Trevor first migrated to Abeokuta when he was 11 or 12. He did so because he was poor and because he and his family had seen others from their community migrate and return with riches. He worked for five years in Abeokuta and returned with a bike, a radio, and 25,000 FCFA ($45) –not an insignificant haul for a 16-year-old in the 1980s. At 16, after a brief period at home, he returned to Abeokuta for a further six years, becoming a boss and also engaging in the production of sodabi, the region’s palm wine.
During his time as a boss, Trevor returned to Benin every two years and routinely brought more boys with him back to Nigeria. Parents and boys themselves would approach him on his visits to ask if he could find them work and take them with him. Sometimes he found this a real burden, because finding work for everyone meant a lot of time and effort for him. But to refuse would have been seen very badly indeed: as if he wished to keep the wealth he had made and not open the same opportunity for others.
When boys were young (between 10 and 14), an advance on their wages would be paid to the parents, who would negotiate the contract on the child’s behalf. In these cases, a boy’s earnings would be considered like any other component of the family economy. By contrast, when the boys were older (in their mid-to late teens), they would themselves often negotiate their own two-year contracts, and would keep their wages upon its completion. This is absolutely in keeping with local developmental norms, which see teenage males progressively incorporated into adulthood and independence.
Trevor was adamant that his relationships with all his workers were good, and he genuinely saw what he was doing as helping them and their families. During of one of our talks, he repeatedly shouted, “Aider! Aider! Aider!”, the French work for ‘help’, to emphasise the solidarity function of his activities. On another, he introduced me to some of the men who sat around his shop, all of whom had become his friends after having themselves ‘graduated’ from under him in Abeokuta.
In 2003, Trevor left Abeokuta and Nigeria, returning to Benin to start his business. He maintained personal links with the quarry economy, however, and was one of the most ardent critics of the dominant anti-trafficking discourse. In one of our last discussions, he picked up a piece of cellotape and exclaimed: “If I earn one of these here but five of them over there, then why the hell would I stay here?”
Case Study 40.4 Arfa
Arfa is an Ivorian national in his late 40s. He comes from a ‘political family’ in Abidjan, and has been in Italy for 20 years. He is here legally and is one of the elders of the Ghetto community. He is a major labour-broker, and also owns one of the most vibrant, sport-watching bars in the Ghetto, with his Polish wife and their daughter. We met and bonded over football; and over the weeks we talked again and again.
A major theme in all of our discussions is the dominant trafficking discourse around caporali. For all its material lack, the Ghetto is a hyper-connected place. And Arfa, along with all the other established Ghetto figures, knows about this discourse. They read it online and see political, civil society, and union figures pronouncing it on TV. It enrages them – and the union representative who is most vocal in peddling it is now consequently a persona non grata. “These guys mobilise stereotypes and scapegoats because it suits their purposes”, Arfa complains. “It attracts attention for their campaigns, and it attracts funding for them”.
In Arfa’s understanding, the caporale should be understood more as a ‘guide’ and as a ‘facilitator’. His role is one of mediation and organisation. He has his contacts and he brings people to work. He is someone who has a car, is legal, and speaks Italian. He goes around and asks farmers for work, then he plans the schedule and brings workers to do the job. He may earn a bit extra for his services and some more for transport. But he never siphons off people’s money. The people he puts to work are mostly people he knows and trusts. But of course, he underlines, the caporale is human – a human like anybody else – and when a young man comes crying desperate for work, he will be helped. “No-one will go hungry here”, I am told.
As if to emphasise this point, he tells me a story that elicits nods of pride from around the table. Last month a very well-dressed young man drove up to the Ghetto looking for Arfa. He was Malian, and he had become very successful over the past few years in Paris. He had come to Arfa to show his gratitude. Because eight years ago, when this young man had first arrived in Italy and knew no-one, he came to the Ghetto hungry, desperate, and lonely. Arfa found him in tears and shared his food with him. He then found the boy work. “I never forgot that kindness”, the boy is said to have said on his return.
I ask Arfa, before I say goodbye on our last meeting: “What would really help people here?” The answers are simple: “Give everyone papers, give them work, and leave them alone”.
The untold political economic back-story
The story told so far takes place at two small, local levels. The writer has argued for an acknowledgement of complexity, and an appreciation that personal economic (as well as socio-cultural) goals are served by, and through, the economies that turn around the mediation of so-called ‘trafficker’ coyotes or caporali. But now it is time to widen the lens. Since it is not only the micro, socio-economic details of life at the margins that are flattened and hidden by the dominant discourse of criminality; it is also the structural, political economic backdrop that shapes the terrain on which these relatively tiny details play out. The major point here is therefore this: when we invoke ‘folk devil’ figures such as the coyote or the caporale, when we present them as inhuman ‘baddies’ responsible for all exploitation and injustice, we not only misrepresent the complexity of people’s lived realities, we also naturalise, hide, and ultimately perpetuate the structural injustices and inequities that sustain these realities. The folk devil narrative is thus de-politicisation at its worst; and those who spread it do a disservice to the people they think they are helping when they do so. Although it is not possible here to enter into a full-blown critique of the political economy of neoliberal capitalism, it is possible to present two clear vignette examples of the political economic injustices and inequalities shaping contexts like those of Abeokuta and Foggia. The first concerns the political economy of world cotton prices; the second that of global retail and the tomato supply chain.
Benin and cotton
Until recently, cotton was by far Benin’s most important cash crop. In 2005, it accounted for around 5% of GDP, and almost 40% of the country’s export receipts.14 Countless small-scale farmers depended exclusively on it for their access to cash. Yet in 2003, Benin was forced to take a case to the World Trade Organization (WTO), citing strong evidence that illegal US subsidies were depressing world prices, damaging national receipts, and imperilling household economies. A huge international trade justice campaign was launched and much research was conducted. OXFAM, for example, concluded that US subsidies lowered international prices and led to a 1–2% loss of gross domestic product.15 In the Zou region of Benin, “a 40% reduction in cotton prices result[ed] in a 15% decrease in per capita income and a 17 percentage point increase in the incidence of poverty”.16 Causality was therefore clearly established; as, indeed, it had been in a parallel case brought by Brazil. But US diplomatic pressure ensured that the US escaped WTO censure, that subsidies were maintained, and that cotton prices remained weak for many years.17
What relationship does this have to the labour mobility linking Benin’s Zou region to the quarries of Abeokuta, in Nigeria? It is quite simple: the overwhelming majority of Abeokuta’s adolescent quarry workers come from Benin’s Zou region, many of them come from cotton-producing families, and many of them engaged in labour mobility to Abeokuta because the crash in cotton prices denied them and their families the only other option they knew of for making money. In 2010 and 2012, the writer interviewed dozens of cotton farmers, and asked all the quarry workers about the role that cotton played in their household economies. All were emphatic: “when cotton works, things are good, people can build house
s, kids can go to school, life is great”. Cotton farmers explained that the collapse in prices led to a huge reduction in household income, an increase in family members entering the wage market, and many more migrating to Nigeria or elsewhere. One man put it bluntly: “Youngsters wouldn’t move at all if prices were still high. They’d all be in school”.
Italian tomatoes and the power of retail
In the dominant discourse around labour exploitation in Italian agricultural production, it is the caporale who is blamed for the worker’s ills. Yet the caporale’s relative power in this economic field is close to zero. The rules of the game are fundamentally set by the global retailers. Collectively, these retailers take €0.83 out of every €1 made from the sale of tomato-based supermarket products to Western consumers. They are so powerful, and their supply chains so integrated, that they set the price for those below them and determine the distribution of value capture across the value chain.18 This means that, of the €0.17 remaining from every €1 sale, Italian industrial transformers take around €0.10, while the farmer, the caporale, and the migrant worker are left to fight over €0.07 between them. Farmers, as many complained to the writer during the research, are barely able to make ends meet. As prices have been driven ever lower over recent years, more and more are going out of business, while the wage share available to tomato pickers and their gang-leaders has declined accordingly by 100% –from €7 per cassone in 2008, to €3.50 now. In the words of one major tomato producer, “The price we have now in 2011 [for tomatoes] is the same as 30 years ago, but the [production] costs have risen”, meaning that the only room for manoeuvre pertains to labour costs.19 In such a context, illegal and underpaid labour is a structural necessity. Without a labour force like the one comprised of seasonal migrant Africans, tomato production would simply no longer be feasible.
Conclusion
The dominant anti-trafficking discourse is one of criminality. It constructs ‘the problem’ as one of one-dimensional ‘baddies’ using their brutality to extract surplus from their workers. Yet this is patently absurd. In the two very different contexts examined in Abeokuta and Foggia, a much more nuanced picture emerges. This picture shows that workers seek out their work, even where it may be exploitative and is certainly not well-remunerated. They do so for a variety of reasons, but central to these is the fact that it offers them the chance to make the money, which, as poor people in marginalised places, they both need and have trouble accessing. The fact that they are paid little for the hard work that they do may not be pleasant for us to learn. But it cannot be explained away by demonising the socio-cultural and economic mediation performed by the putative ‘trafficker’ who puts them to work.
The dominant discourse thus misrepresents the lives of these workers at the margins, and it disrespects them in the process. It strips them of their agency and flattens their complex lived realities. Furthermore, it criminalises the brokerage that is essential to the economic activity on which they depend. Worse still, however, is this: in spreading what is effectively a reassuring morality tale, the dominant discourse of criminality de-politicises the structural relations that engender exploitative work and mobility in the first place. It thus diverts attention away from the real power-holders in the story – from those who really should be targeted with critique. The ‘folk devil figure’ therefore serves a purpose, but its purpose is a nefarious one: to naturalise the injustices and inequities of the wider political economy.
Notes
1 Weitzer, R., “The Social Construction of Sex Trafficking: Ideology and Institutionalization of a Moral Crusade” (2007) 5 Politics & Society 447, at p. 454.
2 See www.oijj.org/en/news/general-news/benins-child-slaves-working-nigerias-quarries.
3 For a more extended discussion of this dominant discourse see the following articles: Howard, N.P., “Is ‘Child Placement’ Trafficking? Questioning the Validity of an Accepted Discourse” (2011) 27(6) Anthropology Today 3–8; Howard, N.P., “An Overview of Anti-Child Trafficking Discourse and Policy in Southern Benin” (2012) 20(2) Childhood; Howard, N., “Teenage Labor Migration and Antitrafficking Policy in West Africa” (2014) 653(1) The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 124–140; and Howard, N.P. and Morganti, S., “(Not!) Child Trafficking in Benin”, in Dragiewicz, M. (ed.), Global Human Trafficking: New Research in Context (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 91–104; Howard, N., “Protecting Children or Pandering to Politics? A Critical Analysis of Anti-Child Trafficking Discourse, Policy and Practice”, in Donà, G. and Veale, A. (eds), Child and Youth Migration: Mobility-in-Migration in an Era of Globalization (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), pp. 213–233. Note that, although the example excerpted here is journalistic, the discourse is not restricted to the media; far from it. As is also the case with the example below pertaining to caporali, these discourses spread across the media and political and civil society.
4 www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/1033179/scandal_of_the_tomato_slaves_harvesting_crop_exported_to_uk.html.
5 See full article at: www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/1033179/scandal_of_the_tomato_slaves_harvesting_crop_exported_to_uk.html.
6 Given its importance, much of this ‘sociological slice’ has also appeared elsewhere, including in Howard (2014: 129–31) see (n.3).
7 In contrast to the narrative presented by the France 24 piece, almost all of the workers in the quarries are male.
8 Note that all names are changed in this chapter to protect the identity of the research participants.
9 Okyere, S., “Re-Examining the Education-Child Labour Nexus: The Case of Child Miners at Kenyasi, Ghana” (2013) 6(1) Childhoods Today, at pp. 10–11, www.childhoodstoday.org/download.php?id=69.
10 See, for example: Morganti, S., “La mobilità dei minori in Benin. Migrazione o tratta?”, in Bellagamba, A. (ed.), Migrazioni Dal lato dell’ Africa (Padova: Edizioni Altravista, 2011), pp. 127–156, at p. 135; and Huijsmans, R. and Baker, S., “Child Trafficking: ‘Worst Form’ of Child Labor, or Worst Approach to Young Migrants?” (2012) 43 Development & Change 919–946, at p. 930.
11 Good cases include: Dines, N. and Rigo, E., “Oltre la clandestinità: lo sfruttamento umanitario del lavoro nelle campagne del mezzogiorno” (2014) Conessione Precarie; Perrotta, D., “Vecchi e nuovi mediatori. Storia, geografia ed etnografia del caporalato in agricoltura” (2014) 79 Meridiana, Paternalismo, at pp. 193–220; Perrotta, D., “Agricultural Day Laborers in Southern Italy: Forms of Mobility and Resistance” (January 2015) 114(1) South Atlantic Quarterly 195–203.
12 See, for instance, the stories in Hashim, I. and Thorsen, D., Child Migration in Africa (London: Zed Books, 2011).
13 It is important to underline, however, that this is not a fairy tale of ideally functioning and willing solidarity. Migrants face enormous social pressure, both to present themselves as a success and to send money home even if they have failed to become one. None of the migrants in the Ghetto would ever admit to their families in Africa that they live in such difficult conditions. And all fear the day when they cannot send money home, as their loved ones at home will not understand and will assume that they are lying when they say that they have nothing.
14 OECD Sahel and West Africa Club Secretariat, Economic and Social Importance of Cotton Production and Trade in West Africa: Role of Cotton in Regional Development, Trade and Livelihoods (Paris: OECD, 2005), at p. 20.
15 OXFAM, Cultivating Poverty: The Impact of US Cotton Subsidies on Africa (Oxfam Briefing Paper, Oxford: OXFAM, 2003), at p. 20.
16 Minot, N. and Daniels, L., “Impact of Global Cotton Markets on Rural Poverty in Benin” (2005) 33(Supplement) Agricultural Economics 453–466, at p. 460.
17 A full account of this is given in Eagleton-Pierce, M., Symbolic Power in the World Trade Organisation (Oxford: OUP, 2013).
18 As is ably demonstrated in the following: Clapp, J., Food (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012); Kaplinsky, R., Globalization, Poverty, and Inequality: Between a Rock and a Hard
Place (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005); Lichtenstein, N., The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (New York: Picador, 2010); Ryan, O., Chocolate Nations: Living and Dying for Cocoa in West Africa (London: Zed Books, 2011).
19 See: www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/1033179/scandal_of_the_tomato_slaves_harvesting_crop_exported_to_uk.html.
41
Trafficking in human beings and the informal economy
Kiril Sharapov
This chapter explores the intersection between trafficking in human beings (THB), labour exploitation, and the informal economy. It highlights how the active process of bracketing human trafficking as an issue of individualised crime, separates it from the realm of broader exploitative relations of labour within the context of informal economy, and allows policy-makers to approach THB as a deviation from an otherwise ‘normal’ pattern of economic and social development.
Informal economy: definitions and features
According to a 2009 estimate by the International Labour Office and the World Trade Organization, about 60 percent of all employees, globally, are not formally employed.1 The 2015 Report on Global Employment Trends for Youth, published by the International Labour Organization (ILO), suggests that an estimated 73.3 million young people were unemployed globally in 2014, with nine in ten young workers in most low-income countries remaining in informal employment.2 The scale of both global unemployment and informal employment is expected to increase further, based on recent assessments of the link between the global economic downturn, on the one hand, and the growing number of workers in non-standard employment and of the working poor, on the other.3
Routledge Handbook of Human Trafficking Page 103
