary really is just an "allowance", like the author stated. Other families already consider feeding the help & providing a roof for them as their salary.
Not really. Historically, slaves were often not fed by their owners. They worked all day on the plantation in the Deep South, then went home and tended their own gardens because their owners did not feed them.
"Room and board" is valid compensation in some jobs. There are valid jobs to this day where having a place to stay is a large part of the compensation you will receive.
It is not as black and white as you seem to think.
I would argue that the salaries aren't enough, but as long as they have freedom to quit and leave, and their children aren't beholden to their debts, it isn't slavery.
That's where the complexity and much of the salient issues lie in the 21st century version: formal (de jure) freedom vs. de facto freedom.
To put some clearer relief around the point: the author's parents had no means of keeping Lola in their home by force. They had no right to shoot or maim her if she attempted to leave, and would have been convicted of murder if they did. But where would she go and what would she do, illiterate, with no education or practical experience with worldly matters, no skills, and uncertain legal status?
Few human beings will cope with that level of uncertainty, and to imagine that they ought to is, I would say, a conceit of someone who is unable to properly situate themselves in that person's shoes as a mental exercise. The familiar, with all of its unpleasantness, can be a welcome refuge from the fear and uncertainty of the outside world, especially if the familiar is all you know, you have few bases for comparison, and weren't brought up socially to embrace fear or uncertainty to any degree.
>I think it would be helpful to distinguish between a true remunerated employer-employee relationship like what you appear to describe above, and unpaid slavery like what is described in the article.
That's the thing, though. It's very difficult to distinguish. I know my parents and some family friends who treat their helpers like extended family. But at the same time, it's not uncommon to find others who do it worse. Still, there are those in between.
Like the author, I was raised with a helper around the house. As long as I remember, even when I was a kid, they were there. Unlike the author, though, my parents take care of them, (they're paid, they get vacations, even help when the situation with their families in the province is tight, etc.) but looking back, I can't help but think if having a helper at all (no matter how well treated) is part of the problem.
There's some effect to society that feels like a barrier. The mentality of "I'm just a helper" is real and even when you invite a friend's driver or helper to eat lunch with the group, they'll lie ("I ate already."). What's difficult too, is you don't know if "I ate already" means they weren't given allowance, they're saving to send some to their family, or just prefer to eat with others i.e. go make friends with the other helpers.
My childhood helper sometimes tells stories of some realities of other helpers that he befriended, and the variance is huge, but it's not a binary good/bad thing. It's more like a range of possibilities.
What I can tell you is that this kind slavery-level practice is virtually non-existent. Maids/Housekeepers/"Kasambahay"s/"Katulong"s are expected to be paid. The practice of employing kasambahays is still common among the middle class and is expected of rich families. In lower classes families that are more well off sometimes takes in relatives, of course paying them something for them to save up or paying for their tuition if they're studying. Houseworkers are mostly needed to take care of little children as it is now more common for families to have both parents working.
Here in the Philippines a LOT of television dramas are with protagonists coming from lower classes, often with plots where they are being employed as houseworkers (and you kind of get where this is going :). And television viewership is almost universal here, even in remote villages. I think this really helps a lot for people who identify with these drama characters.
It was common among my (upper-class) extended family, but (disclaimer) I only ever visited every year or so until I was 15.
A lot needs to be done in terms of triangulating proper compensation and upping respect for some families, but I think people also need to maybe visit the Philippines.
That's not to say I didn't find it weird, I totally did. They were privy to such intimate aspects of our lives, but sitting in the car next to them was weird, and they wouldn't really be "allowed" to eat with us (although my mother, around Alex's age, was fine with them eating with us). It was unsettling to me even as a young kid. It was like they were these pariahs and I didn't exactly know why and couldn't really ask why, but they were so present in the day to day that they would know when I cried over something stupid or if I had a period stain I had trouble washing out.
But, I think it's also good to have some frame of reference. Again, proper compensation and respect are essential. But also realise that it's a country trying to grow it's middle class and that there's no way to go from point A to point B in the major metropolitan area without seeing children digging through trash, shanty-towns that may or may not wear the next rainy flood, etc. In these situations, proper compensation for a live-in helper to a middle class family maybe (I wouldn't know) is the stability of room and board and food, even if that means sleeping on a futon with the other live-in workers (who do different roles) in a tiny spare room.
My philosophy tends to be that if you can reasonably afford to give them better standards, then do so. So if you're a foreigner, give them that extra $20 because they will certainly appreciate the exchange rate. If you're well-to-do and regularly have live-in help, having proper "maids quarters" and cots can't be too much of an ask over time.
A live-in househelp is very common and it is true that even the not-well-to-do families even have their own katulongs, normally a relative who are a lot poorer than them. In fact, we had several throughout my childhood (all have wages btw). we call them Yaya instead of Lola (ymmv). My Aunt was like the authors Mom the way she treated the "katulongs" but that story is for another time. My Mom even used to be a katulong. Her story is probably the same as many other Filipinos born in poverty. Her mom (my grandma) worked for my-now Aunt, and let my mom stay and help with house chores, in exchange for school tuition as my grandmas wage can hardly cover it. We have househelps until now, they stayed with us for like 15-20 years and becoming our secondary parents/aunties. We give them health care plan, weekend holidays, bonuses. They have their own rooms too. Whenever I visit Philippines, I always makes sure they get their extra bonuses. Every time I send "balikbayan" boxes, they are first in line to rummage ;P. They dont really have anywhere to go after living with us for so long. They have become family. I have heard similar of Alex Tizon's story in HK and Singapore. Filipino overseas workers basically becomes the primary mom, stays with the host family till theirs kids have families of their own and yet treated like shit (ie. they dont get to eat dinner on the same table of the host family but responsible for raising her kid). Id say wtf now but I remember my Aunt... rest in peace.
as a follow-up to my post above, we have poor relatives who would ask for financial assistance to their schooling. My moms approach would be, sure I'll give you your tuition money but youll have to stay in hour house, free food and lodging but youll have to help with the chores. My mom lives off on the "pension" we send her on a regular basis (no income nor pension money from govt) so I think thats just fair. There aint no such thing as free lunch. Youd be surprised that some of these relatives would refuse but hey choose your own life path.
Absolutely, my immediate reaction was just wow. Past the amazing story, the way he tells it really makes it seem so real. I never imagined modern slavery to be so casual to the slave master, and I certainly never thought about how it would effect the slave master's children.
I found so much of this fascinating. Not just the circumstances of Lola being brought over here, but the children's recognition of what was happening. Learning family horrors (and trying to rectify them) such as this can be one of the hardest things to deal with when growing up.
I read a lot, but I don't usually pay attention to who the writer is, so I wasn't aware of what he has written. I've read a lot of his articles. They're just exceptional pieces of writing. The last one I remember keeping me reading almost to a point of missing my train station is his article about the missing in Alaska:
Alex Tizon built an exemplary career by listening to certain types of people—forgotten people, people on the margins, people who had never before been asked for their stories. [...]
Alex did not know that we would be putting his piece on the cover of this issue; he died the day we made that decision, before we had a chance to tell him.
One thing that I find somewhat surprising will all stories involving slavery is how masters are consistently portrayed as assholes in a way that goes further than what would be a "normal" master/slave relationship.
Even if you think as a slave not as a human being but as, say, a working dog, or even a nice tool, it is not proper treatment. Most dog owners genuinely love their dogs and don't punish them more than what is strictly necessary. Most people naturally respect and grow attached to their "partners", whether there are humans, animals or even inanimate objects.
So why do slaves, who are are capable of empathy, speech, and everything that make us human get treated worse than a mechanic's favorite wrench?
It's very simple - for keeping them under control and keep them from thinking of themselves as human/equal or even having any independent thought at all. Neither your dog nor your wrench have to be taught their place in the world. You want your slave to internalize their existence as a slave. It's also to prevent yourself from seeing your slave as anything other than a slave.
It also has to do with what's the socially acceptable and normal way of behaving in a given society.
What exactly makes you think the average master/slave relationship is "not normal" for a master/slave relationship? I would think the average story would be, by definition, normal.
Excuse me? No, just no. Not in the same way a human slave needs to be taught. Not at all. And besides I said dogs "don't need to be taught their place in the world" not "what's acceptable and what's not." They do in a sense, of course, but not remotely in the same sense as a slave.
I'm objecting to your sentence, saying it's objectively false. Whether or not training another human being is ethical or not is another argument (e.g. children).
A dog needs to be taught what is acceptable behavior and what is not acceptable behavior. If you have somebody living with you, they need to be educated on what they can and cannot do. And since dogs and human are pack animals, you need to enforce the idea of a hierarchy where you are above them to ensure obedience.
The fact that you're denying them contact with their families and not paying them is one thing. However, it's a completely different thing from saying that the modification of behavior of humans is wrong, categorically.
I understand what you're saying, but his implication is that dogs do not have to be taught not to aspire to be better than dog-status. They cannot be any more than dogs.
This is clarified by using an inanimate object (wrench) as a the other example.
Human beings though have to be molded in order to keep their 'place'. They can even aspire to want to be things that they cannot achieve, such as my never ending desire to be the first man to set foot on Mars.
Often, dogs will try to be part of the family and try to assert dominance over family members, especially younger, more timid children. They're aspiring to be a higher place in the pack than they should be, and they need to be trained in the fact that they're objectively and necessarily not equal to any human being.
When a dog ever thinks it is the equal of humans, bad things happen, such as bites and euthanasia of the dog, and maulings. That's why you need to train it early as a puppy, that it should never bite/be aggressive to humans, as it'd be harmful to the dog.
The same reasoning can be applied to humans, but cannot be applied to wrenches. Equating wrenches to dogs is another logical dead end - either dogs have feelings and emotions and hopes, otherwise the beating your dog is equivalent to leaving a wrench out in the rain without oil, as both are just tools to you.
> When a dog ever thinks it is the equal of humans, bad things happen, such as bites and euthanasia of the dog, and maulings.
You've pretty much laid out the limits of dog rebellion against human control.
Dogs' however can't foment revolution, conspire to free all the other dogs in the state, create an army, capture or hold territory and enslave their former masters.
To put it bluntly, even in the worst case scenario dog-revolt is an annoyance to humanity in general. No one is going to wake up with a collar around their neck, because a dog decided it was 'equal' or 'superior' to humans.
Dogs' are simply limited to dog-level actions, regardless of how hard they're trying.
Human slaves on the other hand have no technical barrier to acting as competently as their masters.
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Now if you say "that is objectively false", let me remind you that we're not talking about dominance, submission, correct behavior, or otherwise. We're talking about objective status in society as determined by humanity in general.
Even if you can find a single person who says "aha! I am dominated by this dog!", humanity in general will never agree that a dog---any dog---has somehow achieved equality with humans. Imagine that: dogs voting, dogs marrying, dogs taking wages, dogs running for president.
When people say they are superior to dogs; they're just making things up. If you think "that is objectively false", well then you'll need a better argument than "oh dogs can bite you if you're not careful".
Slaves often serve as a reference point for social standing in society. If you can push the bar lower, you can effectively raise your own position. I also imagine the standard appeal of bullying others and holding power over others played a role.
Just to be clear I think this behavior is abhorrent, this is just my attempt to understand the mindset.
That's the attitude that maintained Jim Crow in the south (and still maintains anti-black racism today). "We may be poor white trash, but at least we aren't black". (Black isn't the word that would be used, though)
> So why do slaves, who are are capable of empathy, speech, and everything that make us human get treated worse than a mechanic's favorite wrench?
It's quite simple -- if you think of your slave as a human deserving of empathy, you have to recognize yourself as a monster. If you think of them as a creature less than you, you're cruelties are unimportant,
It could be simple memetics. Stories about slaves who are treated in an outrageous manner are more likely to be shared than stories about "nice" slave owners. Such stories might even be mistaken for endorsements of slavery.
I was travelling and a friend said I could use her house, because it was empty. This was perfect for me, since I had a wife and kid.
It turns out there was a housekeeper. She did everything for us, made us feel very comfortable, cooked, served, helped with the kid, etc.
Then one day I found out she didn't have her own room, despite the place being a multi storey mansion. In fact, she slept on a mat in the kitchen. And not only that, there would be a phone call each morning to wake her up, from the master of the house. He didn't want her to get too comfy while the family was out.
It was all a bit shocking. I still haven't chatted to my friend about this, because what on earth do you say? And otherwise ordinary western educated person -in fact a feminist, globalist, left-leaning idealist- who has a slave? What if I've misunderstood something? Maybe my friend didn't approve of it? Maybe he did? I'd never be able to talk to my friend again.
I got the housekeeper a present when we left, as she'd been so good at taking care of us. But naturally I didn't enquire any further into her relationship with the family.
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My main thought is there's a sort of Stockholm syndrome going on. Lola still had thoughts for her family back home, but she was so integrated in the new family it became part of her life, too. I guess it's a coping mechanism. Even slaves need meaning in their lives, and taking care of kids is meaning.
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Ok, enough of moralizing. Actually I find it comforting that there is at least some sympathy for my predicament. At least one or two of you think it is possible that they would behave similarly. Or at least acknowledge the awkward situation.
I will talk to this friend in person next time I'm in that part of the world, which should be soon, about this incident, and get the full story of how their housekeeper lives.
This sounds like a question you would be asked to think about in an ethics class. The kind I would probably dismiss as so unrealistic that it's not worth taking seriously, so I'd give some canned answer that I think is supposed to be the correct one. I don't know what I would do in that situation either to be honest.
So you're trying to tell us that your feeling of uncomfortness is the only thing stopping you from growing a spine and standing up for such an inhumane treatment, that apart from you nobody else can witness?
Have some decency and confront your so-called friend. How can people be rich and not have the decency to give the person feeding you and your family a freaking room.
And I really had to constrain myself from using expletives in this reply.
Seems like he's so hypnotized by being rich adjacent he couldn't ask some questions about something that weird.
HN is the closest thing I have to a portal into the private lives of people with nigh infinite money, and eeeevery so often I read something like the gp that makes me want to gulag the rich and seize the means of production.
Now I know there's evil people at every income level, but infinite money really increases the ability of a person to project evil. My intuition tells me this story isn't even that exceptional. I bet the evil rich hedonism spectrum has some real nightmare fuel.
> makes me want to gulag the rich and seize the means of production.
I feel the opposite way. This sort of thing rarely happens in the west, but quite openly happens in other places, and that fact makes me want to help fix the inequities in OTHER countries that cause this, not tear down my own country.
Specifically (and proselytizing to a degree) it makes me more determined to give a significant portion of my income to https://www.givedirectly.org/basic-income so that at least some of the poorest people on the planet can be empowered to make their own choices.
> Have some decency and confront your so-called friend.
Sounds like you haven't been in this situation.
You know, there's often a gap between how good we think we are, and how good we are. I feel terrible about it, and the subject comes up now and again of whether we should say something, and my wife and I feel bad.
It's easy to tell people what they should do, I do it all the time as well, even to myself.
I understand your reasoning and try acting decently (even though I probably fail often). Of course it is easier to point out mistakes instead of changing oneself to the better. I think it is commendable that you were so open about your thoughts, which empowered a stranger like me to take a moral shit on your behavior in this specific situation.
I have some acquaintances with weird/antisocial/borderline illegal behavior and never addressed it directly with them, just avoided them.
I've had some acquaintances do some weird, antisocial, definitely illegal things. I can't recall a time when an acquaintance has done something that appears as evil as the situation we're discussing.
Best case interpretation that I can make, ignoring the floor mat. They were micromanaging when their employee wakes up despite their daily responsibilities being temporarily reduced (home owners were away).
If I had a friend doing even the above, I'd at LEAST ask "explain to me how this isn't you being a dick." That's just getting to know them. Don't you want to know the people you're friends with?
It seems there's an opportunity to meet my friend in person soon. I'll use it to ask about what exactly happened. It's not the kind of thing that comes across well electronically, you really need to be there in real time looking at the reaction. It also needs to be managed properly because this friend is in a somewhat fragile state for completely separate reasons. The last time we met this other issue meant nothing else could even be discussed.
But the key takeaway for my kids is his parents aren't perfect. Hopefully he will have learned that in other ways by the time he's old enough to understand this situation.
This really isn't about attaining some impossible standard of perfection. If it was your child being treated like that, what would you do? Would you hope that someone who witnessed your child being treated like that would say or do something?
Perhaps the situation you find yourself in is so egregious that it is "worth" the risk of losing a friendship, possibly troubling your friend even more, and you yourself going through much emotional distress leading up to, and during the conversation.
I've been accused by a friend for not doing enough in a much less egregious situation (but also in the category of morality and equality), and understand the social difficulty in broaching such a topic, especially if you don't know them well.
It's easy to say "do the right thing" on an internet forum to a stranger, especially if you yourself haven't been in this social situation where you know what the right thing is in a vacuum, yet our survival instincts push us towards not stirring the water. I think your reaction thus far is completely rational given such an alien situation (which is where I found myself in the past).
I just want to say that your internal turmoil is being discounted too much by other commenters. I hope that you can find internal peace and understanding of where you stand and what you believe in for yourself, not because someone tells you that's what people "should do", before doing or saying anything, because that is the only way we can sustain both our moral and emotional health.
I upvoted your comment because I think it's the kind of positive, supportive remark seen too rarely online. I say this with complete sincerity.
However, part of your response gave me pause: "I just want to say that your internal turmoil is being discounted too much by other commenters."
I would offer that we cannot underestimate the internal turmoil, stress and emotional trauma of the aforementioned "housekeeper" (slave), who sleeps on a mat in the kitchen, and that any internal turmoil by those of us with freedom pales in comparison.
Immediate, unambiguous action is the only moral response to slavery.
"Hey, when I was at your place, [housekeeper's name] was sleeping in the [location] - is that normal? Does she get a room? Surely there's a spare room for her?"
"I need to keep rooms spare for when friends visit."
"When does that ever happen though? Come on man, they would understand if they had to stay nearby or squeeze into a room. [Housekeeper] is there every day. She is a gem and works so hard. I couldn't do that to someone. I think if you have a better supported employee or helper or whatever, they're more likely to be happier around your family and feel naturally interested in their role."
"She doesn't mind."
"I bet she would, but do you really think she'd feel comfortable raising that with you? You should do the right thing. Think about how valuable a comfortable room is to you. Everyone should be able to appreciate that and not sleep on a mat."
Agreed. What I've been discovering lately is that, the first time you speak out and experience that intense awkwardness (making waves, creating conflict, etc), it's hard. Then it gets easier. It's like standing up for what's right is a muscle that needs exercising.
yeah, i get you, and i'm not saying i'd necessarily do better. though i'd hope i would[0]. but just because you acted in a way that others would find relatable, or because others might act in the same way, doesn't make that action right. sometimes we need to call each other out on the hard stuff.
if you feel that bad about it, you should probably bring it up with your friend.
0 - also, i'd hope that my character judgement is good enough that i wouldn't be close friends with someone like that. though of course, people change, we don't always choose who we like, etc etc.
You feel terrible about it because you haven't done anything about it even though you know its wrong. If you heard about it second or third hand then it would be better not to judge because you don't know the facts, but you've said that you do know this person doesn't even have a bed, sleeps on the floor, and gets a wake-up call every morning.
There is no question in my mind that I would confront anyone I knew engaging in the situation you're describing. Among my circles, injustices always seem to be a third person. Mostly bosses. Boss doesn't give you a day off despite a month of notice. Boss dicks you around on hours or a promised promotion. The people I consider friends are folks I can talk to about morality. I've grown as a person based on the critical things some friends have told me.
Never anything in the same time zone of FRIEND MISTREATS LIVE IN HELP, MIGHT BE SLAVE, I DIDNT KNOW WHAT TO SAY. This whole thread is hysterical to me. This is a parody of real life, right?
I hate to edge in on godwin territory, but this has reminded me that our society has not grown at all in the last 100 years. We've accreted a card house morality that collapses for SO MANY people at the slightest breeze. Can't let a slave come between friends am I right?
> There is no question in my mind that I would confront anyone I knew engaging in the situation you're describing. Among my circles, injustices always seem to be a third person.
But there should be a question in your mind unless you've actually confronted something like this yourself (with all of it's associated complexity). Until then, your certainty is only a fantasy.
Sure, a fantasy. I doubt you can be convinced, but let me try.
I was always sure that if someone broke into my home, I would confront them - lethally - if necessary, despite any complexities. Dignity is important to me, and I'm willing to take risks to keep it. When I was a sweet summer child I used to think that was the default state of adulthood.
Well, recently someone did break into my home at 3am. Coincidentally I was sleeping on the couch right in front of the front door. My eyes opened to the sight of a strange man in dark clothes standing inside my home. I went from half asleep to awake and armed faster than I've done anything else from deep sleep. If they had shown me any signs of aggression I'd have shot them. Fortunately for both of us they panicked and fled.
You're right, the action itself wasn't a thing I deliberated on or decided in that moment. I told myself I'd do it, but the way I responded in that acute moment was instinctual and adrenaline fueled.
There are actually some weak parallels between a home invasion and finding out your friend might be a slave owner.
I can understand why some people would respond to a home invasion with submission. For some folks, that doesn't even touch their personal definition of dignity, the function is life > stuff and I can respect that completely.
Yet, when you see your friend possibly engaging in slavery, and mistreating them to boot.. it's like home invasion with the personal stakes all lowered. Your life isn't on the line, just potentially the life of the victim and your friendship. Not only that, but the time frame is extended from do-or-die adrenaline to days of deliberation if you want. I'd have to work real hard to come up with some complexities that shake my confidence on how I'd react here. Basically the maid would have to be skeletor or a war criminal. I really wish more people were backing me up on this. I'm pretty blown away.
But yeah my knees would probably buckle and i'd let them continue with their evil so things wouldn't get awkward. Lol nope.
For what it's worth, this entire thread is making me feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Typically, I appreciate the nuanced, thoughtful, and introspective discussions we tend to have here.
In this case? Like, what the fuck is there even to discuss here? This is black and white. You free the slave and deal with "social inconveniences" or whatever. Jesus Christ.
We have someone sleeping on a matt, and getting a daily wake up call to do their work.
Work which presumably they are being paid for---we don't know if they're not being paid for the work.
Now in the USA, sleeping on a matt in the kitchen is some kind of terrible situation that no one would live with but....
In my country, I slept on a matt as a child. I wasn't poor. We had a house, food, private schooling, etc. but kids under the age of 7 slept on a matt. It was just the way things were done.
Even today, I have relatives who sleep on matt's despite being totally capable of buying western style beds.
Now as for not having a room of their own, I don't understand the attachment to a private room as opposed to simply a lockbox or a place to keep your things. Private rooms seem like a luxury that one can do without, not a must have.
Disclaimer:
Our families maids have private rooms, and beds (which ironically they endlessly complain are too hot compared to the breezy floor mats they're used to). They also have savings accounts, and pension funds because the family matriarch is a western trained banker and believes that in the absence of good governance, private individuals have to take better care of their employees livelihood.
So much this! I am appalled at this thread possibly full of non-asian people who think having a room and board househelp is slavery.
They are free to quit and renegotiate salaries. Their children are free to do whatever they want, infact we help in their education and give them gifts. If anything it tends to be a more empathic employer-employee relationship, albeit with shit salary.
There is real slavery however, bonded labour, forced child beggars. Seeing this not being mentioned at all, I don't think we have many asian people here, just westerners speculating.
I think we don't have enough information to decide either way. The guy who visited his friend's house seems to think everything wasn't above-board there. Maybe he's wrong, but the responsible thing to do is follow up on it with the friend, promptly. It doesn't need to be an accusation, just an "I noticed something odd; can you tell me what's going on?" type thing. And if the explanation isn't satisfying, you get the authorities involved, immediately.
Regardless, just because something is culturally acceptable (like Lola's slavery back in the Philippines), it doesn't make it right.
"free the slave" is not always trivial, though. Simply taking them out of the house moves them from a mat in the kitchen to sleeping on the street without a mat. They need a place to live, friends and family, and confidence to look for a real job.
Modern slavery is rarely keeping someone physically locked up (though sometimes it is). It's often more a matter of keeping the slave socially isolated and with too low confidence to dare to walk away.
I don't mean that they like their situation, but it's often what they're familiar with. Setting them free requires support and commitment.
And it's not as though my reaction would be to open a door and yell "Run! You're free!".
My first reaction would be to confront the friend about the situation. Next steps would happen next. Ignoring it because it's challenging, awkward or complicated is wrong. It just is.
Absolutely. It's an attrocity, but at the same time, I'm not sure I'd know what to do about it. In a society not equipped to handle this, I fear they might simply lock up the "owner" and set the slave free, but that's unlikely to do the slave much good in extreme cases like this.
Setting them free is great for people who have family that can take them in, as is often the the case when the slavery lasted a couple of months or years at most (which is probably the case with adolescent girls pressured into prostitution, for example). But in cases like in the article, where someone has groomed to be a slave from a young age, and has lived that life for decades, been moved to another country even; the family that owns them may be all they have. You've got to free them, but that might take away the only thing they still have, and sever the connection with the only people they know and care about.
It's a seriously fucked up situation.
But yes, when you know someone who seems to have a slave, that is absolutely something to confront them about.
Confronting suspicions about friend mabey being a slave owner is 100% something I would do and I assume most people would. But mabey im naive? Peoples rationalisations for gross unethical behavior in this thread are indeed troubling.
Yeah, I'm with you on this. This doesn't even need to be accusatory in the first place, just something like "hey, when I was staying at your house I noticed that your housekeeper was sleeping on a mat in the kitchen: just was wondering what's up with that". The guy could decide based on the answer if it was legit ("that's weird; she has a room... it's the third door on the left on the second floor; I'll check on her and make sure she's ok") or suspicious ("oh, she's strange and I think she likes it there") and if it made sense to press more.
I really _really_ hope I'd confront this "friend" if I were in that situation. It's definitely the right thing to do.
When this story hit HN earlier today, I was taken aback by how so many of the responses basically were of the hand-clasping, oh-what-a-touching-story nature.
This is fucking slavery. There is nothing to admire. Treating slaves-in-all-but-name nicer after the fact does not make it any less repellent.
One human being owned another, and had final say regarding all aspects of their lives. It is abhorrent in all forms, and should called out as such. This isn't something that a sad-face emoji or hashtag campaign fixes, and isn't something that should wait until a more convenient time lest anyone be offended.
Jesus Christ, this may be one of the most vile things I've ever seen on HN.
Phew thanks for making yourself known. This could be bias, but the blob of people on the internet seems to have become a lot more casually sociopathic over the last 15 years. Sure back when folks used to troll for laughs, but it always seemed like a mask to get a rise out of people.
I've only noticed people recently openly talking convincingly and casually about weird shit like this.
Either
A) The world has always been a much worse place than I realized
B) Society is morally decaying
C) Kids these days have perfected some artisan grade, gluten free, premium master craft trolling.
It's just always been easy to close our eyes to it, but western shops are full of products created through slavery. A couple of years some people (at least in Netherland) drew attention to the fact that nearly all chocolate is grown by people who are effectively slaves, and there was no way to eat chocolate while being sure you didn't support slavery. A lot has been done to improve that situation (at least in Netherland; no idea about other countries), but the same is still true with other products. If your smartphone is not a Fairphone, chances are that some of the materials used it in, have been dug up by slaves. Cheap clothes are often made in sweat shops, often by children who should be in school.
The public face in western developed countries may have been freed from the appearance of slavery and oppression, but that's just a thin veneer. Slavery, child labour and really awful working conditions are still appallingly common, and are a big part of the reason why so many products in our shops are so cheap. And most people close their eyes to it because it's easy to ignore, and we like cheap stuff. And when we do see it, it's so easy pretend it's not really slavery, because once you take up that fight, it never stops, because there's so much injustice that still needs to be righted.
And even in western countries, vulnerable people (illegal immigrants, young women, people with mental disabilities) are conned or pressed into all sorts of situations that are disgustingly close to slavery.
I mean....the world is a far better place now than it was 200 years ago. Society has always had weak morals as a whole. It was the few and strong willed that built American society -- with a heavy disdain for the decision making capability of the proletariat. If anything what you see on the Internet simply isn't real. It is a fake and dangerous to absorb ideals from. Some of it is real, but which part?
I sympathize with the idea that we don't know what's going on, even based on that guy's post, so it might be a bit premature to point fingers and declare that, without question, this is an instance of slavery. Because really, that's the case. We don't know enough. And maybe the guy who visited his friend doesn't know enough to call it either.
However, the thing that gets me is that this guy had a moral responsibility to find out more, promptly, and he hasn't done it. I'm glad that some of his follow-up posts suggest that he's going to do so soon, but it's waaaaaaay overdue, and that's pretty messed up.
I could try to free the slave, but on the other hand, it might cause a bit of unpleasantness with my friend. So it's six of one, half a dozen of the other!
I have confronted and ended friendships over things like former friends talking to service people like they are somehow better than them or own them. I can't look at someone the same after that type of behavior. Your friend literally owns a person.
> your feeling of uncomfortness is the only thing stopping you from growing a spine and standing up for such an inhumane treatment
> Have some decency and confront your so-called friend.
I think your advice falls into the "much easier to say (from a great distance) than do" category.
The people who unfailingly and immediately know and do the moral thing, regardless of personal cost or expectation of results, are often literally saints. The rest of us muddle through; being uncertain, un-confident, and only occasionally recognizing and mustering the strength to act against an injustice.
> I think your advice falls into the "much easier to say (from a great distance) than do" category.
What of it? You still don't allow people to remain in a state of slavery when it is within your power to free them with just a phone call to the police. It doesn't have to be easy to do to be unacceptable not to do.
> it is within your power to free them with just a phone call to the police
Maybe not. Sounds like the situation was in another country. Who knows if the police there would care or not. And applying the term "slavery" to the story in the comment is jumping to a conclusion that provides more moral clarity than there may actually be. We don't know enough to say if the situation is that of a shitty employer or that of a slaveowner, and our only source of information doesn't even know himself:
> I will talk to this friend in person next time I'm in that part of the world, which should be soon, about this incident, and get the full story of how their housekeeper lives.
I only say that to emphasize that this stuff, in reality, is probably a lot harder to deal with than some people seem to think.
> Who knows if the police there would care or not.
That's not a reason not to call.
> We don't know enough to say if the situation is that of a shitty employer or that of a slaveowner, and our only source of information doesn't even know himself:
Well, if police were to check, all the "friend" would have to do is provide proof of salary and most everything would be fine if it was a mistake.
I think you're pretty mistaken in thinking any proof would be available or required. All these maids are typically paid in cash.
Unless the person has bruises, or complains that they're not being allowed to leave---the police would ignore the situation.
Compounding this effect is that most 'maids' are distant relatives in the western sense---being 3rd cousins or nieces through marriage to the hosting family. When push comes to shove, the host family just claims truthfully that they are all a single family, and the sleeping conditions of an adult who isn't being forced to do anything is really no ones business.
---
As an edit. What I'm describing is the traditional lifestyle of West African maidservants. All maids are relatives, since no one trusts anyone who isn't related to them to live in their house.
The world is a big place though. I wouldn't be surprised if maidservant lifestyles in Asian countries or Middle Eastern countries was much different.
Middle Eastern countries even use foreign-born servants, something that'd be seen as the height of insanity in someplace like Ghana.
You know, I have a life threatening genetic disorder. This is the root cause of my homelessness and the one thing I most need to get my life back is an online income adequate to support myself. I am an active participant on HN and I appear to be the top ranked woman here.
I assure you, no one on HN is valiantly trying to help me solve my financial problems. In fact, I am routinely treated dismissively by people claiming they are not being dismissive and crap like that.
Given that context, it is incredibly difficult for me to read the many remarks on HN in this thread by people claiming unequivocally that they would know the right thing to do by this woman sleeping on the kitchen floor and they would absolutely do the right thing when my experience suggests the exact opposite is probably true of most members here.
Maybe some folks could get down off their high horses and quit making me just spastic today. It would be a kindness, though probably more of a kindness than most of the incredible hypocrites here are capable of.
I'm sorry for your troubles. But being confronted, in person, with a situation that you think is domestic slavery and being asked on the internet for money by a stranger are two different things.
I'm sorry for your troubles. But being confronted, in person, with a situation that you think is domestic slavery and being asked on the internet for money by a stranger are two different things.
I am not asking for money. And you are just proving my point.
Or because of how you phrase things, maybe. I won't rule out that I'm prejudiced -- it's all but a certainty that I am, to some extent or another. But despite that, I don't normally think women are asking me for money on the internet.
I am the highest ranked woman on HN because women are generally not all that warmly welcomed here. So if you don't think women are asking you for money on the internet, maybe it is because you are mostly talking to men.
It is hard to ask for anything at all when silenced by the general behavior of men online. I offend in part because I fail to shut up, in spite of the sometimes horrible treatment I receive through no fault of my own.
I routinely hear men here tell each other that their high karma is evidence of competence. No one says that about me -- except me. When I say it, it gets ridiculed.
I routinely see men here ask for help with making their businesses profitable. They are not misinterpreted as begging for money. When I do it, I am accused of panhandling or ignored or it otherwise typically is not very helpful.
It would be nice if you would just stop digging your grave deeper. Your first remark was just sort of dumb. But you get more offensive with each iteration of telling me it is somehow all my fault that I can't get taken seriously no matter how hard I try, a thing I have been doing for literally years, which is part of how I ended up the highest ranked woman here.
The next closest openly female member is many, many thousands of points behind me, yet I am far from the bottom rung of the leaderboard. So all the evidence suggests that, sadly, I get taken more seriously here and get more respect than most women who basically don't bother to open their mouths, even when they have serious tech jobs.
I have many thousands more karma than the only female cofounder of Y Combinator, Jessica Livingston. She currently has 3521, which is hundreds more than she had the last time I looked. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jl
You felt it was appropriate to interject in a conversation about slavery to wonder why none of these people online haven't helped you out financially, which a typical person would construe as asking for money, despite being a woman with the highest internet points (or something). Maybe I don't frequent HN enough to know who's who, but your replies to obstinate read like the ramblings of someone with mental problems (I don't mean that as an insult).
You felt it was appropriate to interject in a conversation about slavery to wonder why none of these people online haven't helped you out financially, which a typical person would construe as asking for money
No, that is not what I did. There are comments here comparing the woman sleeping on the kitchen floor to homeless people. There are multiple comments here where people are getting up on their high horse swearing that if confronted with such a situation, they would a) unequivocally know "The right thing to do" about it and b) absolutely do the right thing. They are berating this person on the internet for their moral failure in doing nothing when that individual doesn't even know the full details. But when then confronted with a homeless woman who participates here regularly, none of these supposed paragons of virtue is stepping up to valiantly go to bat for me -- which is exactly what I expected, given my long standing experience online.
No one owes me that intervention. But the people berating this guy for not automatically knowing the right answer and not immediately rescuing the woman from presumed slavery are quick to tell me I am somehow in the wrong and somehow asking for something from them when I point out the obvious example that, no, it isn't always immediately clear and obvious how to help and, no, they wouldn't valiantly rise to the occasion and feel compelled to rescue some pathetic woman from her plight just because it came to their attention like some of them are claiming.
Those are incredibly easy boasts to make when talking to some guy on the internet about his supposed moral defects. But no one here is going to back up those boasts by doing whatever it takes to extract me from my plight AND, on top of that, I am going to be inundated with accusations of mental health problems, panhandling the internet, etc for pointing out that all these supposed paragons of virtue absolutely will not have all the answers and absolutely will not go the distance involved for every case of injustice they casually trip across in the world, such as my situation.
The only thing I asked for in my remark was for people to get down off their high horses in regards to how they are talking to this guy. I am not expecting anyone to rescue me. I am only pointing out that the expectation that this individual is obligated to rescue this woman sleeping on the kitchen floor is a crazy, ridiculous expectation. Such situations are almost never solved by making a single phone call to the police and poking it at may even do enormous harm to the woman's already not enviable life.
It is easy to be a high handed braggart claiming moral high ground on the internet and trying to bully someone else into "doing the right thing" while ignoring the fact that it is rarely clear and obvious what that is and it is never easy to actually right a tremendous injustice, even when you do know all the details. Such things come at quite a high cost, if they can be pulled off at all.
Here is another viewpoint - it's not clear what you wish for when saying
> 'I assure you, no one on HN is valiantly trying to help me solve my financial problems.'
I gather you have financial problems and are working hard to fight them. There seems to be some relation with the people on HN that don't help, but how? Did you ask for help and nobody offered? Is it sarcasm and people are actively hindering you in your job? I am confused, and I can see how someone could understand that you're asking for money. (I'm female, in case that matters.) So, I also concur that your way of expression is a bit unclear.
> I think your advice falls into the "much easier to say (from a great distance) than do" category.
That may be true, but that doesn't change the fact that it's the right thing to do. The parent's language was perhaps a bit more inflammatory than it needed to be, but sometimes you need someone outside the situation to be more objective and remind you -- possibly rudely -- what needed to be done.
I hope I would have the wisdom and fortitude to do the right thing in that situation, but I won't know until and unless I'm put in it.
Yeah, all I could think of reading that was "If I found out my friend kept a slave (outside a consensual BDSM context), that person would no longer be my friend."
In some parts of the world a lot of people make do with a spot on the floor. I stayed at a guest house in India recently and the staff all slept on the roof or in the kitchen. Places are poor.
Sure, and that sucks. But we're talking about someone wealthy who has a lot of space. Making your live-in housekeeper sleep on a mat when you have plenty of space to spare as at best being a horrifying asshole, and if this guy is truly a "friend", I would hope he'd find out what's going on.
In some parts of the world a lot of people make do with a spot on the floor. I stayed at a guest house in India recently and the staff all slept on the roof or in the kitchen. Some places in the world are poor. Better that than on the street.
He is at least aware that what is happening was not quite right. It is concerning that he cared more about rich friends feelings than the woman sleeping in dirt but there isn't really enough here to label him a sociopath :)
I see a lot of ads in the highway rest areas against slavery translated in multiple languages. There is hotline phone number on them. Its so easy to report to authorities they even encourage you. Every time i saw them i thought slavery in our day and age??? Now i know better.
Feminism is the idea that women have the natural right to make decisions for their own lives and pursue those decisions to the best of their abilities. Taking part in the detention and mistreatment of a woman is orthogonal to being a feminist.
Idealism, well I'm assuming she's not an adherent of the philosophical kind and aspires to some sort of 'ideal' which I would have a hard time reconciling with slavery.
So in conclusion, I reject your charges of No True Scotsman. Some things are cut-and-dried.
if his friend was indian, the authorities would have been mightily puzzled. this is standard treatment for live-in servants, right down to the sheer meanness of making sure she "didn't get too comfortable" by way of an unnecessary phone call each morning.
How likely would that be to lead to a better outcome than both the slaver or the slave being deported?
Any solution that grants immigration status to people (who are often, as the woman in OP's story, not even literate) "just" on the basis of them having been enslaved is probably not politically tenable in the US. The most you can hope for is some sizeable amount of damages to be paid, and depending on the legal framework of the source country they subsequently get expelled to, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the slaver could just reclaim the money once they are back.
One reason is I almost never hear from this friend since his relocation to another part of the world. Another is they have enough issues going on, personal issues requiring a lot of work, and being told they are a slave owner would not help.
Perhaps most importantly my friend is not the direct slave owner, if that is indeed the relationship. It's my friend's dad, a guy I've barely even met. Perhaps if he was around, and caning her as I walked into the kitchen, I would have said something, who knows? But I was receiving his hospitality through a third party, and I am a foreigner to their country and customs.
Did you ever read the article and wonder why Billy or his family didn't do anything? They probably felt it was so alien they didn't know what to do.
You also gotta ask yourself, if you owned a slave, why you would allow that slave to be the only attendant when a western family comes through town?
I think there might be some conflation between this story and the article posted. We and the OP don't actually know if the person was enslaved by forced labour.
All they know is that they slept on a matt in the kitchen.
If they were being paid adequately, I would not call it slavery. Poor labour practice, certainly, and distasteful in the extreme but not the same thing as forced labour and bondage.
> I think there might be some conflation between this story and the article posted.
Yeah. My sense is people are angry at what the OP described, and their anger has clouded their judgment. They're twisting ambiguous stories like lordnacho's into a version of the OP's, so they can play-act their sense of righteous superiority.
> You understand that you are now complicit in her abuse, yes? You understand that you are an accomplice to this crime?
FFS, you literally know next to nothing about the situation. Why do you feel like you're in a position to self righteously adjudicate him as being a criminal? None of us, not even lordnacho himself, know enough about his friend's housekeeper to legitimately make claims like that (or casually throw around terms like slave).
Seriously, the housekeeper's situation may not be too far off from the archetypal startup employee working 18 hour days and sleeping under his desk. None of us know, and none of us should claim to know.
>Seriously, the housekeeper's situation may not be too far off from the archetypal startup employee working 18 hour days and sleeping under his desk. None of us know, and none of us should claim to know.
Do you really believe that some 23 year old fresh out of college programmer working 18 hours days by choice in hopes of either a significant payoff or at least experience that will anyways lead to a very well compensated job is at all similar to a women who is sleeping on a mat in the kitchen of an empty house full of empty rooms who is then woken up every morning by a phone call explicitly designed to be demeaning so that she can start her menial, low payoff, worthless experience work?
> in hopes of either a significant payoff or at least experience that will anyways lead
You're moving the goalposts. It's not about whether they have equivalent opportunities, it's about whether they're slaves. The overworked-and-sleeping-on-a-mat-programmer and the overworked-and-sleeping-on-mat-maid may both simply have paid jobs with shitty bosses. People here are jumping to the conclusion that being worked hard + sleeping on a mat = slavery, when clearly it doesn't.
> You also gotta ask yourself, if you owned a slave, why you would allow that slave to be the only attendant when a western family comes through town?
Because you're rich, you know that the local system is so heavily weighed in your favour that you could literally kill the housekeeper and get away with a fine. Because you feel that you own that woman and she has no more rights than a dog. There are many reasons. What does that have to do with anything?
I usually refrain from telling people who they are instead of what they do, but your friend is not a feminist or a left-leaning idealist if they have a slave, full stop.
My main thought is there's a sort of Stockholm syndrome going on. Lola still had thoughts for her family back home, but she was so integrated in the new family it became part of her life, too. I guess it's a coping mechanism. Even slaves need meaning in their lives, and taking care of kids is meaning.
OH, puhleez. This is so much worse than theories of "codependency," as if a woman with young kids being financially dependent on her alcoholic husband isn't an actual serious problem, it's just some sort of emotional disorder. If you are married and financially dependent on the guy, you wake him up and help him get to work and you cover up his alcoholism because you and your kids are dependent upon his money, not because you need therapy or something. Geez.
Lola had no papers. She had no means to job hunt. She had no social connections outside the family. They uprooted her and moved her repeatedly. They never gave her the allowance they promised. This was her only means of survival. And she had agreed to it to get out of being married off to some asshole twice her age. So, she could do domestic labor or she could be de facto a sex slave. That would have probably involved all of the same abuses this involved, only add into it routine rape as part of the deal. She came from a place with no prospects. Then, having taken this deal, she was incredibly trapped.
It is abhorrent to westerners, but indentured servitude used to be pretty common and was often done somewhat willingly/by choice as a means to pay a debt with labor at a time when money per se was hard to come by. Historically, it was not uncommon for people to pay for passage to the U.S. by agreeing to 7 years of indentured servitude following their trip here.
That is still reality in a lot of places in the world. We don't want to hear it, but there is some truth to the idea that you need a middle class income to afford middle class morality. There are parts of the world where large numbers of people have no hope of anything resembling a middle class American lifestyle.
> That is still reality in a lot of places in the world. We don't want to hear it, but there is some truth to the idea that you need a middle class income to afford middle class morality. There are parts of the world where large numbers of people have no hope of anything resembling a middle class American lifestyle.
Not only that, they likely don't even have hope of anything resembling a poor American lifestyle.
Yes, please, do something about this. Talk to your friend. Call the cops. Leave an anonymous tip and try to follow up. Something. Custom, law, and your own sense of right say so.
Billy isn't the villain—but is he the role model you aspire to? If your kid learns your online identity some day and they stumble across this, is this the end of the story you want them to hear?
Maybe my friend didn't approve of it? Maybe he did? I'd never be able to talk to my friend again.
I've got to say that slavery as a moral ill outweighs social awkwardness, and rationalizing the situation by saying that maybe it gives slaves' life meaning is an abdication of moral responsibility.
I mean, yeah, you could find meaning in that. I'm pretty stoic, I can find meaning in things like dying of cancer or whatever. But that doesn't make it acceptable to put someone in that position, since there's an implicit assertion that their life would lack meaning without this structure.
I think you should swallow your anxiety about this and discuss the matter with your friend, who essentially coopted you into participating in an abusive relationship by not informing you of this in advance.
Sorry man, but that's dangerous thinking. I might understand if all rooms in the mansion were occupied by family members, or if the house was small such that the housemaid didn't have a room to stay in. But having her sleep in the kitchen of a huge mansion is inexcusable.
It's inexcusable because it's expected that the housemaid gets his/her own private area. Remember, they are employees, and their job is to maintain the household. They are not "homeless" people skulking around the house.
I've lived in a country where live-in housemaids are quite widespread and this kind of behavior would definitely be out of the ordinary, especially among more affluent families. Yes, worse things can happen to housemaids, but I'm talking about the general case.
> I've lived in a country where live-in housemaids are quite widespread and this kind of behavior would definitely be out of the ordinary, especially among more affluent families. Yes, worse things can happen to housemaids, but I'm talking about the general case.
That's pretty typical of what I've seen in countries like Malaysia, Singapore and China. The maid gets the worst room and in many cases that room is basically an unfinished store room with just concrete. In China, it's usually a bit better, the live-in housekeeper is not locked in the house/apartment with no possibility to go out. Nor do they strip the houseworker before allowing her to go out to make sure she didn't steal anything.
I'm a loudmouth, it disgusts me, and I like to think that I have principles so I make my opinions about the treatment of those housekeepers clear. I've lost acquaintances over this and from what I've seen telling them that what they're doing is right almost never changes things for the housekeepers in question.
I strongly believe that the main issue in all those cases is that the housekeeper lives in the house, this is what creates the abuse, this is what causes the extreme dependence of the housekeeper with their employer.
I don't think people are arguing that it is bad this woman has shelter and a place to sleep.
I think people are arguing that the treatment of said woman, between the infantilizing phone call to wake her every morning to insist she doesn't "get too comfy", and her sleeping on the floor in a house that sounds like it had more rooms than people to live in them, is unnecessarily demeaning at best.
High contrast at short distances, indeed, is the problem for one of the above two points - sleeping on an open space on the floor when everyone else has their own bedroom and bed is at least one tier beyond "just" wanting to put yourself above those you employ to help in your home.
The other, though, is possibly the more damning to me - calling someone every day to insist they be awake at the same time even while you're out of town? At best, that sounds like an overly controlling homeowner trying to make sure the staff are keeping the house up, but that dynamic would usually imply (to my mind) a trusted person in charge of the staff in their absence, to contact, not the two persons combined in one.
The whole situation leaves a bad taste in my mouth because it implies that the people whose home this is do not think it necessary to treat this woman well, and that does not, in my experience, bode well for how they treat others whom they have no obligation to.
> that dynamic would usually imply (to my mind) a trusted person in charge of the staff in their absence, to contact, not the two persons combined in one.
Exactly. Although its a touch shameful, the first thing that went through my mind reading the story in the comments was "what kind of person has a mansion and only one maid?".
Multi-room houses aren't easy to keep clean. Add cooking, driving, and shopping on top of that and we have a situation where:
(a) Someone is being severely overworked
(b) Someone cannot keep up with the work, leading to frustration on the employers part and an unnecessarily bad relationship
Yeah, a lot of people would act like you, a lot of people also wouldn't. Just because others are pussies doesn't mean I have sympathy for you being a pussy.
This is why US government employees and employees of contractors get mandatory training in how to recognize human trafficking.
In this situation, at the very minimum, you need to ask "Do you feel your employer treats you fairly? I will keep your answer confidential."
If the answer is "yes", then your moral obligation is satisfied. If the answer is "no", you may have to dig down through "uncomfortable situation," potentially to "friendship-ending argument about unethical behavior."
Well obviously, if there is an ongoing crime being committed they will speak. Even lawyers, priests, and doctors will speak if there's an ongoing crime being committed by someone who they'd otherwise hold confidence to.
You can discuss your own observations without ever referring to your conversation with the housekeeper, or even admitting that a conversation happened.
Was she a slave? When travelling in Vietnam (and probably plenty of other places) its pretty common to find the staff at little hotels all sleeping on mats on the floor in the kitchen. Its not a big deal - to get to the fridge you might need to step over and around them. None of these people are slaves, though they are certainly lowly paid workers.
Is it unusual to have this arrangement in a private home? I don't know.
The opprobrium from other commenters seems a little steeped in our own western views as to what's right and wrong, and I think your plan of digging more into the situation sounds an appropriate one.
at least share this article to your friend and ask her innocently what she thinks. and then pounce on her for being a hypocritical evil b1tch. good luck. im just kidding but pls do it. lol.
"Paid house keeper plus all supplies and food. Helped her family also."
While I have no proof, I'm inclined to believe her. It's hard to imagine my parents owning a slave AND the US Military allowing it's personnel to keep slaves AND word of that not making it back to the US Mainland.
Knowing how base authorities handle off-base housing, I'd say the chances of this are next to zero. I doubt there's a military officer who isn't fully aware that the US's war with the most casualties was the one to end slavery.
I hope you're right, but it's also worth looking into the history of the Philippine-American war, which like many smaller wars seems to have been largely forgotten by history. I wasn't even aware of it until I came upon a gruesome picture of US soldiers posing in front of a pile of thousands of skulls in one of my history books.
"[Iraq and Afghanistan war] foreign workers are known, in military parlance, as 'third-country nationals,' or TCNs. Many of them recount having been robbed of wages, injured without compensation, subjected to sexual assault, and held in conditions resembling indentured servitude by their subcontractor bosses. Previously unreleased contractor memos, hundreds of interviews, and government documents I obtained during a yearlong investigation confirm many of these claims and reveal other grounds for concern. Widespread mistreatment even led to a series of food riots in Pentagon subcontractor camps, some involving more than a thousand workers."
I'm sure some of the strategists in Vietnam were well aware of the horrors of chemical warfare but chose to coat many acres of forests with Agent Orange regardless. Just like any sufficiently large organization, the military has members on every rung of the empathy/introspection spectrum.
Curious, How do base authorities handle off base housing? My husband is in the military and our off base housing is just a normal house we bought. Base authorities have nothing to do with our house. I'm wondering if you're talking about military owned off base housing? Here they are wholly operated by a private company and also rent to civilians and aren't really much different than renting normal private housing.
We've never lived overseas though. I imagine that's pretty different.
I totally believe you have different experience than me, I'm curious to what they are.
I grew up in a town with an air force training base and the students seem to have some oversight from the base housing authority to make sure they aren't doing anything to piss off the locals.
By that logic no American institution would ever countenance racism, given that the 14th Amendment was intended to give equal protection under the law for all and was also a result of the Civil War.
I visited Hong Kong a year ago. It is famous for its night markets, its abundant partying, and the massive financial powerhouses that make their home here. I did all the tourist things, I partied, I explored, it was great.
A couchsurfing host showed me around the city on a tram. She pointed out masses of ladies in plain clothing sitting around on the sidewalks and in streets. It was a Sunday. This was the "maids day", the one day a week when maids are required not to work.
There were thousands of them, all sitting in groups around the streets and buildings that were closed on the weekends. Groups of street vendors dotted the scene. They appeared when the maids did, a sort of "maid economy", where extremely cheap goods and snacks are sold to the maids on their time off. At night they sleep on the street, and are easily victimized.
The maids have no place to live. During the week they sleep on the floor in a closet, or on a cot in the kitchen of a typical Hong Kong home, and work all day and night, 6 days a week. The little money they make they send home to their family. They are mostly Filipino, mostly illegal immigrants, and as such, they have no rights. And because they have no status here, they also can't get a legal job, leaving them with no other choice to make a living.
There are an estimated 200,000 female domestic workers in Hong Kong (336,000 migrant domestic workers overall), and they are effectively slaves. As many as 56,000 migrant domestic workers here endure forced labor. http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/15/news/hong-kong-forced-labor-... As you might imagine, a large number of these maids are victimized by their "host families".
The really scary thing? I would have had absolutely no clue this was going on if my host hadn't pointed it out to me.
When I first saw Hong Kong I fell in love with the place and have wanted to live there ever since. But I also quickly realized that it is a hellish place if you have no resources.
I watched a few years ago a French movie about a Parisian family owning a quasi-slave, a young woman from (IIRC) Africa. The son of the family finally sent an anonymous mail to an organization which had it taken care of. The interesting character was the grandmother who was vehemently supporting her son (the father of the boy who sent an email) until she realized how the slave-girl was treated.
The movie was average but I am mentioning it here because contemporary slavery (or almost slavery) can happen next door, today. Even a an average movie (we call these in French "TV movies) can be eye opening.
Great read! Many Asian countries have the concept of live-in housekeepers. I think the 'best' (scraping the bottom, here) arrangement is in Singapore, where the government, laws, and law-enforcement ensure that immigrant live-in housekeepers are treated fairly- kinda like au pairs, etc. in the US. I knew someone in India who brought their live-in maid's sister to the US in some capacity (and AFAIK, paid her wages- she returned happier and was able to put her kids, etc. in better schools).
I am pretty sure some of these arrangements, especially in poorer Asian countries like India, Indonesia, Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam, etc. are effectively, slavery.
In most cases in Asian countries, live-in housekeepers are paid wages and their families are provided with various amenities and help- kinda like a very small-scale version of the servants' lives in Downton Abbey. But, there are at least two very serious problems: 1. cultural norms allow the servants to be treated very poorly- as second-class citizens, 2. while obscure well-meaning laws exist to prevent trafficking in India, law enforcement doesn't care much if they are treated shittily (physical/mental abuse, nonpayment of wages, etc. often go unreported or are ignored by cops).
Humanity is both so strange and so static. We got 'rid' of slavery in most of the world no later than a century ago. It was bloody and difficult to do, but we managed it. Yet, there are still people living as just the same as slaves century or more ago, in a world of space ships and the internet. Yeah, tech has helped, we don't have smallpox anymore and the mass famines have stopped recently, but the deeper gestal psyche is the same. The old saying of history repeating itself if you do not listen to it comes to mind. But, what can we do, humans are still humans, basically the same for the last ~10k years. No matter how much we want to change, how much time and effort and writing and money and sweat and blood and death and war, we cannot. Its not that we are dystopian now, maybe, its that we have always been so.
When I was in the Boy Scouts, we had this saying for when we were out camping and hiking. It was "you're only as fast as your slowest hiker". I realize that the context here isn't the same but the concept is still very much applicable. We as a species can only be judged and advance as fast as our as the 'slowest' of us are willing to move.
This is a very good point! Thank you. If this is the case, that we can even be judged as a whole, then it is sad. But it gives the proper perspective on what our species should be working on in a moral way. Bringing up the 'bottom' though difficult, is much more noble and better for us all than the efforts of trying to get the 'top' even higher. Maybe this is something many older religions have recognized
When you go searching for meaning, chase all the leads, trying to separate wrong from right. What you find is that beyond all the pop culture tropes, the outrage and terror about the latest and greatest paedophile revelation, evil greedy capitalists banker stories, murderous terrorists and backstabbing trophy wives and all the other stories about 'true monsters'. You'll find that all the monsters are just humans. Just like you and me.
It's easy to see from far away what is bad, people all over the western world can point at Hitler in their history books as an example of absolute evil. But then we'd be missing the complete picture, which is so much worse if you cling to a traditional view of good and evil. Normal school curriculum (at least where I'm from) does not teach about the horrific things Belgium did in the Congo up until the 1960s Or any of the other decimations/genocides caused directly or indirectly as a result of occupation by the various colonial powers. Or all the terrible things our ancestors did even further in the past when news spread so much slower or not at all.
There was a Byzantine king named Basil. Who, after defeating a Bulgarian army and capturing a number of their soldiers, blinded 99 out of every 100 captured soldiers and sent them back to Bulgaria to cripple their economy and to sabotage future war efforts. Man is a savage evil creature imo. I don't think we ever truly can change. The civilization I and many others enjoy in the western world is a fragile thing I think. And if we can't make it stick and spread, and I don't think I can, then when the troubles get too bad we'll be back to savagery soon enough, or not as the bomb is still hanging above our heads even if it doesn't feel like that any more.
Thank you for that. It is very hard to remember that good also lasts just like evil. So, I guess, choose what you will and know that they both will live on past yourself.
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
Jordan Peterson talks about how one of the most important things you can do to become a well-formed person in terms of moral reasoning is to realize that you're a Nazi. You're a concentration camp guard. You'd do it, by choice. It takes a lot of discussion and examples and thought to get to the point where this is really understood, but it's true and it's important.
I'd say the main thing that convinced me is that I realized that there are people I'd like to see suffer. Not because it'd lead to some external outcome, but just because I want them to suffer. You can see this every day in politics too. People who want to hurt just for the joy of hurting. You can hear it in their voices when they knock people down at a protest and hurl dehumanizing snarl terms at them.
And this is present on every 'side'. The only possible difference is in how much each side embraces this impulse.
Once this is understood - that people aren't divided into good and evil groups, but rather that every person is both good and evil - a lot of questions and problems look quite different from the common "good people vs evil people" frame. A lot of policies and historical judgments start to look pretty dumb.
And, in fact, the idea that some people are evil is a foundation of evil acts. The false belief that someone is pure evil is what gives you the excuse to feel good about making them suffer.
It's ironic that wrong beliefs about the shape of evil in the world are themselves a foundation for evil.
While Lola's story is certainly tragic, it's a tangibly different class of slavery than that which existed in the western world 2 centuries ago. Chattel slavery is far, far crueler and not comparable
Abuse is rampant in Singapore as well though. For example, if a maid becomes pregnant, they have to leave Singapore immediately and the employer gets fined -- so it's common to lock them in the apartment 24/7/365 for however many years their contract is.
Legally, they're supposed to have one day a week off, but in practice this is not enforced and the maid has no leverage: many have paid large sums to brokers and need to work several years just to repay their debts.
Yes, I've seen families in Malaysia and Singapore that really treated their housekeeper badly. In a lot of cases, they are not allowed to go out of the apartment either because of potential pregnancy or because they are scared of the housekeeper stealing things from them.
They bring housekeepers from Indonesia and pay them very little. The housekeepers have to work a lot of hours and are pretty much treated as slaves. Often, the housekeepers are not allowed to eat at the same table, they have to eat after everyone has eaten, they don't sleep in a proper room but rather in a storage room.
At least, there's a contract and they do get money at the end but it's really a hard life and hardly more freedom than being a prisoner.
It always shocked me when I saw people that I thought were educated and friendly treat their housekeepers this way.
I only can speak for malaysia and yes this issue doesn't get brought up much, it's quite sickening to be honest. What is even more interesting is that most of the housekeepers are hired by the middle class, the same middle class that is wants racial equality in malaysia..
Exactly, it's the cognitive dissonance of those people wanting racial equality: being open minded and then hiring housekeepers and treating them badly. That cognitive dissonance surprises me and shocks me.
I have no issue with people hiring housekeepers but the work conditions absolutely need to be decent. And if for some reason they feel that there's too much risk in being decent, then they shouldn't hire a live in housekeeper, they could also easily hire locals to help with some housework.
Of course, that's not everyone, I have some Malaysian friends who treated their live in housekeeper with respect, let her take some holidays and even helped her set up her own business when she went back to Indonesia. But, that's the exception rather than the norm.
Very true; a former coworker grew up with a "housekeeper" in HK. She told us stories about how her dad slipped the housekeeper extra pay and Christmas bonuses because her mother refused to allow it. She said her mom would have been irate if she had found out. To her mother such people were disposable servants not worth consideration.
I would add the counterpoint, however, that HK housekeepers can live lives much better than some HK citizens.
Room and board is given to a housekeeper. That in and of itself can translate to thousands a month in rent and many times, are better living conditions than HK citizens can afford.
> Many Asian countries have the concept of live-in housekeepers.
As educated as the HN crowd is, I'm surprised so many people are susceptible to stereotypes.
Perhaps because most people on HN are rather wealthy and well off, when they visit Asia they hang around other rich Asians.
So yes, among rich Asians, the idea of a live-in caretaker maybe common, but they are the minority.
This would be like some rich Asian people hanging out with rich Westerners and saying, "many Western countries have the concept of live-in butlers and maids."
Incredibly ignorant statement. In many parts of Asia, including South Asia, having live in servants is very common. Philippines and Indonesia are just two examples.
As others have mentioned, it actually is quite common. Part of the reason is that the going rate for hiring any sort of unskilled labor is much lower in Southeast Asia and South Asia, compared to North America. (Another way to say this is that income inequality is greater.) So if you're "middle class" in South/Southeast Asia, you're more likely to be able to afford a domestic helper than if you're "middle class" here (where you could only afford to hire your own domestic help, say a babysitter or a nanny or a maid or a food delivery guy, for only a small portion of your time) simply because of the wage differences.
Having lived in Brunei, culturally very similar to Singapore, I know a thing about this. I was a kid at the time and we had an "amah" and her family living in our house (or rather, in the servants' quarters on the ground floor, while we lived in the main residence on the floor above that). Most of the foreigners were Dutch and English people, in the employ of Shell. For us, a Dutch family, the concept of having a servant was a very alien concept.
Our amah was a very friendly lady and had a relatively easy life with us -- helping with the cleaning of the house, doing the laundry, and washing the dishes, no cooking or raising us kids -- and was paid quite well. Even though it's been 30 years, I still remember helping her out by drying the dishes and visiting her family.
What shocked me personally was the exploitative nature of many other families, from what my parents told me, the British tended to have this more than the Dutch, though I can't be sure. My parents actually got in trouble with others who didn't appreciate their "spoiling the market" -- by paying wages that they considered fair, which was at approximately 250% of the going rate -- and by not working them to the bone. It still boggles my mind.
When I was in elementary school in the 80s one of my friends has a "nanny" who slept on a cot in the laundry room in the basement. I didn't think much of it, a few of us had housekeepers and I just imagined a few other people had live-in help too, like on TV shows...
A year or two into our friendship, I was over at their house after school and around dinner time I asked if I could stay. The parents said, "Sure, no problem... just let your parents know..." They went to talk to the "nanny" -- who didn't speak any English -- and let her know to set another plate.
There was some miscommunication, the "nanny" didn't expect the father to be home for dinner, so they didn't quite have enough food prepared for me too, since they were already one up. That's sort of what my friend translated after... anyway all I saw was two adults arguing and then the father, not liking the "nanny" talking back to him, slapped her face. Hard. Then stood over her with a clenched fist and yelled at her in a language I didn't understand.
My friend was mortified, he started apologizing to me that I had to see it... and the mother came to yell at the father... and ultimately I didn't get to stay for dinner... for weeks my friend just kept apologizing, saying he was sorry I saw what I saw and sorry his father wasn't kinder to their "nanny"...
At some point, 25+ years later, I saw the "nanny" walking with the mother in a grocery store. She still didn't speak English, but she smiled at me and knew who I was. My friend's mother and I caught up, and it hit me... this wasn't really a "nanny" and I probably didn't have a word for that relationship in my vocabulary.
She was part of the family, went to all the school functions and plays and soccer games... cooked for them... kept house... but wasn't related... and who knows if she was paid or not -- but I doubt it... Still she always doted on children. Seeing her all those years later, the facial expressions she made when seeing me were just like seeing a grandmother or aunt. Her face lit up, and she was just excited and proud to see me all grown up.
Anyway this story was really powerful and reminded me of that woman, and got me thinking we probably all know a Lola -- some degree of Lola anyway. Slavery probably isn't as uncommon as we'd like it to be.
Not sure what your value of "we" is. I've never met anyone like Lola, and I've never heard a story like this from anyone I know. Then again, I didn't have a housekeeper or know anyone who did. People in my social class were glad to keep the electric bill paid and have a working car to drive.
Look at it the other way: If people in your social class were glad to keep the electric bill paid and have a working car, some of them could have ended up like Lola.
I bet if you peek your head in the kitchen of your top 5 favorite restaurants, you'll find someone on the dishwashing or cleaning staff who is an immigrant and signs over most, if not all, of their paycheck to a "sponsor" here who looks after them. Gives them a place to stay, helps them with language barriers, etc. Or if you know of anyone who has done a mail-order-bride-type thing...
While you may not interact with these people, I bet you see them in your day-to-day life.
A few people I socialised with at university had live-in housekeepers, and I wouldn't be surprised if one or two of them had a rough time.
Most of the students from Asia or the Middle East, whose parents were paying tens of thousands of pounds for their child to attend a British university, had staff at their parents' home.
One close friend was a British girl who'd grown up in Hong Kong, with a full-time au pair. She complained that the other HK and Chinese girls she shared a kitchen with didn't know anything about cooking or cleaning, since their au pairs had always done everything for them. In her case, her parents told her to "help" the au pair with chores, in the same way I helped my mum, so she'd learn. Presumably, her parents knew the arrangement in Hong Kong wouldn't last forever.
I've also met a couple of people working as au pair's here, both ~20 year old women mixing the work with studying, which is the usual sytem in Europe. It looks like a very poor deal, for example [1] £320/mth for what's not far off full time hours (37.5hr/wk would be full time in a government job).
While in Germany the concept of a full time housekeeper is a rich people thing only, we also have this special case of au-pairs who are do not fall under the same regulations, cultural constraints and protections as normal employees. You would not treat an employed housekeeper like people use their aupairs nor would you be allowed to.
I guess this one of the privileges of a certain class that just goes unmentioned and untouched by politics.
>The night ended when she declared that I would never understand her relationship with Lola. Never. Her voice was so guttural and pained that thinking of it even now, so many years later, feels like a punch to the stomach. It’s a terrible thing to hate your own mother, and that night I did. The look in her eyes made clear that she felt the same way about me.
The mother makes me wonder if losing your humanity means becoming an animal.
I guess that being human means being part of a human society, and the acts of someone who loses their humanity means that they are excluded from human society.
For a lot of people with experience of abuse, animal relationships are arguably superior to human ones because animals are more emotionally reliable.
Another way to look at this is to consider humans as eusocial animals and speculate on whether someone is more concerned with their identity/position within a given or monolithic social body or their position as a discrete conscious individual. Over time the dichotomy between these positions might result in acute psychic stresses.
There's a conjectural argument that schizoid tendencies are an evolutionary remnant of social organization, most famously explore din Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which is worth reading even if you reject his thesis.
For those who think it can't happen here, there was a recent case in Silicon Valley where a group of small business owners was keeping slaves. I actually ate at their restaurant and had no idea what was going on.
Desperate to make a living after the global economic collapse in 2008 hit Spain particularly hard, at least three victims accepted the jobs without meeting the restaurant and salon owners, Estanislao said. In some cases, the group paid for their tickets and told them they could work off the debt.
This happens in the Chinese community all of the time. In my area, waitstaff in restaurants are often shipped in via the Chinatown bus from up to 200 miles away. They are like ghosts, movie game from place to place.
I invite you to point out a flaw in my observations.
Sometimes it's good to be able to rationality ground your morality instead of merely feeling it. Guess which one will hold up when actually challenged in real life.
Your whole post is disingenuous and full of logical fallacies.[1]
>Take a homeless person and let them sleep in your kitchen in exchange for mowing your lawn -> moral hero.
This is a flawed thesis if you're still trying to argue w.r.t. lordnacho's post.
>Take a homeless person
First off, there's no reason to believe that that person was or was not homeless prior to the situation. This is called an "Argument from ignorance"[2]
>let them sleep in your kitchen in exchange for mowing your lawn
This premise is really a False analogy[3], and explicitly ignores the other warning signs in his post that would indicate that this is not what the situation truly is.
Also, in most developed countries, there are very specific labor and tenant laws. "I'm letting him sleep on my couch if he mows my lawn once a week" is not a legal agreement. It is also not equivalent to "I have a live-in maid" - which also has a buttload of legal protections.
All of your other statements are riddled with half-truth bullshit and I'm not interested in explicitly explaining the rest to you. If you are, in fact, serious about being able to "rationality ground your morality" then I suggest you take a look at some of your statements and think about how grounded in reality they truly are.
My comment was not an argument/direct analogy to the parent.
They were a series of observations designed to illustrate a particular/contrasting point. Or rather an attempt to show where the boundaries lie in the grey of such thought.
Read the reply again without assuming the parents context. Do you agree with the observations presented?
Morality is an inherently grey subject. Boolean morality only exists in a vacuum. I do agree with your underlying sentiment that it's all about perspective, but I don't feel like you're adding anything to the conversation, as your post could essentially be boiled down to "morality is about perspective" - which, in my personal opinion, falls into the realm of common sense.
However, after reading some of the other comments in this thread, I might have to rethink that. It's interesting to see how many people seem to be unable to see through their own moral outrage.
I think we both are in agreement in sentiment, but I do not think you effectively communicated your ideas in a way that would be beneficial to a constructive discussion. It's too easy for people who disagree with you to point out flaws in your argument as opposed to understanding and discussing your true point.
Any attempt to rationally ground morality is going to boil down to some set of axioms that are just taken for granted: this is good, that is evil.
Sometimes people try to get around this by choosing different words - for example, a popular adage is that rational morality is "do no harm, except to prevent greater harm". The only problem with it, of course, is that you then have to define "harm", and it something fundamentally just as subjective as "evil" (as evidenced by the fact that the same thing can be harmful or not depending on consent - i.e. on the subjective determination of a person).
Interesting that the author and his siblings had empathy for the servant. In most American Slavery stories the entire household, including young children, are portrayed as being evil and unforgiving towards the slaves. In these situations I wonder if there is any sort of innate feeling of compassion and decency and how that manifest itself in a culture where slavery and cruelty is the norm.
Yes, except as a full grown adult, the author never reported the situation to the authorities, took this 'secret' to the grave and even 'inherited' his slave from his parents. He said he paid her an allowance (which didn't sound like much) and also didn't make her work after she lived with them, but that's a token effort to right the injustice of decades of work without pay.
After the mother passed, Lola had nowhere to go, and no job or career or savings. She had nothing, except for the kids that she helped raise since their birth. The author gave her not only a place to live rent-free, but paid her some amount of money he could afford so she could better enjoy her life.
I'm not saying either of our comments are 100% accurate, but you are taking a pretty 1-sided viewpoint to the situation. You can't pretend like the relationship between the author and Lola was strictly one of slave-master - that's disingenuous.
It's really easy to judge someone else for what they didn't do when you have no understanding of what their lives were like.
Are you an American? If so: America has never paid reparations to former slaves or their descendants. He may have only paid her a token sum, but it's better than the rest of us have done, so don't act holier than thou about it.
Also, he clearly didn't plan to take his secret to the grave, it's on the cover of the Atlantic.
So, obviously my citizenship or my country's history has no bearing on the merits of my criticism. It seems you want to have a completely different argument.
I think it's fair to criticize someone for being aware that a person is being enslaved and not doing anything meaningful about it for the same reason that it's fair to criticize onlookers who fail to call 911 on a crime in progress.
What do you think would happen if you report the family to the authorities? it was a tragedy but I bet making her life a lot less miserable is the best one can do. In case you havent realized yet from reading the story, he considers her second mom and Lola considers him her son and his offsprings her grandkids. Your "authorities" will just throw everyone into a bureaucratic hell.
Many such American slavery stories are just that- stories. There are plenty of real examples of American slave owners across the spectrum from evil cruelty to compassionate caring, even love.
you can't be compassionate if your compassion only extends to the point that it starts to have any negative effect on your life.
Then you're just a dick that wants to pretend you are a better person than you are.
The author is as compassionate as many of the Republicans in Congress. They care! They really do, just not enough to vote in anyway that would make a difference to the things they proclaim to care about.
I really appreciate the author sharing something so personal, but his entire family is less than human.
Most of the guys I went to engineering school with were Indians (Brahmins), and they'd frequently mention how the jobs here paid more, but they still wanted to go back to India because they'd have to treat their servants "differently" here. I just assumed it was a payroll issue. Perhaps I assumed wrongly.
It varies from area to area and case by case, ranging from servants who live in nearby shanty towns who are payed "technically livable wages"; To live-in servants who are paid what we would consider unfair wages, but compensated in food and board.
Even among the live-in servants there will be huge ranges in the fairness (or in this case, existence) of the wages they get, the amount of respect they are given, the quality of the food/board, the amount of free time they get, and the amount of rights they are allowed to express.
In many parts of India, in most cases, Mr Foo Bar's kid will be called Baz Foo. So as people start calling their kids more modern names not derived from Sanskrit, the text you linked starts getting outdated.
I'm a little bit familiar with Indian culture; I think it's not that easy to tell the caste from the surname. It's probably easier to figure out if someone is Brahmin I guess.
Not really. Sure you can most likely tell a Brahmin by their surname. But anything below that in the caste hierarchy and hard to tell. For example in Gujarat, many lower caste people have last names that are same as Rajputs. They changed their names to avoid discrimination.
Oh definitely agree their. I've met a quite a few Indians (I assume some were Brahmin) in university. They all shared the same surnames like Chakrabati, Mithra, Gupta, etc. Yet, none of them were even remotely related. I was told the names were derived from castes.
In the west we still have nobel names like "de la", von, etc. as indicators that this person is of royal decent.
Ha ha, you must know enough people from both sets ;)
I've found that vegetarian-ism is a stronger indicator than someone telling me they are Brahmin. Or, if they are somewhat practicing, their sacred thread is sometimes visible.
Whenever we'd talk girls, if I suggested someone who wasn't a Brahmin, first they'd look at me as if I were asking them to date livestock, then they'd tell me they only date Brahmin girls.
There is a saying : “To the privileged, equality feels like oppression.”
If you already belong to a community in a geo-location which holds and controls entry to key places in every walk of life. It makes zero sense to migrate to a different place and stand in the queue like a plebeian.
A soon-to-be-married couple of Brahmins I met few years ago in India while backpacking seemed very nice. Very modern and educated. Till the point of discussing life of small kids from lowest caste (Dalits) - it felt natural and correct to them that 5-6 years old would work in a fireworks factory. "You know, they bring a bit of money home".
I was speechless for a while, not wanting to start yelling on them. Maybe I should have had. I am pretty sure they wouldn't enjoy THEIR 5-6 year old kid working every day with possibility of losing fingers/dying. And of course forget school, and any good future whatsoever.
Damn, it still makes me angry! Bear in mind that most Indians you can meet in the west are Brahmins, common folks wouldn't be able to afford schools good enough to get out. Caste system is fading and it will die eventually, one of great evils of mankind and in fact a form of slavery for lower castes.
Lola happens to be the word for Grandma in the Philippines.
The description of this idea of a live in slave is alive and well in many parts of Asian and the Middle East.
Life in the Philippines is quite a struggle especially in the provinces. I know of a few people that live and work in Hong Kong doing the same job described in the article, but they are doing it for two families for very little pay.
It's more acceptable outside the west. Western cultures were the ones who decided slavery was a universal sin and had to be eradicated everywhere.
There are still whole races of people kept as slaves in sub-saharan Africa, for example. And I mean outright slavery, no ambiguity about it.
Abolitionism is a Eurocentric concept.
Another example from Asia. Two people were kept as slaves for 14 years in a tofu factory. This is in a developed country with a GDP per capita comparable to Spains. They were caught and fined 40k USD, no jail time.
Wow that's super progressive. I'm not one for cultural relativism though, I'm afraid. I'm quite the reactionary, unenlightened provincial bore, with my outmoded beliefs like "slavery is unjustifiable".
Only because we were fortunate enough that the culture that ended up banning it won out. In fact we are lucky that Western culture took this path at all.
It's worth noting that punishments for 'employing' unfree labour in the west are also often astonishingly small, when it's prosecuted at all. Despite there being a fair bit of it around few people end up in jail over it.
Depends where you define Asia as. Saudi Arabia plays in the Asian conference in FIFA, but so does Australia. Australian and Saudi values differ ever so slightly :)
This idea is definitely more acceptable than it is in the west in all the world. Africa. Asia. Middle East. Maybe not South America, but even there it would be more acceptable than it is in say Norway.
As for the absolute level of acceptability in each area or country, that is hard to work out, especially in Asia where saving face means something can be unacceptable in theory, but practiced quasi-openly, as in the example of the article, where Lola was an open secret in the guys family.
When Ulysses S Grants father-in-law died a few years before the civil war, he left them his slave. The Grants were dead broke, Ulysses had failed at farming and the slave was worth a lot of money, they could have worked him or sold him to make the their life instantly better. Instead Ulysses took him to the courthouse and made him a free man.
I think that even people with extreme mental disorders can probably imagine that they themselves would not very much like to be slaves who are beaten and scolded on a whim.
While the historical record is clear that Grant freed a slave named William Jones in 1859, Grant's father-in-law, Frederick Dent, died in 1873 at the White House (Grant was president at the time).
It is clear that Jones was previously owned by Dent, but when and how Grant acquired him from his father-in-law, as well as Grant's motivations for freeing him are not known.
Note - This is a modern tale, and the title is accurate. This isn't about unearthing stories from the 1800; this is by the son raised by the slave in question.
This was very much worth the read. It's touching and troubling and a human story.
643 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 356 ms ] thread[0]https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/country/philippines/
it's ranking by prevalence, so countries like North Korea (rank #1) worse than countries like the U.S. (#52) and Australia (also #52).
I couldn't find a country that was ranked #167 out of #167, though. I think #52 is as high as it goes.
Site seems pretty good overall but is missing a hard facts and figures section to go alongside the nice graphical interface. They appear to offer a pdf report but they wanted me to request access to get it.
So they didn't count prisoner labour?
What is 'force' though? "Do this or I hit you with a stick"? "Do this and you go back to your cage"? "Do this or there will be nothing positive in your life"?
The prison gets cheap labour. Slavery is just a border on a map of human exploitation, I think some distinctions need far more qualification to be relevant.
> The Index presents a ranking of 167 countries based on the proportion of the population that is estimated to be in modern slavery. [0]
North Korea, with 4.37% in slavery, is ranked 1.
India, with 1.4% in slavery, is ranked 4.
Philippines, with 0.4% in slavery, is ranked 33.
China, with 0.25% in slavery, is ranked 40.
USA, with .02% in slavery, is ranked 52.
[0] https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/findings/
EDIT: number -> ranking
GP's claim makes it seem like they interpreted as I did.
> ...countries like North Korea (rank #1) are closer to 0...
NK is not close to 0 in relative or absolute slave counts, and I don't see the utility in pointing out that 1 is closer to 0 than 52.
Maybe it has to do with prostitution being legal here. You'd expect licensed and regulated prostitution to reduce slavery in prostitution, but apparently it's still a serious problem. Still, 17,500 people in slavery? That's a lot. I'd like to know where they got that figure.
Although they probably do get paid something and have freedom, the situations are very similar. Dropped into a location without the ability to speak the language or financial resources to escape.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EHNSDKK/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
Partly for this reason. The addition of ethnic differences to economic inequality is a volatile mixture.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/World-Fire-Exporting-Democracy-Instab...
Not only are they paid well, there are government restrictions on who can hire a foreign live-in caregiver.
Usually there has to be a compelling reason like the person is handicapped or extremely elderly.
The reason it's so heavily regulated is because they are taking away jobs from native caregivers.
That book was published in 2006 and if that's what you got from it, then it's extremely outdated.
I think it would be helpful to distinguish between a true remunerated employer-employee relationship like what you appear to describe above, and unpaid slavery like what is described in the article. The former is a valued part of the economy in many developing country (if you're wealthy and employ no household staff in some such countries you're considered stingy). The latter is slavery, nothing less nothing more, as the author of the piece was able to recognize at a fairly early age.
"Room and board" is valid compensation in some jobs. There are valid jobs to this day where having a place to stay is a large part of the compensation you will receive.
It is not as black and white as you seem to think.
To put some clearer relief around the point: the author's parents had no means of keeping Lola in their home by force. They had no right to shoot or maim her if she attempted to leave, and would have been convicted of murder if they did. But where would she go and what would she do, illiterate, with no education or practical experience with worldly matters, no skills, and uncertain legal status?
Few human beings will cope with that level of uncertainty, and to imagine that they ought to is, I would say, a conceit of someone who is unable to properly situate themselves in that person's shoes as a mental exercise. The familiar, with all of its unpleasantness, can be a welcome refuge from the fear and uncertainty of the outside world, especially if the familiar is all you know, you have few bases for comparison, and weren't brought up socially to embrace fear or uncertainty to any degree.
That's the thing, though. It's very difficult to distinguish. I know my parents and some family friends who treat their helpers like extended family. But at the same time, it's not uncommon to find others who do it worse. Still, there are those in between.
Like the author, I was raised with a helper around the house. As long as I remember, even when I was a kid, they were there. Unlike the author, though, my parents take care of them, (they're paid, they get vacations, even help when the situation with their families in the province is tight, etc.) but looking back, I can't help but think if having a helper at all (no matter how well treated) is part of the problem.
There's some effect to society that feels like a barrier. The mentality of "I'm just a helper" is real and even when you invite a friend's driver or helper to eat lunch with the group, they'll lie ("I ate already."). What's difficult too, is you don't know if "I ate already" means they weren't given allowance, they're saving to send some to their family, or just prefer to eat with others i.e. go make friends with the other helpers.
My childhood helper sometimes tells stories of some realities of other helpers that he befriended, and the variance is huge, but it's not a binary good/bad thing. It's more like a range of possibilities.
What I can tell you is that this kind slavery-level practice is virtually non-existent. Maids/Housekeepers/"Kasambahay"s/"Katulong"s are expected to be paid. The practice of employing kasambahays is still common among the middle class and is expected of rich families. In lower classes families that are more well off sometimes takes in relatives, of course paying them something for them to save up or paying for their tuition if they're studying. Houseworkers are mostly needed to take care of little children as it is now more common for families to have both parents working.
Here in the Philippines a LOT of television dramas are with protagonists coming from lower classes, often with plots where they are being employed as houseworkers (and you kind of get where this is going :). And television viewership is almost universal here, even in remote villages. I think this really helps a lot for people who identify with these drama characters.
We have now laws setting salary, benefits and treatment standards for houseworkers. This is the landmark law that was signed into law in 2013: https://www.dole.gov.ph/files/Q%20&%20A%20on%20Batas%20Kasam...
A lot needs to be done in terms of triangulating proper compensation and upping respect for some families, but I think people also need to maybe visit the Philippines.
That's not to say I didn't find it weird, I totally did. They were privy to such intimate aspects of our lives, but sitting in the car next to them was weird, and they wouldn't really be "allowed" to eat with us (although my mother, around Alex's age, was fine with them eating with us). It was unsettling to me even as a young kid. It was like they were these pariahs and I didn't exactly know why and couldn't really ask why, but they were so present in the day to day that they would know when I cried over something stupid or if I had a period stain I had trouble washing out.
But, I think it's also good to have some frame of reference. Again, proper compensation and respect are essential. But also realise that it's a country trying to grow it's middle class and that there's no way to go from point A to point B in the major metropolitan area without seeing children digging through trash, shanty-towns that may or may not wear the next rainy flood, etc. In these situations, proper compensation for a live-in helper to a middle class family maybe (I wouldn't know) is the stability of room and board and food, even if that means sleeping on a futon with the other live-in workers (who do different roles) in a tiny spare room.
My philosophy tends to be that if you can reasonably afford to give them better standards, then do so. So if you're a foreigner, give them that extra $20 because they will certainly appreciate the exchange rate. If you're well-to-do and regularly have live-in help, having proper "maids quarters" and cots can't be too much of an ask over time.
He was 57.
[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/a-repor...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/in-the-...
Alex did not know that we would be putting his piece on the cover of this issue; he died the day we made that decision, before we had a chance to tell him.
How... serendipitous.
Even if you think as a slave not as a human being but as, say, a working dog, or even a nice tool, it is not proper treatment. Most dog owners genuinely love their dogs and don't punish them more than what is strictly necessary. Most people naturally respect and grow attached to their "partners", whether there are humans, animals or even inanimate objects.
So why do slaves, who are are capable of empathy, speech, and everything that make us human get treated worse than a mechanic's favorite wrench?
It also has to do with what's the socially acceptable and normal way of behaving in a given society.
What exactly makes you think the average master/slave relationship is "not normal" for a master/slave relationship? I would think the average story would be, by definition, normal.
Have you ever had a dog? Dogs definitely need to be taught what's acceptable and what's not.
A dog needs to be taught what is acceptable behavior and what is not acceptable behavior. If you have somebody living with you, they need to be educated on what they can and cannot do. And since dogs and human are pack animals, you need to enforce the idea of a hierarchy where you are above them to ensure obedience.
The fact that you're denying them contact with their families and not paying them is one thing. However, it's a completely different thing from saying that the modification of behavior of humans is wrong, categorically.
This is clarified by using an inanimate object (wrench) as a the other example.
Human beings though have to be molded in order to keep their 'place'. They can even aspire to want to be things that they cannot achieve, such as my never ending desire to be the first man to set foot on Mars.
Often, dogs will try to be part of the family and try to assert dominance over family members, especially younger, more timid children. They're aspiring to be a higher place in the pack than they should be, and they need to be trained in the fact that they're objectively and necessarily not equal to any human being.
When a dog ever thinks it is the equal of humans, bad things happen, such as bites and euthanasia of the dog, and maulings. That's why you need to train it early as a puppy, that it should never bite/be aggressive to humans, as it'd be harmful to the dog.
The same reasoning can be applied to humans, but cannot be applied to wrenches. Equating wrenches to dogs is another logical dead end - either dogs have feelings and emotions and hopes, otherwise the beating your dog is equivalent to leaving a wrench out in the rain without oil, as both are just tools to you.
You've pretty much laid out the limits of dog rebellion against human control.
Dogs' however can't foment revolution, conspire to free all the other dogs in the state, create an army, capture or hold territory and enslave their former masters.
To put it bluntly, even in the worst case scenario dog-revolt is an annoyance to humanity in general. No one is going to wake up with a collar around their neck, because a dog decided it was 'equal' or 'superior' to humans.
Dogs' are simply limited to dog-level actions, regardless of how hard they're trying.
Human slaves on the other hand have no technical barrier to acting as competently as their masters.
---
Now if you say "that is objectively false", let me remind you that we're not talking about dominance, submission, correct behavior, or otherwise. We're talking about objective status in society as determined by humanity in general.
Even if you can find a single person who says "aha! I am dominated by this dog!", humanity in general will never agree that a dog---any dog---has somehow achieved equality with humans. Imagine that: dogs voting, dogs marrying, dogs taking wages, dogs running for president.
When people say they are superior to dogs; they're just making things up. If you think "that is objectively false", well then you'll need a better argument than "oh dogs can bite you if you're not careful".
I meant to say they're NOT just making things up
Thus a worldview of superiority is cultivated to prevent the illusion from fading that slaves could be non-slaves or even the masters.
Just to be clear I think this behavior is abhorrent, this is just my attempt to understand the mindset.
It's quite simple -- if you think of your slave as a human deserving of empathy, you have to recognize yourself as a monster. If you think of them as a creature less than you, you're cruelties are unimportant,
I was travelling and a friend said I could use her house, because it was empty. This was perfect for me, since I had a wife and kid.
It turns out there was a housekeeper. She did everything for us, made us feel very comfortable, cooked, served, helped with the kid, etc.
Then one day I found out she didn't have her own room, despite the place being a multi storey mansion. In fact, she slept on a mat in the kitchen. And not only that, there would be a phone call each morning to wake her up, from the master of the house. He didn't want her to get too comfy while the family was out.
It was all a bit shocking. I still haven't chatted to my friend about this, because what on earth do you say? And otherwise ordinary western educated person -in fact a feminist, globalist, left-leaning idealist- who has a slave? What if I've misunderstood something? Maybe my friend didn't approve of it? Maybe he did? I'd never be able to talk to my friend again.
I got the housekeeper a present when we left, as she'd been so good at taking care of us. But naturally I didn't enquire any further into her relationship with the family.
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My main thought is there's a sort of Stockholm syndrome going on. Lola still had thoughts for her family back home, but she was so integrated in the new family it became part of her life, too. I guess it's a coping mechanism. Even slaves need meaning in their lives, and taking care of kids is meaning.
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Ok, enough of moralizing. Actually I find it comforting that there is at least some sympathy for my predicament. At least one or two of you think it is possible that they would behave similarly. Or at least acknowledge the awkward situation.
I will talk to this friend in person next time I'm in that part of the world, which should be soon, about this incident, and get the full story of how their housekeeper lives.
Have some decency and confront your so-called friend. How can people be rich and not have the decency to give the person feeding you and your family a freaking room.
And I really had to constrain myself from using expletives in this reply.
HN is the closest thing I have to a portal into the private lives of people with nigh infinite money, and eeeevery so often I read something like the gp that makes me want to gulag the rich and seize the means of production.
Now I know there's evil people at every income level, but infinite money really increases the ability of a person to project evil. My intuition tells me this story isn't even that exceptional. I bet the evil rich hedonism spectrum has some real nightmare fuel.
I feel the opposite way. This sort of thing rarely happens in the west, but quite openly happens in other places, and that fact makes me want to help fix the inequities in OTHER countries that cause this, not tear down my own country.
Specifically (and proselytizing to a degree) it makes me more determined to give a significant portion of my income to https://www.givedirectly.org/basic-income so that at least some of the poorest people on the planet can be empowered to make their own choices.
Sounds like you haven't been in this situation.
You know, there's often a gap between how good we think we are, and how good we are. I feel terrible about it, and the subject comes up now and again of whether we should say something, and my wife and I feel bad.
It's easy to tell people what they should do, I do it all the time as well, even to myself.
I have some acquaintances with weird/antisocial/borderline illegal behavior and never addressed it directly with them, just avoided them.
Best case interpretation that I can make, ignoring the floor mat. They were micromanaging when their employee wakes up despite their daily responsibilities being temporarily reduced (home owners were away).
If I had a friend doing even the above, I'd at LEAST ask "explain to me how this isn't you being a dick." That's just getting to know them. Don't you want to know the people you're friends with?
Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but it sounds like the "master of the house" (the one calling in the morning) wasn't the friend, but the friend's father?
Then your kid asking you "and what did you do?"
Then yourself telling them what you did or what you did not do.
If you are honest throughout that mental exercise, your next steps, whatever they may be, should be a lot easier to take.
It seems there's an opportunity to meet my friend in person soon. I'll use it to ask about what exactly happened. It's not the kind of thing that comes across well electronically, you really need to be there in real time looking at the reaction. It also needs to be managed properly because this friend is in a somewhat fragile state for completely separate reasons. The last time we met this other issue meant nothing else could even be discussed.
But the key takeaway for my kids is his parents aren't perfect. Hopefully he will have learned that in other ways by the time he's old enough to understand this situation.
I've been accused by a friend for not doing enough in a much less egregious situation (but also in the category of morality and equality), and understand the social difficulty in broaching such a topic, especially if you don't know them well.
It's easy to say "do the right thing" on an internet forum to a stranger, especially if you yourself haven't been in this social situation where you know what the right thing is in a vacuum, yet our survival instincts push us towards not stirring the water. I think your reaction thus far is completely rational given such an alien situation (which is where I found myself in the past).
I just want to say that your internal turmoil is being discounted too much by other commenters. I hope that you can find internal peace and understanding of where you stand and what you believe in for yourself, not because someone tells you that's what people "should do", before doing or saying anything, because that is the only way we can sustain both our moral and emotional health.
However, part of your response gave me pause: "I just want to say that your internal turmoil is being discounted too much by other commenters."
I would offer that we cannot underestimate the internal turmoil, stress and emotional trauma of the aforementioned "housekeeper" (slave), who sleeps on a mat in the kitchen, and that any internal turmoil by those of us with freedom pales in comparison.
Immediate, unambiguous action is the only moral response to slavery.
"I need to keep rooms spare for when friends visit."
"When does that ever happen though? Come on man, they would understand if they had to stay nearby or squeeze into a room. [Housekeeper] is there every day. She is a gem and works so hard. I couldn't do that to someone. I think if you have a better supported employee or helper or whatever, they're more likely to be happier around your family and feel naturally interested in their role."
"She doesn't mind."
"I bet she would, but do you really think she'd feel comfortable raising that with you? You should do the right thing. Think about how valuable a comfortable room is to you. Everyone should be able to appreciate that and not sleep on a mat."
if you feel that bad about it, you should probably bring it up with your friend.
0 - also, i'd hope that my character judgement is good enough that i wouldn't be close friends with someone like that. though of course, people change, we don't always choose who we like, etc etc.
Never anything in the same time zone of FRIEND MISTREATS LIVE IN HELP, MIGHT BE SLAVE, I DIDNT KNOW WHAT TO SAY. This whole thread is hysterical to me. This is a parody of real life, right?
I hate to edge in on godwin territory, but this has reminded me that our society has not grown at all in the last 100 years. We've accreted a card house morality that collapses for SO MANY people at the slightest breeze. Can't let a slave come between friends am I right?
But there should be a question in your mind unless you've actually confronted something like this yourself (with all of it's associated complexity). Until then, your certainty is only a fantasy.
It's really not. There are many people who don't even have to think about this to understand what the right thing to do is.
I was always sure that if someone broke into my home, I would confront them - lethally - if necessary, despite any complexities. Dignity is important to me, and I'm willing to take risks to keep it. When I was a sweet summer child I used to think that was the default state of adulthood.
Well, recently someone did break into my home at 3am. Coincidentally I was sleeping on the couch right in front of the front door. My eyes opened to the sight of a strange man in dark clothes standing inside my home. I went from half asleep to awake and armed faster than I've done anything else from deep sleep. If they had shown me any signs of aggression I'd have shot them. Fortunately for both of us they panicked and fled.
You're right, the action itself wasn't a thing I deliberated on or decided in that moment. I told myself I'd do it, but the way I responded in that acute moment was instinctual and adrenaline fueled.
There are actually some weak parallels between a home invasion and finding out your friend might be a slave owner.
I can understand why some people would respond to a home invasion with submission. For some folks, that doesn't even touch their personal definition of dignity, the function is life > stuff and I can respect that completely.
Yet, when you see your friend possibly engaging in slavery, and mistreating them to boot.. it's like home invasion with the personal stakes all lowered. Your life isn't on the line, just potentially the life of the victim and your friendship. Not only that, but the time frame is extended from do-or-die adrenaline to days of deliberation if you want. I'd have to work real hard to come up with some complexities that shake my confidence on how I'd react here. Basically the maid would have to be skeletor or a war criminal. I really wish more people were backing me up on this. I'm pretty blown away.
But yeah my knees would probably buckle and i'd let them continue with their evil so things wouldn't get awkward. Lol nope.
In this case? Like, what the fuck is there even to discuss here? This is black and white. You free the slave and deal with "social inconveniences" or whatever. Jesus Christ.
We have someone sleeping on a matt, and getting a daily wake up call to do their work.
Work which presumably they are being paid for---we don't know if they're not being paid for the work.
Now in the USA, sleeping on a matt in the kitchen is some kind of terrible situation that no one would live with but....
In my country, I slept on a matt as a child. I wasn't poor. We had a house, food, private schooling, etc. but kids under the age of 7 slept on a matt. It was just the way things were done.
Even today, I have relatives who sleep on matt's despite being totally capable of buying western style beds.
Now as for not having a room of their own, I don't understand the attachment to a private room as opposed to simply a lockbox or a place to keep your things. Private rooms seem like a luxury that one can do without, not a must have.
Disclaimer:
Our families maids have private rooms, and beds (which ironically they endlessly complain are too hot compared to the breezy floor mats they're used to). They also have savings accounts, and pension funds because the family matriarch is a western trained banker and believes that in the absence of good governance, private individuals have to take better care of their employees livelihood.
They are free to quit and renegotiate salaries. Their children are free to do whatever they want, infact we help in their education and give them gifts. If anything it tends to be a more empathic employer-employee relationship, albeit with shit salary.
There is real slavery however, bonded labour, forced child beggars. Seeing this not being mentioned at all, I don't think we have many asian people here, just westerners speculating.
Regardless, just because something is culturally acceptable (like Lola's slavery back in the Philippines), it doesn't make it right.
Modern slavery is rarely keeping someone physically locked up (though sometimes it is). It's often more a matter of keeping the slave socially isolated and with too low confidence to dare to walk away.
I don't mean that they like their situation, but it's often what they're familiar with. Setting them free requires support and commitment.
My first reaction would be to confront the friend about the situation. Next steps would happen next. Ignoring it because it's challenging, awkward or complicated is wrong. It just is.
Setting them free is great for people who have family that can take them in, as is often the the case when the slavery lasted a couple of months or years at most (which is probably the case with adolescent girls pressured into prostitution, for example). But in cases like in the article, where someone has groomed to be a slave from a young age, and has lived that life for decades, been moved to another country even; the family that owns them may be all they have. You've got to free them, but that might take away the only thing they still have, and sever the connection with the only people they know and care about.
It's a seriously fucked up situation.
But yes, when you know someone who seems to have a slave, that is absolutely something to confront them about.
I really _really_ hope I'd confront this "friend" if I were in that situation. It's definitely the right thing to do.
When this story hit HN earlier today, I was taken aback by how so many of the responses basically were of the hand-clasping, oh-what-a-touching-story nature.
This is fucking slavery. There is nothing to admire. Treating slaves-in-all-but-name nicer after the fact does not make it any less repellent.
One human being owned another, and had final say regarding all aspects of their lives. It is abhorrent in all forms, and should called out as such. This isn't something that a sad-face emoji or hashtag campaign fixes, and isn't something that should wait until a more convenient time lest anyone be offended.
Jesus Christ, this may be one of the most vile things I've ever seen on HN.
I've only noticed people recently openly talking convincingly and casually about weird shit like this.
Either A) The world has always been a much worse place than I realized B) Society is morally decaying C) Kids these days have perfected some artisan grade, gluten free, premium master craft trolling.
It's just always been easy to close our eyes to it, but western shops are full of products created through slavery. A couple of years some people (at least in Netherland) drew attention to the fact that nearly all chocolate is grown by people who are effectively slaves, and there was no way to eat chocolate while being sure you didn't support slavery. A lot has been done to improve that situation (at least in Netherland; no idea about other countries), but the same is still true with other products. If your smartphone is not a Fairphone, chances are that some of the materials used it in, have been dug up by slaves. Cheap clothes are often made in sweat shops, often by children who should be in school.
The public face in western developed countries may have been freed from the appearance of slavery and oppression, but that's just a thin veneer. Slavery, child labour and really awful working conditions are still appallingly common, and are a big part of the reason why so many products in our shops are so cheap. And most people close their eyes to it because it's easy to ignore, and we like cheap stuff. And when we do see it, it's so easy pretend it's not really slavery, because once you take up that fight, it never stops, because there's so much injustice that still needs to be righted.
And even in western countries, vulnerable people (illegal immigrants, young women, people with mental disabilities) are conned or pressed into all sorts of situations that are disgustingly close to slavery.
However, the thing that gets me is that this guy had a moral responsibility to find out more, promptly, and he hasn't done it. I'm glad that some of his follow-up posts suggest that he's going to do so soon, but it's waaaaaaay overdue, and that's pretty messed up.
> Have some decency and confront your so-called friend.
I think your advice falls into the "much easier to say (from a great distance) than do" category.
The people who unfailingly and immediately know and do the moral thing, regardless of personal cost or expectation of results, are often literally saints. The rest of us muddle through; being uncertain, un-confident, and only occasionally recognizing and mustering the strength to act against an injustice.
What of it? You still don't allow people to remain in a state of slavery when it is within your power to free them with just a phone call to the police. It doesn't have to be easy to do to be unacceptable not to do.
Maybe not. Sounds like the situation was in another country. Who knows if the police there would care or not. And applying the term "slavery" to the story in the comment is jumping to a conclusion that provides more moral clarity than there may actually be. We don't know enough to say if the situation is that of a shitty employer or that of a slaveowner, and our only source of information doesn't even know himself:
> I will talk to this friend in person next time I'm in that part of the world, which should be soon, about this incident, and get the full story of how their housekeeper lives.
I only say that to emphasize that this stuff, in reality, is probably a lot harder to deal with than some people seem to think.
That's not a reason not to call.
> We don't know enough to say if the situation is that of a shitty employer or that of a slaveowner, and our only source of information doesn't even know himself:
Well, if police were to check, all the "friend" would have to do is provide proof of salary and most everything would be fine if it was a mistake.
Unless the person has bruises, or complains that they're not being allowed to leave---the police would ignore the situation.
Compounding this effect is that most 'maids' are distant relatives in the western sense---being 3rd cousins or nieces through marriage to the hosting family. When push comes to shove, the host family just claims truthfully that they are all a single family, and the sleeping conditions of an adult who isn't being forced to do anything is really no ones business.
---
As an edit. What I'm describing is the traditional lifestyle of West African maidservants. All maids are relatives, since no one trusts anyone who isn't related to them to live in their house.
The world is a big place though. I wouldn't be surprised if maidservant lifestyles in Asian countries or Middle Eastern countries was much different.
Middle Eastern countries even use foreign-born servants, something that'd be seen as the height of insanity in someplace like Ghana.
I assure you, no one on HN is valiantly trying to help me solve my financial problems. In fact, I am routinely treated dismissively by people claiming they are not being dismissive and crap like that.
Given that context, it is incredibly difficult for me to read the many remarks on HN in this thread by people claiming unequivocally that they would know the right thing to do by this woman sleeping on the kitchen floor and they would absolutely do the right thing when my experience suggests the exact opposite is probably true of most members here.
Maybe some folks could get down off their high horses and quit making me just spastic today. It would be a kindness, though probably more of a kindness than most of the incredible hypocrites here are capable of.
YEESH.
I am not asking for money. And you are just proving my point.
I stated it as clearly as I know how, yet people routinely assume I am "panhandling the internet." Because prejudice etc.
It is hard to ask for anything at all when silenced by the general behavior of men online. I offend in part because I fail to shut up, in spite of the sometimes horrible treatment I receive through no fault of my own.
I routinely hear men here tell each other that their high karma is evidence of competence. No one says that about me -- except me. When I say it, it gets ridiculed.
I routinely see men here ask for help with making their businesses profitable. They are not misinterpreted as begging for money. When I do it, I am accused of panhandling or ignored or it otherwise typically is not very helpful.
It would be nice if you would just stop digging your grave deeper. Your first remark was just sort of dumb. But you get more offensive with each iteration of telling me it is somehow all my fault that I can't get taken seriously no matter how hard I try, a thing I have been doing for literally years, which is part of how I ended up the highest ranked woman here.
The next closest openly female member is many, many thousands of points behind me, yet I am far from the bottom rung of the leaderboard. So all the evidence suggests that, sadly, I get taken more seriously here and get more respect than most women who basically don't bother to open their mouths, even when they have serious tech jobs.
I have many thousands more karma than the only female cofounder of Y Combinator, Jessica Livingston. She currently has 3521, which is hundreds more than she had the last time I looked. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jl
Regardless of whether or not one agrees with what Mz is saying, how is that not an insult?
No, that is not what I did. There are comments here comparing the woman sleeping on the kitchen floor to homeless people. There are multiple comments here where people are getting up on their high horse swearing that if confronted with such a situation, they would a) unequivocally know "The right thing to do" about it and b) absolutely do the right thing. They are berating this person on the internet for their moral failure in doing nothing when that individual doesn't even know the full details. But when then confronted with a homeless woman who participates here regularly, none of these supposed paragons of virtue is stepping up to valiantly go to bat for me -- which is exactly what I expected, given my long standing experience online.
No one owes me that intervention. But the people berating this guy for not automatically knowing the right answer and not immediately rescuing the woman from presumed slavery are quick to tell me I am somehow in the wrong and somehow asking for something from them when I point out the obvious example that, no, it isn't always immediately clear and obvious how to help and, no, they wouldn't valiantly rise to the occasion and feel compelled to rescue some pathetic woman from her plight just because it came to their attention like some of them are claiming.
Those are incredibly easy boasts to make when talking to some guy on the internet about his supposed moral defects. But no one here is going to back up those boasts by doing whatever it takes to extract me from my plight AND, on top of that, I am going to be inundated with accusations of mental health problems, panhandling the internet, etc for pointing out that all these supposed paragons of virtue absolutely will not have all the answers and absolutely will not go the distance involved for every case of injustice they casually trip across in the world, such as my situation.
The only thing I asked for in my remark was for people to get down off their high horses in regards to how they are talking to this guy. I am not expecting anyone to rescue me. I am only pointing out that the expectation that this individual is obligated to rescue this woman sleeping on the kitchen floor is a crazy, ridiculous expectation. Such situations are almost never solved by making a single phone call to the police and poking it at may even do enormous harm to the woman's already not enviable life.
It is easy to be a high handed braggart claiming moral high ground on the internet and trying to bully someone else into "doing the right thing" while ignoring the fact that it is rarely clear and obvious what that is and it is never easy to actually right a tremendous injustice, even when you do know all the details. Such things come at quite a high cost, if they can be pulled off at all.
> 'I assure you, no one on HN is valiantly trying to help me solve my financial problems.'
I gather you have financial problems and are working hard to fight them. There seems to be some relation with the people on HN that don't help, but how? Did you ask for help and nobody offered? Is it sarcasm and people are actively hindering you in your job? I am confused, and I can see how someone could understand that you're asking for money. (I'm female, in case that matters.) So, I also concur that your way of expression is a bit unclear.
That may be true, but that doesn't change the fact that it's the right thing to do. The parent's language was perhaps a bit more inflammatory than it needed to be, but sometimes you need someone outside the situation to be more objective and remind you -- possibly rudely -- what needed to be done.
I hope I would have the wisdom and fortitude to do the right thing in that situation, but I won't know until and unless I'm put in it.
For starters: Why is a woman sleeping on a mat in your kitchen?
you need new friends
And your friend is no feminist or idealist.
No Scotsman either!
Idealism, well I'm assuming she's not an adherent of the philosophical kind and aspires to some sort of 'ideal' which I would have a hard time reconciling with slavery.
So in conclusion, I reject your charges of No True Scotsman. Some things are cut-and-dried.
Any solution that grants immigration status to people (who are often, as the woman in OP's story, not even literate) "just" on the basis of them having been enslaved is probably not politically tenable in the US. The most you can hope for is some sizeable amount of damages to be paid, and depending on the legal framework of the source country they subsequently get expelled to, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the slaver could just reclaim the money once they are back.
It's still not too late to talk to your friend and express your utter disgust at how that lady is being treated. Why haven't you done that?
Perhaps most importantly my friend is not the direct slave owner, if that is indeed the relationship. It's my friend's dad, a guy I've barely even met. Perhaps if he was around, and caning her as I walked into the kitchen, I would have said something, who knows? But I was receiving his hospitality through a third party, and I am a foreigner to their country and customs.
Did you ever read the article and wonder why Billy or his family didn't do anything? They probably felt it was so alien they didn't know what to do.
You also gotta ask yourself, if you owned a slave, why you would allow that slave to be the only attendant when a western family comes through town?
All they know is that they slept on a matt in the kitchen.
If they were being paid adequately, I would not call it slavery. Poor labour practice, certainly, and distasteful in the extreme but not the same thing as forced labour and bondage.
Yeah. My sense is people are angry at what the OP described, and their anger has clouded their judgment. They're twisting ambiguous stories like lordnacho's into a version of the OP's, so they can play-act their sense of righteous superiority.
FFS, you literally know next to nothing about the situation. Why do you feel like you're in a position to self righteously adjudicate him as being a criminal? None of us, not even lordnacho himself, know enough about his friend's housekeeper to legitimately make claims like that (or casually throw around terms like slave).
Seriously, the housekeeper's situation may not be too far off from the archetypal startup employee working 18 hour days and sleeping under his desk. None of us know, and none of us should claim to know.
Do you really believe that some 23 year old fresh out of college programmer working 18 hours days by choice in hopes of either a significant payoff or at least experience that will anyways lead to a very well compensated job is at all similar to a women who is sleeping on a mat in the kitchen of an empty house full of empty rooms who is then woken up every morning by a phone call explicitly designed to be demeaning so that she can start her menial, low payoff, worthless experience work?
You're moving the goalposts. It's not about whether they have equivalent opportunities, it's about whether they're slaves. The overworked-and-sleeping-on-a-mat-programmer and the overworked-and-sleeping-on-mat-maid may both simply have paid jobs with shitty bosses. People here are jumping to the conclusion that being worked hard + sleeping on a mat = slavery, when clearly it doesn't.
I don't even know what to say to you, man.
Because you're rich, you know that the local system is so heavily weighed in your favour that you could literally kill the housekeeper and get away with a fine. Because you feel that you own that woman and she has no more rights than a dog. There are many reasons. What does that have to do with anything?
Imprinting basically.
OH, puhleez. This is so much worse than theories of "codependency," as if a woman with young kids being financially dependent on her alcoholic husband isn't an actual serious problem, it's just some sort of emotional disorder. If you are married and financially dependent on the guy, you wake him up and help him get to work and you cover up his alcoholism because you and your kids are dependent upon his money, not because you need therapy or something. Geez.
Lola had no papers. She had no means to job hunt. She had no social connections outside the family. They uprooted her and moved her repeatedly. They never gave her the allowance they promised. This was her only means of survival. And she had agreed to it to get out of being married off to some asshole twice her age. So, she could do domestic labor or she could be de facto a sex slave. That would have probably involved all of the same abuses this involved, only add into it routine rape as part of the deal. She came from a place with no prospects. Then, having taken this deal, she was incredibly trapped.
It is abhorrent to westerners, but indentured servitude used to be pretty common and was often done somewhat willingly/by choice as a means to pay a debt with labor at a time when money per se was hard to come by. Historically, it was not uncommon for people to pay for passage to the U.S. by agreeing to 7 years of indentured servitude following their trip here.
That is still reality in a lot of places in the world. We don't want to hear it, but there is some truth to the idea that you need a middle class income to afford middle class morality. There are parts of the world where large numbers of people have no hope of anything resembling a middle class American lifestyle.
Not only that, they likely don't even have hope of anything resembling a poor American lifestyle.
So much this. You win the Internet today!
> But naturally I didn't enquire any further into her relationship with the family.
I just hope I would do the opposite. This is so wrong.
Billy isn't the villain—but is he the role model you aspire to? If your kid learns your online identity some day and they stumble across this, is this the end of the story you want them to hear?
I've got to say that slavery as a moral ill outweighs social awkwardness, and rationalizing the situation by saying that maybe it gives slaves' life meaning is an abdication of moral responsibility.
I mean, yeah, you could find meaning in that. I'm pretty stoic, I can find meaning in things like dying of cancer or whatever. But that doesn't make it acceptable to put someone in that position, since there's an implicit assertion that their life would lack meaning without this structure.
I think you should swallow your anxiety about this and discuss the matter with your friend, who essentially coopted you into participating in an abusive relationship by not informing you of this in advance.
But if it's not, think if it were you or one of your family or friends in the housekeeper's position.
Build a mansion around this kitchen -> morally reprehensible
It seems contrast in an unrelated area has confused the morally righteous over here.
Do you own a nice car? Have a room in your house that is currently empty? There are people out there who could use some of that wealth for food.
How would you feel if this wasn't a mansion but instead a small shack with only a kitchen and an adjacent room?
It seems we're ok with: Low contrast at any distance, High contrast at large distances.
But not high contrast at short distances
It's good the woman in the story has shelter and a place to sleep.
Merely on the paradoxes and hypocrisy in this rather large stream of replies.
What exactly makes it inexcusable to you though? The fact that the owner of the house could but did not, and the proximity of the rooms?
That's what I'm talking about.
I've lived in a country where live-in housemaids are quite widespread and this kind of behavior would definitely be out of the ordinary, especially among more affluent families. Yes, worse things can happen to housemaids, but I'm talking about the general case.
That's pretty typical of what I've seen in countries like Malaysia, Singapore and China. The maid gets the worst room and in many cases that room is basically an unfinished store room with just concrete. In China, it's usually a bit better, the live-in housekeeper is not locked in the house/apartment with no possibility to go out. Nor do they strip the houseworker before allowing her to go out to make sure she didn't steal anything.
I'm a loudmouth, it disgusts me, and I like to think that I have principles so I make my opinions about the treatment of those housekeepers clear. I've lost acquaintances over this and from what I've seen telling them that what they're doing is right almost never changes things for the housekeepers in question.
I strongly believe that the main issue in all those cases is that the housekeeper lives in the house, this is what creates the abuse, this is what causes the extreme dependence of the housekeeper with their employer.
I think people are arguing that the treatment of said woman, between the infantilizing phone call to wake her every morning to insist she doesn't "get too comfy", and her sleeping on the floor in a house that sounds like it had more rooms than people to live in them, is unnecessarily demeaning at best.
High contrast at short distances, indeed, is the problem for one of the above two points - sleeping on an open space on the floor when everyone else has their own bedroom and bed is at least one tier beyond "just" wanting to put yourself above those you employ to help in your home.
The other, though, is possibly the more damning to me - calling someone every day to insist they be awake at the same time even while you're out of town? At best, that sounds like an overly controlling homeowner trying to make sure the staff are keeping the house up, but that dynamic would usually imply (to my mind) a trusted person in charge of the staff in their absence, to contact, not the two persons combined in one.
The whole situation leaves a bad taste in my mouth because it implies that the people whose home this is do not think it necessary to treat this woman well, and that does not, in my experience, bode well for how they treat others whom they have no obligation to.
Exactly. Although its a touch shameful, the first thing that went through my mind reading the story in the comments was "what kind of person has a mansion and only one maid?".
Multi-room houses aren't easy to keep clean. Add cooking, driving, and shopping on top of that and we have a situation where:
(a) Someone is being severely overworked
(b) Someone cannot keep up with the work, leading to frustration on the employers part and an unnecessarily bad relationship
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In this situation, at the very minimum, you need to ask "Do you feel your employer treats you fairly? I will keep your answer confidential."
If the answer is "yes", then your moral obligation is satisfied. If the answer is "no", you may have to dig down through "uncomfortable situation," potentially to "friendship-ending argument about unethical behavior."
Is it unusual to have this arrangement in a private home? I don't know.
The opprobrium from other commenters seems a little steeped in our own western views as to what's right and wrong, and I think your plan of digging more into the situation sounds an appropriate one.
I had to text my mom and find out if we paid her--I couldn't imagine my family owning a slave.
"Paid house keeper plus all supplies and food. Helped her family also."
While I have no proof, I'm inclined to believe her. It's hard to imagine my parents owning a slave AND the US Military allowing it's personnel to keep slaves AND word of that not making it back to the US Mainland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_Wa...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEovFBU7V9Q
"[Iraq and Afghanistan war] foreign workers are known, in military parlance, as 'third-country nationals,' or TCNs. Many of them recount having been robbed of wages, injured without compensation, subjected to sexual assault, and held in conditions resembling indentured servitude by their subcontractor bosses. Previously unreleased contractor memos, hundreds of interviews, and government documents I obtained during a yearlong investigation confirm many of these claims and reveal other grounds for concern. Widespread mistreatment even led to a series of food riots in Pentagon subcontractor camps, some involving more than a thousand workers."
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/06/06/the-invisible-a...
We've never lived overseas though. I imagine that's pretty different.
I totally believe you have different experience than me, I'm curious to what they are.
A couchsurfing host showed me around the city on a tram. She pointed out masses of ladies in plain clothing sitting around on the sidewalks and in streets. It was a Sunday. This was the "maids day", the one day a week when maids are required not to work.
There were thousands of them, all sitting in groups around the streets and buildings that were closed on the weekends. Groups of street vendors dotted the scene. They appeared when the maids did, a sort of "maid economy", where extremely cheap goods and snacks are sold to the maids on their time off. At night they sleep on the street, and are easily victimized.
The maids have no place to live. During the week they sleep on the floor in a closet, or on a cot in the kitchen of a typical Hong Kong home, and work all day and night, 6 days a week. The little money they make they send home to their family. They are mostly Filipino, mostly illegal immigrants, and as such, they have no rights. And because they have no status here, they also can't get a legal job, leaving them with no other choice to make a living.
There are an estimated 200,000 female domestic workers in Hong Kong (336,000 migrant domestic workers overall), and they are effectively slaves. As many as 56,000 migrant domestic workers here endure forced labor. http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/15/news/hong-kong-forced-labor-... As you might imagine, a large number of these maids are victimized by their "host families".
The really scary thing? I would have had absolutely no clue this was going on if my host hadn't pointed it out to me.
The movie was average but I am mentioning it here because contemporary slavery (or almost slavery) can happen next door, today. Even a an average movie (we call these in French "TV movies) can be eye opening.
I am pretty sure some of these arrangements, especially in poorer Asian countries like India, Indonesia, Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam, etc. are effectively, slavery.
In most cases in Asian countries, live-in housekeepers are paid wages and their families are provided with various amenities and help- kinda like a very small-scale version of the servants' lives in Downton Abbey. But, there are at least two very serious problems: 1. cultural norms allow the servants to be treated very poorly- as second-class citizens, 2. while obscure well-meaning laws exist to prevent trafficking in India, law enforcement doesn't care much if they are treated shittily (physical/mental abuse, nonpayment of wages, etc. often go unreported or are ignored by cops).
It's easy to see from far away what is bad, people all over the western world can point at Hitler in their history books as an example of absolute evil. But then we'd be missing the complete picture, which is so much worse if you cling to a traditional view of good and evil. Normal school curriculum (at least where I'm from) does not teach about the horrific things Belgium did in the Congo up until the 1960s Or any of the other decimations/genocides caused directly or indirectly as a result of occupation by the various colonial powers. Or all the terrible things our ancestors did even further in the past when news spread so much slower or not at all.
There was a Byzantine king named Basil. Who, after defeating a Bulgarian army and capturing a number of their soldiers, blinded 99 out of every 100 captured soldiers and sent them back to Bulgaria to cripple their economy and to sabotage future war efforts. Man is a savage evil creature imo. I don't think we ever truly can change. The civilization I and many others enjoy in the western world is a fragile thing I think. And if we can't make it stick and spread, and I don't think I can, then when the troubles get too bad we'll be back to savagery soon enough, or not as the bomb is still hanging above our heads even if it doesn't feel like that any more.
There is good and there is evil.
One evil act does not absolve another.
Goodness lives forever and evil does not die either
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
Jordan Peterson talks about how one of the most important things you can do to become a well-formed person in terms of moral reasoning is to realize that you're a Nazi. You're a concentration camp guard. You'd do it, by choice. It takes a lot of discussion and examples and thought to get to the point where this is really understood, but it's true and it's important.
I'd say the main thing that convinced me is that I realized that there are people I'd like to see suffer. Not because it'd lead to some external outcome, but just because I want them to suffer. You can see this every day in politics too. People who want to hurt just for the joy of hurting. You can hear it in their voices when they knock people down at a protest and hurl dehumanizing snarl terms at them.
And this is present on every 'side'. The only possible difference is in how much each side embraces this impulse.
Once this is understood - that people aren't divided into good and evil groups, but rather that every person is both good and evil - a lot of questions and problems look quite different from the common "good people vs evil people" frame. A lot of policies and historical judgments start to look pretty dumb.
And, in fact, the idea that some people are evil is a foundation of evil acts. The false belief that someone is pure evil is what gives you the excuse to feel good about making them suffer.
It's ironic that wrong beliefs about the shape of evil in the world are themselves a foundation for evil.
Legally, they're supposed to have one day a week off, but in practice this is not enforced and the maid has no leverage: many have paid large sums to brokers and need to work several years just to repay their debts.
They bring housekeepers from Indonesia and pay them very little. The housekeepers have to work a lot of hours and are pretty much treated as slaves. Often, the housekeepers are not allowed to eat at the same table, they have to eat after everyone has eaten, they don't sleep in a proper room but rather in a storage room.
At least, there's a contract and they do get money at the end but it's really a hard life and hardly more freedom than being a prisoner.
It always shocked me when I saw people that I thought were educated and friendly treat their housekeepers this way.
I have no issue with people hiring housekeepers but the work conditions absolutely need to be decent. And if for some reason they feel that there's too much risk in being decent, then they shouldn't hire a live in housekeeper, they could also easily hire locals to help with some housework.
Of course, that's not everyone, I have some Malaysian friends who treated their live in housekeeper with respect, let her take some holidays and even helped her set up her own business when she went back to Indonesia. But, that's the exception rather than the norm.
I really can't understand such a mentality.
Room and board is given to a housekeeper. That in and of itself can translate to thousands a month in rent and many times, are better living conditions than HK citizens can afford.
What is the significance of the live-in part?
As educated as the HN crowd is, I'm surprised so many people are susceptible to stereotypes.
Perhaps because most people on HN are rather wealthy and well off, when they visit Asia they hang around other rich Asians.
So yes, among rich Asians, the idea of a live-in caretaker maybe common, but they are the minority.
This would be like some rich Asian people hanging out with rich Westerners and saying, "many Western countries have the concept of live-in butlers and maids."
You are completely ignorant of the situation if you think otherwise. The Hong Kong government has even set up special visa programs for helpers: http://www.immd.gov.hk/eng/services/visas/foreign_domestic_h...
Our amah was a very friendly lady and had a relatively easy life with us -- helping with the cleaning of the house, doing the laundry, and washing the dishes, no cooking or raising us kids -- and was paid quite well. Even though it's been 30 years, I still remember helping her out by drying the dishes and visiting her family.
What shocked me personally was the exploitative nature of many other families, from what my parents told me, the British tended to have this more than the Dutch, though I can't be sure. My parents actually got in trouble with others who didn't appreciate their "spoiling the market" -- by paying wages that they considered fair, which was at approximately 250% of the going rate -- and by not working them to the bone. It still boggles my mind.
A year or two into our friendship, I was over at their house after school and around dinner time I asked if I could stay. The parents said, "Sure, no problem... just let your parents know..." They went to talk to the "nanny" -- who didn't speak any English -- and let her know to set another plate.
There was some miscommunication, the "nanny" didn't expect the father to be home for dinner, so they didn't quite have enough food prepared for me too, since they were already one up. That's sort of what my friend translated after... anyway all I saw was two adults arguing and then the father, not liking the "nanny" talking back to him, slapped her face. Hard. Then stood over her with a clenched fist and yelled at her in a language I didn't understand.
My friend was mortified, he started apologizing to me that I had to see it... and the mother came to yell at the father... and ultimately I didn't get to stay for dinner... for weeks my friend just kept apologizing, saying he was sorry I saw what I saw and sorry his father wasn't kinder to their "nanny"...
At some point, 25+ years later, I saw the "nanny" walking with the mother in a grocery store. She still didn't speak English, but she smiled at me and knew who I was. My friend's mother and I caught up, and it hit me... this wasn't really a "nanny" and I probably didn't have a word for that relationship in my vocabulary.
She was part of the family, went to all the school functions and plays and soccer games... cooked for them... kept house... but wasn't related... and who knows if she was paid or not -- but I doubt it... Still she always doted on children. Seeing her all those years later, the facial expressions she made when seeing me were just like seeing a grandmother or aunt. Her face lit up, and she was just excited and proud to see me all grown up.
Anyway this story was really powerful and reminded me of that woman, and got me thinking we probably all know a Lola -- some degree of Lola anyway. Slavery probably isn't as uncommon as we'd like it to be.
Not sure what your value of "we" is. I've never met anyone like Lola, and I've never heard a story like this from anyone I know. Then again, I didn't have a housekeeper or know anyone who did. People in my social class were glad to keep the electric bill paid and have a working car to drive.
Keep in mind that "capitalism with higher taxes" is still capitalism so I'm curious of what of the few really socialist countries you're from.
I bet if you peek your head in the kitchen of your top 5 favorite restaurants, you'll find someone on the dishwashing or cleaning staff who is an immigrant and signs over most, if not all, of their paycheck to a "sponsor" here who looks after them. Gives them a place to stay, helps them with language barriers, etc. Or if you know of anyone who has done a mail-order-bride-type thing...
While you may not interact with these people, I bet you see them in your day-to-day life.
Most of the students from Asia or the Middle East, whose parents were paying tens of thousands of pounds for their child to attend a British university, had staff at their parents' home.
One close friend was a British girl who'd grown up in Hong Kong, with a full-time au pair. She complained that the other HK and Chinese girls she shared a kitchen with didn't know anything about cooking or cleaning, since their au pairs had always done everything for them. In her case, her parents told her to "help" the au pair with chores, in the same way I helped my mum, so she'd learn. Presumably, her parents knew the arrangement in Hong Kong wouldn't last forever.
I've also met a couple of people working as au pair's here, both ~20 year old women mixing the work with studying, which is the usual sytem in Europe. It looks like a very poor deal, for example [1] £320/mth for what's not far off full time hours (37.5hr/wk would be full time in a government job).
[1] https://www.aupair.com/en/job/lisburn-united-kingdom-765795....
Why does a college kid need a live-in housekeeper?
Not at university in London.
Maybe I didn't make that clear.
I guess this one of the privileges of a certain class that just goes unmentioned and untouched by politics.
Which language?
The mother makes me wonder if losing your humanity means becoming an animal.
Another way to look at this is to consider humans as eusocial animals and speculate on whether someone is more concerned with their identity/position within a given or monolithic social body or their position as a discrete conscious individual. Over time the dichotomy between these positions might result in acute psychic stresses.
There's a conjectural argument that schizoid tendencies are an evolutionary remnant of social organization, most famously explore din Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which is worth reading even if you reject his thesis.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2015/11/20/plight-of-saratoga-hum...
Desperate to make a living after the global economic collapse in 2008 hit Spain particularly hard, at least three victims accepted the jobs without meeting the restaurant and salon owners, Estanislao said. In some cases, the group paid for their tickets and told them they could work off the debt.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2491045/97-arrested-in-raids-o...
And there are also a lot of illegal cannabis growing locations which basically have slave boys from Vietnam tending them.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/26/uk-police-crit...
Sometimes it's good to be able to rationality ground your morality instead of merely feeling it. Guess which one will hold up when actually challenged in real life.
>Take a homeless person and let them sleep in your kitchen in exchange for mowing your lawn -> moral hero.
This is a flawed thesis if you're still trying to argue w.r.t. lordnacho's post.
>Take a homeless person
First off, there's no reason to believe that that person was or was not homeless prior to the situation. This is called an "Argument from ignorance"[2]
>let them sleep in your kitchen in exchange for mowing your lawn
This premise is really a False analogy[3], and explicitly ignores the other warning signs in his post that would indicate that this is not what the situation truly is.
Also, in most developed countries, there are very specific labor and tenant laws. "I'm letting him sleep on my couch if he mows my lawn once a week" is not a legal agreement. It is also not equivalent to "I have a live-in maid" - which also has a buttload of legal protections.
All of your other statements are riddled with half-truth bullshit and I'm not interested in explicitly explaining the rest to you. If you are, in fact, serious about being able to "rationality ground your morality" then I suggest you take a look at some of your statements and think about how grounded in reality they truly are.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_analogy#False_an...
They were a series of observations designed to illustrate a particular/contrasting point. Or rather an attempt to show where the boundaries lie in the grey of such thought.
Read the reply again without assuming the parents context. Do you agree with the observations presented?
However, after reading some of the other comments in this thread, I might have to rethink that. It's interesting to see how many people seem to be unable to see through their own moral outrage.
I think we both are in agreement in sentiment, but I do not think you effectively communicated your ideas in a way that would be beneficial to a constructive discussion. It's too easy for people who disagree with you to point out flaws in your argument as opposed to understanding and discussing your true point.
And in my opinion your observations are shameful. I am ashamed FOR you.
Sometimes people try to get around this by choosing different words - for example, a popular adage is that rational morality is "do no harm, except to prevent greater harm". The only problem with it, of course, is that you then have to define "harm", and it something fundamentally just as subjective as "evil" (as evidenced by the fact that the same thing can be harmful or not depending on consent - i.e. on the subjective determination of a person).
After the mother passed, Lola had nowhere to go, and no job or career or savings. She had nothing, except for the kids that she helped raise since their birth. The author gave her not only a place to live rent-free, but paid her some amount of money he could afford so she could better enjoy her life.
I'm not saying either of our comments are 100% accurate, but you are taking a pretty 1-sided viewpoint to the situation. You can't pretend like the relationship between the author and Lola was strictly one of slave-master - that's disingenuous.
It's really easy to judge someone else for what they didn't do when you have no understanding of what their lives were like.
Also, he clearly didn't plan to take his secret to the grave, it's on the cover of the Atlantic.
I think it's fair to criticize someone for being aware that a person is being enslaved and not doing anything meaningful about it for the same reason that it's fair to criticize onlookers who fail to call 911 on a crime in progress.
Then you're just a dick that wants to pretend you are a better person than you are.
The author is as compassionate as many of the Republicans in Congress. They care! They really do, just not enough to vote in anyway that would make a difference to the things they proclaim to care about.
I really appreciate the author sharing something so personal, but his entire family is less than human.
How much of your income do you donate?
Even among the live-in servants there will be huge ranges in the fairness (or in this case, existence) of the wages they get, the amount of respect they are given, the quality of the food/board, the amount of free time they get, and the amount of rights they are allowed to express.
In the west we still have nobel names like "de la", von, etc. as indicators that this person is of royal decent.
I've found that vegetarian-ism is a stronger indicator than someone telling me they are Brahmin. Or, if they are somewhat practicing, their sacred thread is sometimes visible.
If you already belong to a community in a geo-location which holds and controls entry to key places in every walk of life. It makes zero sense to migrate to a different place and stand in the queue like a plebeian.
I was speechless for a while, not wanting to start yelling on them. Maybe I should have had. I am pretty sure they wouldn't enjoy THEIR 5-6 year old kid working every day with possibility of losing fingers/dying. And of course forget school, and any good future whatsoever.
Damn, it still makes me angry! Bear in mind that most Indians you can meet in the west are Brahmins, common folks wouldn't be able to afford schools good enough to get out. Caste system is fading and it will die eventually, one of great evils of mankind and in fact a form of slavery for lower castes.
The description of this idea of a live in slave is alive and well in many parts of Asian and the Middle East.
Life in the Philippines is quite a struggle especially in the provinces. I know of a few people that live and work in Hong Kong doing the same job described in the article, but they are doing it for two families for very little pay.
There are still whole races of people kept as slaves in sub-saharan Africa, for example. And I mean outright slavery, no ambiguity about it.
Abolitionism is a Eurocentric concept.
Another example from Asia. Two people were kept as slaves for 14 years in a tofu factory. This is in a developed country with a GDP per capita comparable to Spains. They were caught and fined 40k USD, no jail time.
http://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3105152
Were they wrong?
This idea is definitely more acceptable than it is in the west in all the world. Africa. Asia. Middle East. Maybe not South America, but even there it would be more acceptable than it is in say Norway.
As for the absolute level of acceptability in each area or country, that is hard to work out, especially in Asia where saving face means something can be unacceptable in theory, but practiced quasi-openly, as in the example of the article, where Lola was an open secret in the guys family.
When Ulysses S Grants father-in-law died a few years before the civil war, he left them his slave. The Grants were dead broke, Ulysses had failed at farming and the slave was worth a lot of money, they could have worked him or sold him to make the their life instantly better. Instead Ulysses took him to the courthouse and made him a free man.
How hard is it to have empathy for others?
Harder for most people than you seem to think.
That really depends on the person. Some people don't have empathy. As a sufferer of DPDR, a lot of times I don't even feel I have emotion.
It is clear that Jones was previously owned by Dent, but when and how Grant acquired him from his father-in-law, as well as Grant's motivations for freeing him are not known.
See http://www.snopes.com/confederate-history-slave-ownership/ or https://www.researchgate.net/publication/297734845_Ulysses_S... or almost any other reputable source.
It appears that Jones worked on Dent's farm with Grant, so maybe he freed him when the farm failed?
This was very much worth the read. It's touching and troubling and a human story.