USA Africa Dialogue Series - Could an iPhone app help in the fight against slave labour?

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go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2010/dec/03/iphone-slavery-app

Could an iPhone app help in the fight against slave labour?

One-legged potter, Josiah Wedgwood, fought slavery in the 1800s by
creating medallions crafted with a revolutionary logo. Today, app
developers are doing the same thing

Claire Provost
Friday December 3 2010
guardian.co.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2010/dec/03/iphone-slavery-app

As America braces for the 150th anniversary of the civil war, the
California-based Not for Sale Campaign [http://
www.notforsalecampaign.org/about/slavery" title="Not for Sale
Campaign] claims "there are more than 30 million slaves in the world
today ? more than at the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade."

Yesterday, while the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery
[http://www.un.org/en/events/slaveryabolitionday" title="International
Day for the Abolition of Slavery] passed with little official fanfare,
anti-slavery activists are busy tinkering with new media tools to
catch the public's attention, using iPhones and "open-source activism"
to try and reinvigorate the centuries-old humanitarian impulse to end
slavery.

This November, the Not for Sale Campaign and the International Labour
Rights Forum launched a new iPhone app, Free2Work [http://
free2work.org" title="Free2Work], to help consumers reduce their
"slavery footprint" by delivering product ratings as they shop.

The mobile phone application lets you browse and search for companies
and products ?from Lego to Levi's, and from food to footwear ? each of
which is awarded a grade from A to F.

An "A" grade is awarded to brands with sustainable and participatory
systems to prevent forced labour, and a commitment to improve their
industry as a whole. A "C" is the "standard" minimum passing grade,
while an "F" goes to brands which are most at risk of using forced
labour, as they do little or nothing to monitor their supply chain.

For those behind the Free2Work project, the hope is that the mobile
phone application will help consumers deal with the complicated webs
of supply-chains, outsourcing and subcontracting, and the plethora of
monitoring, certification, and labelling programs that make it
difficult for the average person to find an answer to the question:
"Is my product slave-free?"

"The complexities of the global slave trade and limited insight into
product supply chains make it difficult for the average consumer to
grasp how he or she is connected to forced and child labour occurring
within the global production cycle," says the Free2Work project.

The hope is that the mobile phone application will revolutionise how
consumers make informed purchases by providing information when they
need it most ? while they shop.

"When companies know consumers have a tool to check their human rights
and labour records at the point of purchase, they might just take
those issues a lot more seriously," said Amanda Kloer [http://
humantrafficking.change.org/blog/view/
free2work_smartphone_app_lets_shoppers_fight_slavery" title="Amanda
Kloer] an editor at Change.org [http://Change.org" title="Change.org],
on her blog there.

Kloer has high hopes for how new media can invigorate contemporary
anti-slavery campaigning, suggesting that Twitter can also be a useful
tool.

"In 2010, we have a powerful weapon in the fight against slavery.
Twitter. Yes, the 144-character social media tool might just do what
all the legislation and international conventions have failed to ?
finally end slavery," she blogged [http://humantrafficking.change.org/
blog/view/
how_abolitionists_are_ending_slavery_144_characters_at_a_time"
title="proclaims].

But while the Free2Work app could attract much of the same criticism
directed towards other campaigns for ethical consumerism, and while
the suggestion that Twitter can end slavery is wide open for ridicule
a la Malcolm Gladwell [http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/
2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all" title=" a la
Malcolm Gladwell], historians and campaigners have often made the case
that the British anti-slavery movement of the 18th and 19th
centuries ? which played no small part in the abolition of the slave
trade ? owed much of its success to its' activists innovative use of
"new media."

In a 2004 essay in radical journal, Mother Jones [http://
motherjones.com/politics/2004/01/against-all-odds" title="In a 2004
essay in Mother Jones], Adam Hochschild accredits many of the
achievements of the early British anti-slavery movement ? "the first
great human rights campaign" ? to its inventive communications
strategies.

In one example, Hochschild recounts the story of famous, one-legged
pottery entrepreneur, Josiah Wedgwood, who had hundreds of medallions
crafted featuring a bas-relief of a chained, kneeling slave, encircled
by the words: "Am I not a Man and a Brother?"

"The equivalent of the lapel buttons we wear for an electoral
campaign, this was probably the first widespread use of a logo
designed for a political cause. It was the 18th century's 'new
media,'" he writes.

Along with the medallions, Hochschild lists consumer boycotts,
petitions, political posters, newsletters, direct-mail fundraising
letters, political book tours, and national campaigns with local
committees among the countless innovative tactics pioneered by the
activists, and used ever since.

The Not for Sale Campaign say the major obstacle in the fight against
modern-day slavery is that the crime is largely hidden, and that
slavery is not part of the current collective consciousness. All too
often, the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade is interpreted as the
end of slavery.

And while alerts of the "re-emergence" of slavery and calls to "re-
abolish" it give campaigns and media reports a sense of much-needed
urgency, they run the risk of misreading history, which has seen
slavery disappear more from our public discourse than from our
economy.

The widespread use of forced, indentured, and slave labour in Europe's
African colonies, for example, is well-documented. And in his 2010
message [www.un.org/en/events/slaveryabolitionday" title="message] for
the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery, UN secretary
general Ban Ki Moon stresses that "the abolition of the trans-Atlantic
slave trade in the 19th century did not eradicate the practice
globally."

"Instead, it took on other forms, which persist to this day: serfdom,
debt-bondage and forced and bonded labour; trafficking in women and
children, domestic slavery and forced prostitution, including of
children; sexual slavery, forced marriage and the sale of wives; child
labour and child servitude, among others," he adds.

Indeed, a key challenge has been defining what constitutes slavery in
the 20th century and providing estimates of its scope.

It would, of course, be hard to imagine an iPhone app ending modern-
day slavery. But as Hochschild pointed out in his Mother Jones
article, the 18th and 19th-century sugar boycotts caught people's
imaginations by bringing to light the hidden ties of an otherwise
largely obscure globalised economy.

The moral outrage that followed produced the first mass human rights
campaign, and played a significant part in the end of the trans-
Atlantic slave trade. Could the Free2Work app - and future new media
innovations, still to come - do the same for us today?

What do you think?

guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2010

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