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by willmacdonald 1268 days ago
Slavery is definitely not abolished in the West. It is rife in the UK and Europe.
2 comments

It is certainly abolished.

There are of course Roma beggar-gangs who have travelled to Sweden and who practise some kind of forced labour system on their members, but this is not something officially permitted and to the degree that this is a phenomenon it is only possible because of the foreignness of these gangs the the difficulty of Swedish policemen to genuinely understand what is going on.

When we have access to experts we try to break these things up and to prosecute.

Furthermore, we are not in any way reliant on these groups, since they are, as I have mentioned, beggar-gangs. They do not offer any service, but beg for money outside supermarkets and on trains.

Slavery is abolished on paper, but there are more than enough well-known instances where we still have slavery or slavery-like conditions... Italy is estimated to have 50k people in agriculture, mostly in tomato picking, and a further 95k in prostitution and domestic labor [1] as a result of a lot of undocumented immigrants being exploited, Spain's agriculture modern slavery is smaller but still existent [2] and known for at least a decade [3], even Germany has massive issues [4] with estimates going up to 167k people [5].

We may not have overt slavery any more in the Western world, but covert slavery and human trafficking? Absolutely.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/20/tomatoes-italy...

[2] https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/26136/strawberry-picker...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/feb/07/spain-salad...

[4] https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/moderne-lohnsklaven-in-...

[5] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/schneller-schlau/mode...

For the purposes of discussions like this, abolish should be defined as: to repeal the statutes creating the institution of slavery.

It is a stepping stone toward greater legal rights, and not an all-or-nothing goal.