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Ten years on, have we moved Beyond Trafficking and Slavery? [1]
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Date: 2025-05
Anti-trafficking killjoys – at least the ones working in the labour space – live in a different political universe to the establishment. They’ve never believed that corporations care about decent work in their supply chains. They instead start with the premise that deregulation, outsourcing, and subcontracting are designed to ensure that workers are vulnerable, exploited, and unable to organise. Labour abuses must be regarded as intended effects, rather than isolated events, and the only way to end them is to fundamentally change the economic system.
Such drastically different starting points make it hard for the two halves to talk to each other. Openness to self-reflection during those conversations is even more difficult.
Anti-trafficking killjoys are constantly frustrated with the anti-trafficking establishment. They have effectively spent years of their lives trying to convince practitioners and policymakers to transform into Marxist radicals, only to get increasingly upset when they stubbornly prefer to work within the system as it stands, rather than trying to smash it into bits.
The latter, meanwhile, tends to experience this harping from the corner as unkind, unhelpful and unrealistic. They take a look at their resources and programmes, and wonder when the critics will notice that they’re the only ones getting things done.
Shooting for the stars doesn’t always mean landing on a cloud. All too often, it means landing on nothing at all.
Killjoy confessions
Blaming the anti-trafficking establishment for any and all problems has become an un-reflexive ritual. Indulging this, however, ignores two inconvenient facts: 1) the anti-trafficking field is not one thing, but many different things, and 2) the field is constantly evolving in ways that mean that past critiques may not align with present circumstances.
The establishment undoubtedly deserves criticism, but it is a mistake to reduce the anti-trafficking field to a black and white universe where the establishment is always assumed to be on the wrong side of things.
No one has all the answers, and being an anti-trafficking killjoy can lend itself to being hypercritical of others without applying similar kinds of scrutiny to oneself. Identifying as critical tends to happen in opposition to ‘the mainstream’, which is assumed to be uncritical and lacking wisdom and understanding (otherwise they’d be critical).
This too easily becomes an exercise in self-flattery, rather than a considered argument. Critics have to be open to the proposition that intelligent, knowledgeable people have engaged with the critiques, understood the positions, but nonetheless decided that there are good reasons not to follow the advice. They also have to be open to the idea that there are establishment actors who have valuable knowledge as well, and from which they could benefit.
Finally, they must recognise that being a killjoy is not an all or nothing proposition. While many critics focus their identity and energies on contesting anti-trafficking from the outside, there are plenty of actors inside anti-trafficking spaces who are also advocating for better policy and practice. These insider killjoys are outspoken about potential harms at office meetings and conferences. But rather than quitting in protest, they hold onto the value they see in their work and show up the next day to do it all again.
With these imperatives in mind, we have a few confessions to make. Many of these we were confronted with while in dialogue with the contributors to this series. This doesn’t mean we are backing down on everything, but we want to show that killjoys also have to learn and adapt to avoid becoming stale and repetitive.
Roses, by any other name, still prick
Language is important, but terminological debates don’t solve real-world problems. For many years now we have been trying our best to move away from ‘modern slavery’ and trafficking as political and legal starting points. We stand by our arguments for why the term is counterproductive, but we have to confess to having overestimated the practical stakes of the debate. It has become clear to us that phasing it out would probably have a modest – at best – impact.
Too many advocates and critics incorrectly assume that finding the right terminology – modern slavery, human trafficking, forced labour, labour exploitation, etc. – unlocks the power to completely transform the rules of engagement. It doesn’t. We need to stop pretending that these discussions are more influential than they really are, and focus on what’s most important: actually addressing exploitation.
No field is a monolith
Anti-trafficking is not one thing. This irritates us as editors, as collapsing a complex set of actors and actions into a single, convenient punching bag makes for cleaner prose. But it can also mean that your readers tune out your arguments because you indiscriminately condemn their entire field.
A wide variety of work gets done within the broad rubric of anti-trafficking. A lot of equally relevant work gets done outside of it. Killjoys too often focus on the worst examples – the low hanging fruit – to support their denunciations of anti-trafficking as a whole.
They also overly generalise who is involved in this work. We did this a bit ourselves earlier on, when we talked about ‘the anti-trafficking establishment’. Such a framing suggests that all actors within this space come from the same place and use the same political lens. They don’t.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/ten-years-on-have-we-moved-beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/
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