Laborers, Indentured Servants, Run-aways, Modern-Day Slaves, Abused Workers Are All Too Common in Era of Globalization
I will never forget the Emirati student who revealed to the class matter-of-factly that her mother’s car hit and killed an Indian laborer as he was crossing the street. “He ran out in front of the car on purpose,” my student said, without emotion, “because he wanted his family to get the blood money.”
Indeed, blood money, which courts in the UAE order to be paid when someone is deemed responsible for another person’s death or dismemberment, might be $25,000 or $50,000, enough to set a loved one up for a comfortable life in rural India or another South Asian country. To suggest an Indian laborer killed himself on purpose so his family could receive largesse was my student’s way of dehumanizing or “othering” him.
Occasionally Emirati students expressed or wrote of their empathy for the plight and sacrifice of laborers. A few students organized charity drives to provide laborers with water and snacks while working in the hot sun. Their empathy was comparable to the paternalistic empathy white plantation owners had for their slaves in the antebellum South of the US.
In other words, Gulf State Arabs are mostly as morally blind as my Confederate ancestors and racist relatives in the Old South.
And yet extreme worker exploitation and even slavery certainly exist in the US: An estimated 17,000 foreign nationals and 400,000 Americans are victims of human trafficking, 80 percent of them women and children. (Source.)
Laborers from South Asia living in the Gulf States do send billions of dollars in remittances home each year, significantly raising the standard of living of
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