> Although the family has agreed to compensate her, Maria, who lived in near-total isolation and without contact with her relatives, will remain with her employers
What the fuck?
Why did the law need the family's "agreement"??
Why is nobody going to jail for imprisoning someone for 55 years??
Just going on what it says in the article, it may be difficult to prove that anyone specifically forbade her to leave or made threats to prevent her from leaving.
I have some insight into this as my ex ended up in a similar situation in Malaysia. Rich family, no free days, 5-22 work hours.
It took me a year to convince her that it was not ok. They took away her passport, phone, she wasn't allowed to go out without them. I was ready to help her but she did not want my help.
In the end I'm sure she had to pay her "employer" for breach of contract since she left early. I think she had less than $1000 saved from these 18 months of work.
The thing that made me angry the most is that the family was incredibly well off, yet thought they deserve a slave (or more than one) at home.
Sadly this kind of crap is also common in Arab countries like Dubai/UAE where the majority of "household help" is expats who get their passports seized and sometimes even beaten.
Between the two of you only one is violating the guidelines. Their comment at least asks a question their are curious about. Yours just nags and tries to shut down discussion.
> The concern is that Maria’s dependence on the exploiting family is so extreme that removing her abruptly, without a structured support network, could do more harm than good
Oh wow, I didn't realize this was already 9 years old. One of the essays of all time.
Certainly provides some perspective on why Brazil might let that woman stay with the family that enslaved her. But, Lola's case is unique because she was taken halfway around the world and was an undocumented immigrant for decades. It sounds like that's not the case for this woman in Brazil, but there's a lot we don't know.
You are acting like the case it is that the girl was kidnapped or taken from their family against their will. Barring extraordinary circumstances, this is not the case here. More likely than not, this is the case of some poor family that couldn't take care of the girl and gave her away.
It is a horrible arrangement, and she should be given a lot more than what she is getting (at the very least, she should be given backpay + pension equivalent to the market rate of her work for all these years), but to treat this case as some sadistic family keeping someone in captivity is overreacting.
> “The signing of this agreement does not rule out the possibility that the worker may pursue individual claims through the courts,” the statement added.
In cases like this, it’s likely the victim defended the family, and it made it impossible to classify the crime as slavery if she said she was free to leave but “was afraid of the violence outside”, which the article mentioned. It sounds ridiculous but in any court, if you can’t prove something beyond doubt, you cannot punish, which I think is why they ended up with that arrangement.
But being so afraid that you have never been outside unless accompanied by your bosses would be pathological in any other case.
Also, what I said was "ridiculous" was the jury's conclusion, not going outside.
Pathological, yes, but it doesn't necessarily mean that this fear was instilled by the family as a way to keep her trapped.
Most people in Brazil are so used with the precautions that they have to take to deal with urban violence, they don't get to realize that they are the ones living in their own prisons. I have family members in Rio de Janeiro who get panic attacks at the thought of going anywhere by themselves. I've met grown women in college who wouldn't dare to do anything outside of the home <-> campus itinerary on their own.
Minimum wage is about US$300, which would make about US$220k total (you get about 13.3 salaries per year), plus fines and overtime. They'll have to pay social security too. It seems to me that the case doesn't include the labour part of the situation. That might be a separate case.
systemic racism is a thing, bet you there are judges, lawyers, etc that have the same thing going on. many in power do and thus are sympathetic to such causes. it's hard to viciously go after what you are guilt of.
Its a common occurrence for families to take in poor girls to do house work in exchange for food and lodging. And with the insidious nature of Brazilian racism, they will pretend that she is part of the family. They might even take her on vacations (to work, of course). If you grow up with this mentality it might even be hard for you to see the injustice. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, the last country in the Americas to do so, decades after its neighbours. The slaves never got compensation but their owners did.
I was shocked to read how late even several prominent European countries abolished it. Most northern US states abolished slavery even before Britain, France, Portugal, and (especially) Spain did.
Serfdom wasn't legally abolished in Russia until 1861. Slavery was technically abolished in the late 1700s, but in some areas serfs were still bought and sold like chattel until the end of serfdom.
The Ottoman Empire legally abolished slavery in the 1880s, but there was still illicit yet tolerated slavery in Turkey into the 1930s.
I think in some areas of the Sahel chattel slavery may still exist as a practical matter. Mauritania didn't legally abolish chattel slavery until 1981, for example, but as in other areas it can take decades for reality to match the law, given the laws were often changed under international pressure rather than reflecting any change to the domestic social order.
Serfdom continued in practice in Russia for decades and often serfs became indebted to the landowners in a form of financial bondage that pretty much lasted until the Russian revolution, where...well things didn't get much better for them.
The fact that serfdom de-facto remained is one of the primary reasons Russia's industrialization lagged the rest of Europe for so long as factories didn't get the initial cheap labour. It was only finally fully picking up steam (pun not intended) when WW1 broke out.
> serfs became indebted to the landowners in a form of financial bondage that pretty much lasted until the Russian revolution, where...well things didn't get much better for them.
Exactly. Bolsheviks just changed the name from "serfdom" to "collective farms". Mandatory membership where members were not allowed an ID that enabled them to move inside the country and therefore were bound to the farm. The practice continued until the late 1970s.
And, today, in the whole middle east everyone, from governments to individual families, keep getting "embarassed" by having it turn that that they're "holding servants". And then it happens again. And again. And again. Daesh/IS "brought back" slavery (which is one reason bringing back terror brides, some of whom exploited slaves while in the middle east, is such a judicial nightmare. What do you do with a legally Australian girl, now a mother of 4, who lived for 2 years in Iraq, bought and sold slaves, exploited some them to "run the household", and killed/worked to death one of them?)
Slavery is abolished everywhere in the middle east ("except" Daesh/islamic state), and yet this keeps happening. Example after example after example:
Oh and the royal families keep getting caught in "even more embarrassing" incidents.
Here is Saudi Arabia having a royal murder a slave for perceived insults, then forcing UK governments to allow and forgive the murder (by taking nationals hostage then organizing a "prisoner swap")
Or Iranian and Iraqi imams and mullahs selling children, girls, but apparently even including the occasional boy, into child prostitution, functioning as pimps and exploiters:
You'd be shocked how much of our "friends" in MENA still have legal slavery for non citizens. When an employer can confiscate someone's passport and one can only leave the country with their authorization, it is slavery.
I have no idea why we in the west consider that normal and look the other way... What am I saying, I know, oil & VC money...
Some of them also bring their filipino, Nepali, or African slave maids in Europe and everybody looks the other way, they have too much money to be criticized...
They are so brazen about slavery they routinely sell their slaves on Instagram or Facebook ads, with copies such as "doesn't need much food","sleeps on the floor", "will work 20 hours a day"...
The vast majority of slaves went to the New World, so that's where most of its effects were felt. Of the 12.5M people kidnapped from Africa, only ~9000 went to the Old World. It just wasn't as obvious of a problem in Europe itself.
An interesting side-effect of this is that a lot of European countries have two relevant dates: the first being the banning of slave trade, the second being the banning of slavery. For example, the UK prohibited any involvement in the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, but slavery in the UK itself was only abolished in 1833.
> Most northern US states abolished slavery even before Britain, France, Portugal, and (especially) Spain did
Sort of. France and England abolished slavery within their own territories before the US states did, but it did not extend to their colonies until later. France banned slavery within its home territory back in the 1300s (Free Soil Principle), but continued with slavery through its "Code Noir" (Black Code) in its colonies, where slavery was not permanently abolished until 1848 (it was abolished at the time of the French Revolution but then reinstated by Napoleon). England abolished slavery at home in the mid 1700s but not in its colonies until 1834.
(Like the US North, England and France had very small populations of Africans/others, so it was relatively painless and easy to ban slavery there, while continuing to accept slavery "elsewhere". For the US North "elsewhere" was the South, for England and France it was their colonies. Same principle though.)
Along the same lines, slavery of Catholics was forbidden in Europe all the way back in the Middle Ages. So it was acknowledged to be something bad, that Christians should not do to each other. But slavery of "infidels", heathen/pagan/Muslims/etc., was OK - and not only okay but sanctioned by Romanus Pontifex in the 1400s granting Portugal the authority to enslave "pagans" (basically all non-Europeans) along the coast of Africa. (Incidentally, as some Africans converted to Christianity, this posed a problem (they were no longer pagan and couldn't be enslaved), and so eventually it shifted to being about race and skin color rather than religion.)
I wonder if this position was taken from the Muslim slaver behavior who had been conquering/enslaving Christians for quite a while at that point. Especially as Spain was being taken back from Muslim colonizers at that time, and you have lands that had been under Muslim practices (enslaving non-muslims) now having the roles reversed but perhaps the engrained Islamic thought (only enslave non-believers) entrenched.
The abolition of slavery in the US is unfortunately a more complicated story than most people are aware.
The 13th amendment removed the legal concept of slavery (except for convicts) but it was still not a crime to do slavery. Slavery changed shape many times over the years since the civil war (usually involving convicting black people under sham crimes and then selling them as debt slaves or forcing them to sign contracts that rendered them slaves under threat of being convicted for said sham crimes) and can only reasonably be said to have actually ended in the US after Pearl Harbour when concerns that it would be used as enemy propaganda caused the Justice Department to properly prosecute slave owners (see Circular 3591[1]).
The last chattel slave in the US was Alfred Irving[2] and he was released in late 1942. He was kept in chains and was permanently disfigured due to abuse from his owners.
[3] is a very comprehensive video essay about the topic.
I was repeatedly told in school that Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery, only to find out recently that places like UAE had not abolished slavery until 1967.
A family member stayed in a hotel in Dubai recently and on returning said how incredible the staff were and willing they were to help them, and my response was "no shit"
I went once. It feels like Disney Land but for the wealthy. I'll never go back, and I actually regret going to be honest. It's disgusting and it's right out in the open.
Most people I talk to don’t know that 80% of Russians were slaves until their emancipation in 1861, as well as a significant amount of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Latvians and Estonians. There were no reparations paid, in fact they had to continue working for free for generations to pay bankers for the same land they have been enslaved for. Then just after the former serfs finally paid their “debt” the Bolsheviks came and took it
They took the slavery / serf distinction seriously in the Slavic world. While the distinctions might have mattered in the 1800s, by any modern-slavery standard the serfs were slaves, as you rightly say.
Whatever we might now think with hindsight of the communist revolution in Russia, if ever there was a country primed for the peasants to rise up against the ruling class, it was Russia.
Russia might have been a land of art, music, dance and literature, but you were pretty fucked if you weren't in the 20%.
Not just Russia, the Kingdom of Hungary (which contained large parts of Central Europe) abolished serfdom only in 1848 (the Serfdom Patent of 1781 was not really respected in the hungarian part of Austrian Empire until then).
I’m sorry but the current NK regime and the Kim family consolidating power is in large part due to American aggression indochina. The Korean War was more or less genocide on the part of the Americans and history would be different without Douglas MacArthur…
That's just fake history. The US didn't start the Korean war, they helped SK stand free of the oppression of the seriously evil NK government.
China then interfered because they didn't want a US aligned country at their border.
However there have been decades since the affair settled - and I stand by my opinion that if the US and by extension NATO cares whatsoever, they'd have just told China "we won't interfere as long as you free NK citizens into free people".
It would've not been perfect at all, but at least the horrendous reality they are in would've been prevented.
That's also somewhat fake history. The half of Korea under Syngman Rhee was almost as bad as the other half under Kim Il Sung, it's just that Rhee was "our son of a bitch" to quote Roosevelt while Kim was Stalin's son of a bitch. Rhee was just as keen to unite Korea using American blood as Kim was using Chinese blood.
> Slavery in the Arab world is a benign institution. Slaves are rarely used for industrial or agricultural labor. They are often treated as members of the family. Bright young slaves are educated and given positions of trust and are eventually freed. Mohammed Surur, the former Minister of Finance of Saudi Arabia, was born a slave. Two managers of one of Jidda's principal hotels were once slaves.
i.e. its not a good motivation to increase the number of prisoners (even if one looses less money per prisoner, more prisoners will mean more loss), but it does motivate investigating ways on how one can minimize the loss on individual prisoners.
I wasn't claiming there was a financial motivation one way or the other simply stating the actors who do turn a profit with regards to the US prison system.
The explosion of incarceration and the private prisons resulting from that largely come from "the war on drugs". The book The New Jim Crow is pretty good if you're interested in the topic.
Alas, the "kids for cash" scandal was such a big news event that it dominates the results for any search you'd do on the subject of private prison corruption, but it's hardly the only example.
The state as a whole does not have a financial motivation.
The interests of the criminal justice system on the other hand is heavily financially benefited from the current state of affairs. More incarcerations means more judges, more lawyers, more job security.
Moves to correct this are labeled as “soft of crime” and surely my opponent Congresswoman Y isn’t pro crime?
It's possible that you're genuine in your confusion here; it is, however very hard for me to believe that there are people who genuinely don't understand that when the state spends money it -goes somewhere-.
"What's the financial motivation for the state" is way too blinkered and makes at least 2 different false assumptions. There are other motivations besides financial, and it doesn't have to be the state's own motivation for the state to end up doing something.
Countless government policies and programs exist which give no legitimate benefit to the state or the people, no legitimate motivation, financial or otherwise, yet they exist anyway because they do benefit and motivate someone, financially or otherwise, who has some mechanism of influence to cause it to happen.
This is almost like asking "Why would anyone do something bad?" Gosh golly why indeed? 517,000 reasons and 124 new ones every day.
Relevant in that the directly upthread poster argued there was “zero financial motivation for the state for prevention or rehab or any other activities to reduce imprisonment rates”, which I claim is incorrect.
I get how you could read it that way, and of course the state as the thing that is collecting taxes and paying whatever does not profit.
and the state as all citizens, including those affected by gang and drug related violence also would benefit from dong things differently.
it's those who benefit off the current prison labor system who lobby to keep it running, and they make it seem "natural" and "without alternatives"...
and "the state" (as the tax collecting entity) pays for the prisons and the inmates while the labor "providing" companies benefit off the labor.
it's a very very clever system.
enslavement without being called such.
and I agree, no, "the state" (as the totality of citizens) doesn't benefit.
only "the state" as the entity that's controlled by lobbyists and _pretends_ being by the people, for the people, that has no motivation to change this.
"Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy"
Prisoners are not slaves, because they are not the property of the prison or any other entity. It's called involuntary servitude. I'm sure the people affected do not care about the distinction, but words matter.
It's also trivially easy to not end up in involuntary servitude.
Stupid people also assume there are not exceptions to every rule. But you can't build your systems (or your arguments) around edge cases, because that would be ignoring the vast majority of use cases.
> It's also trivially easy to not end up in involuntary servitude.
Look, you're not entirely wrong. But you're not entirely right, either.
In some states, the prisons are privately run and the prison labour is part of the profit motive. They have no incentive to rehabilitate and the states with these "programs" have some of the highest recidivism rates in the USA.
That also ignores the fact that some people are born into situations that make it far harder to live a "legit" life than others, and I'm not even talking about historical racism as part of that equation (which certainly does contribute).
I'm also NOT saying that prisoners shouldn't be made to work, but it should be outside of a system designed to exploit them.
I suppose using this logic, murder is legal, because of self defense. Theft is legal because of tax laws.
Prisoners aren't 'slaves'. They are being punished for crimes they committed. Very dofferent than being born into it and bought/sold to the highest bidder.
If someone is abducted against their will and forced to do work without (fair) compensation and without being allowed to exercise their human rights, is that person not a slave because they were neither born into it nor bought or sold?
"Abduction against their will" is something that happens when a person is arrested. If you are done for crime I don't think freedoms apply to you anymore.
Read the Constitution. The 13th amendment that “abolished” slavery also explicitly reserved the right for the government to keep prisoners as slaves:
AMENDMENT XIII
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
I will say it was common up to the end of 70s and somewhat into the 80s.
Common here I don't mean that every single person would have a "slave child" at home but you'd know someone or someone that knew someone who did it.
I am not saying it justify this horrible behaviour, but mostly as to say how much worse it could get.
Some would just be "Cinderella" style abuse, but other would be physically and sexually abused.
Some reform of policies around de 90s cleared much of the evil practice.
I think by today standards, 99% of people knowing this would have denounced this much earlier. The fact it did not happen in this case is because this family is related to a powerful politician of the region.
Compensation they offer is too little and too disrespectful. It is basically 3 USD a week for the past half decade of forced work relationship.
First, it would need to be at least 100x more than that and it would need to put this rubbish in form of people into jail for the rest of their lives.
> they will pretend that she is part of the family
Wasn't there some mild scandal a decade or so ago where wealthy white American families would adopt kids from Africa or Mexico, only to force them to do housework the whole time?
Well, it's classed as child abuse and the perpetrators ("parents") were punished harshly. So pretty bad, but not remotely the same thing as what happens in the middle east or north Africa.
If you found that movie interesting, check ou The Second Mother (Que Horas ela Volta?) which is a Brazilian movie about a maid and her relationship with the middle class family that employs her.
Hot take: As bad as this is, I wonder if it would be kinder to leave her with the family for the rest of her life.
This lady is in her 60s, does she even know any other way to even live? Life with that family may be better than whatever Brazil's equivalent of welfare shelters are.
Seems like that may have been why the case workers left her with that family for now.
I was talking to a doctor who went to medical school in Brazil and said it was normal for upper-middle class people to have a live-in domestic servant. Many of the floorplans for condos or houses include a servants quarters. They were telling me theirs cost around $12 USD a day which is not a bad deal.
probably for both.. don't forget it includes an air conditioned place to live, food and internet plus a salary. In exchange they take care of domestic needs (cooking, shopping, house keeping)
This used to be quite common in Chile as well. I don't think it's that prevalent anymore, but it was very interesting to see the synergy some families built after decades of cohabiting with a "service person" (don't really know what word to use). I met a lot of people that widely regarded their service lady as a mother, they were pretty much raised with them around, so the bonds run deep. I have no doubt some times the compensation might not exactly be the best, but I have met quite a lot of people that are well happy with this arrangement.
If you pay minimum wage (about US$300) it would be about that per working day. Increasingly, cleaners are working per diem because they earn a lot more (about US$40 a day, but this varies a lot by region).
This is true in Singapore and Malaysia, as well, where Filipino or Indonesian cooks and housekeepers are extremely common, as are separate entrances--typically into the kitchen. In Malaysia there's an odd situation, the reverse of the dynamic in the US, where Indonesian servant immigration is encouraged as a way to grow the Muslim population and help diminish the political power of Chinese-Malaysians and Indian-Malaysians.
> This is true in Singapore and Malaysia, as well, where Filipino or Indonesian cooks and housekeepers are extremely common, as are separate entrances--typically into the kitchen.
Live in housekeepers are very common indeed in Singapore. However, majority of Singapore lives in Housing Development Board flats that do not have any separate entrance into kitchen.
I grew up with servants (in SubSaharan Africa and Morocco).
However, they were paid (I have no idea whether it was a good wage, or not), and had pretty decent quarters (in Morocco). My parents were pretty kind, fairly liberal, people. I would be quite surprised (and shocked) if they took advantage of the servants. I know that my mother made damn sure that I had respect for poor folks.
Those things are a symptom of an involved economy. It harkens back to a time of less development where there were more hands than jobs and much of the labor was manual. Not to excuse the practice in modern times but go back a few generations and that was the reality of the world -everywhere.
It's a symptom of inequality. It will start happening more and more even in the first world if inequality isn't tackled and wealth continues to concentrate.
Logically-speaking, poverty can't exist without inequality. It's a condition of "want" that requires others to "have".
Practically-speaking, inequality is insidious because it enables violations of rights and unjust denial of opportunity even when poverty has been eradicated. Cold comfort, to the middle-class family of people mowed down by a rich motorist who faces negligible jail time because the money they can spend on a lawyer is outside the scope of what the legal system is built to handle.
No. Poverty is not relative to what others have. Poverty is relative to baseline needs. So poverty absolutely can exist without inequality.
Inequality has no moral characteristics. It is not "insidious." The fact that disparate effort and disparate circumstance lead to disparate outcomes is just that; a simple cold fact.
That some people use their power or wealth to take advantage of others is a moral issue. But again, this is orthogonal to disparity of outcome. Or do you claim poor people never steal from other poor people, or that rich people never steal from other rich people?
That's incorrect. The baseline need that poverty is calculated relative to is itself calculated relative to local conditions. Because inequality drives those local conditions, poverty cannot exist without it.
Your post is proof of the insidiousness of inequality. It allows for outcomes to be warped by the presence or lack of aggregated capital, without presenting a direct attack on outcomes. As long as you are able to limit the contextual scope, you are able to claim a "just world", even when clear injustice is extant.
It is then important to insist that the scope stay broad enough to involve all related implications.
"Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely." This suggests that there is a functional relationship between the size of power imbalances and the amount of corruption that exists. It is not that some people use their power or wealth to take advantage of others; it is that inordinate power and wealth ensures that abuses will occur.
> Because inequality drives those local conditions...
That is not in evidence. You may be thinking of inflationary pressures causing the poverty income level to be adjusted upward. This is not a result of income inequality. It is a result of supply and demand.
> "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely."
That is an aphorism, not a universal truth, and holds zero moral weight. You may be judged as corrupt by what you do, not by what you have.
> ...inordinate power and wealth ensures that abuses will occur.
No. This is envy as evidence. It doesn't work that way. Your use of the word "inordinate" is also meaningless from an economic or policy stance. Who decides what is inordinate? What qualifies a level as inordinate?
There is only one equilibrium state with full equality: vacuum. In an economic sense this is where zero exchange of value occurs. It is system-death.
In a just world, you keep what you earn. You reap what you sow. When someone powerful steps out of line you punish them. If they do not, there is no reason to punish them. Pre-punishment because "they probably will" is propaganda from the dictator. We don't want that.
There's is poor people who exploit other poor people. Poor people that sends children to work for example. Only the rich can exploit? You are not using the definition of exploitation from the dictionaries. A stronger or armed person has a power differential with a weaker person.
So, exploitation doesn't seem to be related exclusively to wealth inequality. It's a moral thing, not a matter of wealth differences.
A simple narrative of "us-good VS them-bad" is short sighted.
Inequality is a big factor. Story says the woman in this case felt she was compensated. Like feeling 'lucky' to enjoy (some) perks of living in a rich household. If that family had been as poor as her (or her mother), that stops being true. Then it becomes hard to keep a slave from walking away without resorting to violence.
Another big factor is the victim simply not knowing any better. Not being able to read might have helped with that (and I'd guess she probably wasn't allowed a phone, to keep her isolated from outside).
Point is there's a lot of space between "whips & chains" and "paying below minimum wage". Unfortunately some people are really good at exploiting that space.
Yes poverty is a factor. But inequality too - it helps to create [the powerless vs the powerful] situations. Even if those on the bottom may not qualify as poor.
> Education and a society's culture are certainly important too.
The median income in brazil is 10X lower than USA. So $12 a day -> $120 a day. That's similar to what someone in the US at the bottom of the economic ladder might earn. We have the same thing, it's just that Americans want to have servants but don't want to see them, so there's an app barrier between you and the poor. Someone cooks your food, someone else delivers your food, someone cleans your hotel room, but Americans prefer not to have to ever learn their names or talk to them. Is that really better?
Unlike when you use an app, for the most part, because we're not psychopaths, living with someone every day for months or years causes us to feel a great affinity and care towards them.
I live in a developing country. Some people treat their live-in staff badly. But for many others, this is not the case.
Imagine you are a high-earner and hard worker and so you and your wife get a live-in nanny to assist with childrearing duties. Often, two or three decades later, the live-in nanny is ready to retire, but your children (whom you love) have come to see her as a member of the family, or even as a second mother. Surely you also do. How can you live with someone for 20-30 years and not care about them? You might thus often take care of her for the rest of her life, even though she has her own savings.
(No, I do not have live-in house staff. But I've had the same maid for 7 years and she knows she can come to me if she needs anything.)
How one treats someone else is probably mostly just a reflection of the individual. But it's harder to disregard someone's humanity when they live in your house and you've know them for years.
Thanks for your perspective. I do wonder if this arrangement is usually not as bad as some people are implying. Though on the other hand, the line between this sort of thing and something that can reasonably be called slavery can be quite fuzzy.
The practice of live-in maids has been somewhat common throughout the world up until WWI and into WWII. Well-to-do families would taken in boys and girls from poor families and use them for house and yard work. It wasn’t slavery, or even indentured servitudes, but it did take opportunity of their misfortune. Aristocrats and well to dos would take girls and boys mostly from the less educated countryside or from war-torn areas of the rest of Europe and use them as cheap labor. Some would stay on and some would go off to seek better future outside those families. It was somewhat symbiotic the poor kids (and their families) needed the money and the wealthy could show off they had money to spend on domestic help.
I am a brazilian doctor. Yeah, richer people are very likely to hire staff to manage their homes. It's not a rule, but it's not rare for them to live in the house they work at. This is common enough to show up as a trope in popular telenovelas.
I've yet to uncover a case of literal slavery like TFA though. One could argue the workers aren't getting paid enough and I'd agree, but the workers are getting paid.
> whether the woman desires to be "rescued" or wants changes in the way she lives now
Here’s the thing: you can’t keep someone isolated for 55 years, working them without pay—regardless of whether the victim thinks that they want it or not.
My wife's family were wealthy Chinese near Hong Kong. Her grandmother took in a poor girl as a servant. She was part of the family but also basically a slave. The grandmother arranged her marriage when the girl was older. We met the girls granddaughter when we visited china - she was a new college student. The two families still think of themselves as related.
Almost same story (except china), my grandmother lost her parents very young. A family took her in and she worked for them until 20 years old or something then she got married.
Welcome to HN! You’ll find that a lot of the readers and commenters here don’t view technology as an isolated field, that it interconnects with all sorts of other systems—sociology, politics, entertainment, manufacturing, business, and so on.
at the bottom of the page there is guidelines and FAQ
they also give good indication on how to handle topics that don't tickle your personal preferences (for "interesting" or "curious"): silently ignore them
especially if interest is the guidance on downvoting and flagging. the sorting is not according to your personal preferences, as in "social media", but according to the hn hive think. thus negative voting indicates "anti-curious", "anti-conversation", not dislike.
Welcome to Hacker News. It's not but there are persistent activist users who try to drag off-topic social issues onto Hacker News when the opportunity presents itself under the thin excuse that "everything is political".
The joke's on them; it likely erodes support for their causes.
Submitter here. As per HN guidelines: "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".
This playing out across generations of the family that kept her, the woman 'rescued' but staying with them for the time being, the social context, income levels, how to keep a slave from leaving in today's ultra-connected world, the low $ damages mentioned, relation with other modern forms of slavery...
"Statistics suggest that Maria was undoubtedly poor and, most likely, Black."
That is a new way of reporting news, that journalist Gortázar seems to have invented here. When you don't know anything about the victim, just make something up from "statistics".
Where else can we apply this technique?
"Maria entered their lives around 1971 — the year Henry Kissinger visited China, John Lennon wrote Imagine, and Mexico hosted the first Women’s World Cup."
Good to know.
"The traditional maid’s room is gradually disappearing in Brazil, but buildings with separate social and service elevators — for domestic workers, visiting technicians, neighbors with dogs, or residents carrying groceries — remain commonplace."
Those are for separating workers carrying broken dusty floor tiles or ladders or a bunch of fiber cables from the other people using the building.
Anyway, ignoring the lacking quality of the journalism, more countries should do like Brazil and call slavery for what it is in legislation, instead of using euphemisms like "human trafficking".
Yup, my mom and her sisters were all sent off to work on family houses when they were about 10 - 12. They were born in the country side, and my grandpa didn't care for them at all.
I see a lot of comments claiming that slavery was abolished. It was not, we just made the transition to another form of slavery, one where most people think they are free. In reality, they work every day while most of their earnings are taken from them by force every month ('taxation'). The well known slave Frederik Douglas was one of the first examples of this. Douglas made a deal with his master to do whatever he liked as long as he gave his master a cut. The same dynamic is now implemented worldwide. Watch the movie Jones Plantation.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26964727/
Well, taxation is not “most of your earnings.” Not even remotely close. If we’re talking theft, maybe look at the companies reaping profits off your labor without sharing it.
I think your definition of slavery is highly insulting. Slavery is bad not because two people agree to have this profit sharing scheme as you seem to be implying.
Slavery is evil because one person is nearly fully and entirely controlling another person’s entire life, usually for the “owner’s” gain, without the other person’s consent.
Claiming (twice) that taxation takes most of your earnings is not the same as proving it. We didn't believe you the first time, and we don't believe you the second. Got any actual evidence?
I dunno about proving, but 20% income tax + 20% vat + property taxes + estate tax + the various extra taxed thing like gas etc, and you're easily over half.
She will re receive a compensation of 50.000 reais.
Which on every, with current exchange rate should be about 3 USD per week of work.
One can't get a better bargain for a slave!
169 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 80.7 ms ] threadWhat the fuck?
Why did the law need the family's "agreement"??
Why is nobody going to jail for imprisoning someone for 55 years??
It took me a year to convince her that it was not ok. They took away her passport, phone, she wasn't allowed to go out without them. I was ready to help her but she did not want my help.
In the end I'm sure she had to pay her "employer" for breach of contract since she left early. I think she had less than $1000 saved from these 18 months of work.
The thing that made me angry the most is that the family was incredibly well off, yet thought they deserve a slave (or more than one) at home.
From the article.
Certainly provides some perspective on why Brazil might let that woman stay with the family that enslaved her. But, Lola's case is unique because she was taken halfway around the world and was an undocumented immigrant for decades. It sounds like that's not the case for this woman in Brazil, but there's a lot we don't know.
Maybe public humiliation is better, release names and address.
It is a horrible arrangement, and she should be given a lot more than what she is getting (at the very least, she should be given backpay + pension equivalent to the market rate of her work for all these years), but to treat this case as some sadistic family keeping someone in captivity is overreacting.
Most people in Brazil are so used with the precautions that they have to take to deal with urban violence, they don't get to realize that they are the ones living in their own prisons. I have family members in Rio de Janeiro who get panic attacks at the thought of going anywhere by themselves. I've met grown women in college who wouldn't dare to do anything outside of the home <-> campus itinerary on their own.
The Ottoman Empire legally abolished slavery in the 1880s, but there was still illicit yet tolerated slavery in Turkey into the 1930s.
I think in some areas of the Sahel chattel slavery may still exist as a practical matter. Mauritania didn't legally abolish chattel slavery until 1981, for example, but as in other areas it can take decades for reality to match the law, given the laws were often changed under international pressure rather than reflecting any change to the domestic social order.
The fact that serfdom de-facto remained is one of the primary reasons Russia's industrialization lagged the rest of Europe for so long as factories didn't get the initial cheap labour. It was only finally fully picking up steam (pun not intended) when WW1 broke out.
Exactly. Bolsheviks just changed the name from "serfdom" to "collective farms". Mandatory membership where members were not allowed an ID that enabled them to move inside the country and therefore were bound to the farm. The practice continued until the late 1970s.
Slavery is abolished everywhere in the middle east ("except" Daesh/islamic state), and yet this keeps happening. Example after example after example:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/06/12/fifas-world-cup-ignores-...
https://www.freedomunited.org/news/repression-modern-slavery...
https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/HRBodies...
https://www.ohchr.org/en/stories/2014/12/domestic-servitude-...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpw5v077nyjo
https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/07/13/i-was-sold/abuse-and-e...
https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/22/united-arab-emirates-tra...
https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/08/24/how-can-we-work-withou...
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2017/11/libya-must-e...
Oh and the royal families keep getting caught in "even more embarrassing" incidents.
Here is Saudi Arabia having a royal murder a slave for perceived insults, then forcing UK governments to allow and forgive the murder (by taking nationals hostage then organizing a "prisoner swap")
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9674420/Saudi-...
Or Qatar:
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200619-qatar-prince-accu...
Or Iranian and Iraqi imams and mullahs selling children, girls, but apparently even including the occasional boy, into child prostitution, functioning as pimps and exploiters:
I have no idea why we in the west consider that normal and look the other way... What am I saying, I know, oil & VC money...
Some of them also bring their filipino, Nepali, or African slave maids in Europe and everybody looks the other way, they have too much money to be criticized...
They are so brazen about slavery they routinely sell their slaves on Instagram or Facebook ads, with copies such as "doesn't need much food","sleeps on the floor", "will work 20 hours a day"...
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50228549
The vast majority of slaves went to the New World, so that's where most of its effects were felt. Of the 12.5M people kidnapped from Africa, only ~9000 went to the Old World. It just wasn't as obvious of a problem in Europe itself.
An interesting side-effect of this is that a lot of European countries have two relevant dates: the first being the banning of slave trade, the second being the banning of slavery. For example, the UK prohibited any involvement in the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, but slavery in the UK itself was only abolished in 1833.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1523100.stm
Sort of. France and England abolished slavery within their own territories before the US states did, but it did not extend to their colonies until later. France banned slavery within its home territory back in the 1300s (Free Soil Principle), but continued with slavery through its "Code Noir" (Black Code) in its colonies, where slavery was not permanently abolished until 1848 (it was abolished at the time of the French Revolution but then reinstated by Napoleon). England abolished slavery at home in the mid 1700s but not in its colonies until 1834.
(Like the US North, England and France had very small populations of Africans/others, so it was relatively painless and easy to ban slavery there, while continuing to accept slavery "elsewhere". For the US North "elsewhere" was the South, for England and France it was their colonies. Same principle though.)
Along the same lines, slavery of Catholics was forbidden in Europe all the way back in the Middle Ages. So it was acknowledged to be something bad, that Christians should not do to each other. But slavery of "infidels", heathen/pagan/Muslims/etc., was OK - and not only okay but sanctioned by Romanus Pontifex in the 1400s granting Portugal the authority to enslave "pagans" (basically all non-Europeans) along the coast of Africa. (Incidentally, as some Africans converted to Christianity, this posed a problem (they were no longer pagan and couldn't be enslaved), and so eventually it shifted to being about race and skin color rather than religion.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saqaliba
The 13th amendment removed the legal concept of slavery (except for convicts) but it was still not a crime to do slavery. Slavery changed shape many times over the years since the civil war (usually involving convicting black people under sham crimes and then selling them as debt slaves or forcing them to sign contracts that rendered them slaves under threat of being convicted for said sham crimes) and can only reasonably be said to have actually ended in the US after Pearl Harbour when concerns that it would be used as enemy propaganda caused the Justice Department to properly prosecute slave owners (see Circular 3591[1]).
The last chattel slave in the US was Alfred Irving[2] and he was released in late 1942. He was kept in chains and was permanently disfigured due to abuse from his owners.
[3] is a very comprehensive video essay about the topic.
[1]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Circular_No._3591 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Irving_(former_slave) [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA
Slavery is "illegal".
I'm convinced that the absolute modernity is only a sideshow attraction for the ultra-wealthy to visit Dubai. The real show is the servants.
Whatever we might now think with hindsight of the communist revolution in Russia, if ever there was a country primed for the peasants to rise up against the ruling class, it was Russia.
Russia might have been a land of art, music, dance and literature, but you were pretty fucked if you weren't in the 20%.
China then interfered because they didn't want a US aligned country at their border.
However there have been decades since the affair settled - and I stand by my opinion that if the US and by extension NATO cares whatsoever, they'd have just told China "we won't interfere as long as you free NK citizens into free people".
It would've not been perfect at all, but at least the horrendous reality they are in would've been prevented.
It is still legal in the case of prisoners: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
there is zero financial motivation for the state for prevention or rehab or any other activities to reduce imprisonment rates
did I mention disenfranchisement of the imprisoned?
That seems…unlikely.
i.e. its not a good motivation to increase the number of prisoners (even if one looses less money per prisoner, more prisoners will mean more loss), but it does motivate investigating ways on how one can minimize the loss on individual prisoners.
The explosion of incarceration and the private prisons resulting from that largely come from "the war on drugs". The book The New Jim Crow is pretty good if you're interested in the topic.
For state employees (i.e. representatives, judges, etc.)? Some get kickbacks.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
See: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dhs-contractors-told-wh...
Alas, the "kids for cash" scandal was such a big news event that it dominates the results for any search you'd do on the subject of private prison corruption, but it's hardly the only example.
The interests of the criminal justice system on the other hand is heavily financially benefited from the current state of affairs. More incarcerations means more judges, more lawyers, more job security.
Moves to correct this are labeled as “soft of crime” and surely my opponent Congresswoman Y isn’t pro crime?
"What's the financial motivation for the state" is way too blinkered and makes at least 2 different false assumptions. There are other motivations besides financial, and it doesn't have to be the state's own motivation for the state to end up doing something.
Countless government policies and programs exist which give no legitimate benefit to the state or the people, no legitimate motivation, financial or otherwise, yet they exist anyway because they do benefit and motivate someone, financially or otherwise, who has some mechanism of influence to cause it to happen.
This is almost like asking "Why would anyone do something bad?" Gosh golly why indeed? 517,000 reasons and 124 new ones every day.
and the state as all citizens, including those affected by gang and drug related violence also would benefit from dong things differently.
it's those who benefit off the current prison labor system who lobby to keep it running, and they make it seem "natural" and "without alternatives"...
and "the state" (as the tax collecting entity) pays for the prisons and the inmates while the labor "providing" companies benefit off the labor.
it's a very very clever system.
enslavement without being called such.
and I agree, no, "the state" (as the totality of citizens) doesn't benefit.
only "the state" as the entity that's controlled by lobbyists and _pretends_ being by the people, for the people, that has no motivation to change this.
"Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy"
It's also trivially easy to not end up in involuntary servitude.
Stupid people always say nonsense like this as if no person in prison is innocent.
If you happen to be the one dying for no reason would you consider that just a trivial unfortunate edge case?
Educate yourself:
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/policy/innocence
Every day I am happy many here are techies and not politicians.
Look, you're not entirely wrong. But you're not entirely right, either.
In some states, the prisons are privately run and the prison labour is part of the profit motive. They have no incentive to rehabilitate and the states with these "programs" have some of the highest recidivism rates in the USA.
That also ignores the fact that some people are born into situations that make it far harder to live a "legit" life than others, and I'm not even talking about historical racism as part of that equation (which certainly does contribute).
I'm also NOT saying that prisoners shouldn't be made to work, but it should be outside of a system designed to exploit them.
Prisoners aren't 'slaves'. They are being punished for crimes they committed. Very dofferent than being born into it and bought/sold to the highest bidder.
The punishment is being locked up in a cell. Being forced to work on top of that is the slavery.
Why is it not part of the punishment?
I think it is dependent upon interpretation. Otherwise arresting and locking up can be interpreted as kidnapping and so on.
I do agree that they should be fairly compensated though.
Indeed it is part of the punishment. As an earlier comment in this thread points out from the 13th amendment:
> "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime" (emphasis added by me)
They're not. That's why it's slavery. And slavery of prisoners is permitted by the Constitution, which is the main point here.
AMENDMENT XIII
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
And yes indeed you are correct that the sate does commit theft and declare it legal for itself.
Prisoners that are made to perform any useful work that anyone else benefits from are slaves, not merely prisoners.
If you want to invoke the word "logic" you should actually employ it.
I will say it was common up to the end of 70s and somewhat into the 80s. Common here I don't mean that every single person would have a "slave child" at home but you'd know someone or someone that knew someone who did it.
I am not saying it justify this horrible behaviour, but mostly as to say how much worse it could get. Some would just be "Cinderella" style abuse, but other would be physically and sexually abused.
Some reform of policies around de 90s cleared much of the evil practice.
I think by today standards, 99% of people knowing this would have denounced this much earlier. The fact it did not happen in this case is because this family is related to a powerful politician of the region.
Compensation they offer is too little and too disrespectful. It is basically 3 USD a week for the past half decade of forced work relationship. First, it would need to be at least 100x more than that and it would need to put this rubbish in form of people into jail for the rest of their lives.
Wasn't there some mild scandal a decade or so ago where wealthy white American families would adopt kids from Africa or Mexico, only to force them to do housework the whole time?
Well, it's classed as child abuse and the perpetrators ("parents") were punished harshly. So pretty bad, but not remotely the same thing as what happens in the middle east or north Africa.
This lady is in her 60s, does she even know any other way to even live? Life with that family may be better than whatever Brazil's equivalent of welfare shelters are.
Seems like that may have been why the case workers left her with that family for now.
For the owner or the servant?
The downside is that they get no benefits.
Live in housekeepers are very common indeed in Singapore. However, majority of Singapore lives in Housing Development Board flats that do not have any separate entrance into kitchen.
However, they were paid (I have no idea whether it was a good wage, or not), and had pretty decent quarters (in Morocco). My parents were pretty kind, fairly liberal, people. I would be quite surprised (and shocked) if they took advantage of the servants. I know that my mother made damn sure that I had respect for poor folks.
Those servants will be richer in a few decades but will still be in that situation.
Practically-speaking, inequality is insidious because it enables violations of rights and unjust denial of opportunity even when poverty has been eradicated. Cold comfort, to the middle-class family of people mowed down by a rich motorist who faces negligible jail time because the money they can spend on a lawyer is outside the scope of what the legal system is built to handle.
Inequality has no moral characteristics. It is not "insidious." The fact that disparate effort and disparate circumstance lead to disparate outcomes is just that; a simple cold fact.
That some people use their power or wealth to take advantage of others is a moral issue. But again, this is orthogonal to disparity of outcome. Or do you claim poor people never steal from other poor people, or that rich people never steal from other rich people?
Envy is not the basis of poverty, need is.
Your post is proof of the insidiousness of inequality. It allows for outcomes to be warped by the presence or lack of aggregated capital, without presenting a direct attack on outcomes. As long as you are able to limit the contextual scope, you are able to claim a "just world", even when clear injustice is extant.
It is then important to insist that the scope stay broad enough to involve all related implications.
"Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely." This suggests that there is a functional relationship between the size of power imbalances and the amount of corruption that exists. It is not that some people use their power or wealth to take advantage of others; it is that inordinate power and wealth ensures that abuses will occur.
That is not in evidence. You may be thinking of inflationary pressures causing the poverty income level to be adjusted upward. This is not a result of income inequality. It is a result of supply and demand.
> "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely."
That is an aphorism, not a universal truth, and holds zero moral weight. You may be judged as corrupt by what you do, not by what you have.
> ...inordinate power and wealth ensures that abuses will occur.
No. This is envy as evidence. It doesn't work that way. Your use of the word "inordinate" is also meaningless from an economic or policy stance. Who decides what is inordinate? What qualifies a level as inordinate?
There is only one equilibrium state with full equality: vacuum. In an economic sense this is where zero exchange of value occurs. It is system-death.
In a just world, you keep what you earn. You reap what you sow. When someone powerful steps out of line you punish them. If they do not, there is no reason to punish them. Pre-punishment because "they probably will" is propaganda from the dictator. We don't want that.
There's is poor people who exploit other poor people. Poor people that sends children to work for example. Only the rich can exploit? You are not using the definition of exploitation from the dictionaries. A stronger or armed person has a power differential with a weaker person.
So, exploitation doesn't seem to be related exclusively to wealth inequality. It's a moral thing, not a matter of wealth differences.
A simple narrative of "us-good VS them-bad" is short sighted.
Another big factor is the victim simply not knowing any better. Not being able to read might have helped with that (and I'd guess she probably wasn't allowed a phone, to keep her isolated from outside).
Point is there's a lot of space between "whips & chains" and "paying below minimum wage". Unfortunately some people are really good at exploiting that space.
Education and a society's culture are certainly important too.
> Education and a society's culture are certainly important too.
Agreed.
That's a good example. Curtailing voter rights is another. And then there's money -> influence on media.
Unlike when you use an app, for the most part, because we're not psychopaths, living with someone every day for months or years causes us to feel a great affinity and care towards them.
I live in a developing country. Some people treat their live-in staff badly. But for many others, this is not the case.
Imagine you are a high-earner and hard worker and so you and your wife get a live-in nanny to assist with childrearing duties. Often, two or three decades later, the live-in nanny is ready to retire, but your children (whom you love) have come to see her as a member of the family, or even as a second mother. Surely you also do. How can you live with someone for 20-30 years and not care about them? You might thus often take care of her for the rest of her life, even though she has her own savings.
(No, I do not have live-in house staff. But I've had the same maid for 7 years and she knows she can come to me if she needs anything.)
How one treats someone else is probably mostly just a reflection of the individual. But it's harder to disregard someone's humanity when they live in your house and you've know them for years.
I've yet to uncover a case of literal slavery like TFA though. One could argue the workers aren't getting paid enough and I'd agree, but the workers are getting paid.
It was very, very common before that tho. We shouldn't forget so to not repeat.
Here’s the thing: you can’t keep someone isolated for 55 years, working them without pay—regardless of whether the victim thinks that they want it or not.
they also give good indication on how to handle topics that don't tickle your personal preferences (for "interesting" or "curious"): silently ignore them
especially if interest is the guidance on downvoting and flagging. the sorting is not according to your personal preferences, as in "social media", but according to the hn hive think. thus negative voting indicates "anti-curious", "anti-conversation", not dislike.
The joke's on them; it likely erodes support for their causes.
This playing out across generations of the family that kept her, the woman 'rescued' but staying with them for the time being, the social context, income levels, how to keep a slave from leaving in today's ultra-connected world, the low $ damages mentioned, relation with other modern forms of slavery...
Plenty to go on there. Btw welcome to HN!
That is a new way of reporting news, that journalist Gortázar seems to have invented here. When you don't know anything about the victim, just make something up from "statistics".
Where else can we apply this technique?
"Maria entered their lives around 1971 — the year Henry Kissinger visited China, John Lennon wrote Imagine, and Mexico hosted the first Women’s World Cup."
Good to know.
"The traditional maid’s room is gradually disappearing in Brazil, but buildings with separate social and service elevators — for domestic workers, visiting technicians, neighbors with dogs, or residents carrying groceries — remain commonplace."
Those are for separating workers carrying broken dusty floor tiles or ladders or a bunch of fiber cables from the other people using the building.
Anyway, ignoring the lacking quality of the journalism, more countries should do like Brazil and call slavery for what it is in legislation, instead of using euphemisms like "human trafficking".
I think your definition of slavery is highly insulting. Slavery is bad not because two people agree to have this profit sharing scheme as you seem to be implying.
Slavery is evil because one person is nearly fully and entirely controlling another person’s entire life, usually for the “owner’s” gain, without the other person’s consent.