1. Consumerism and the Many Faces of Human Trafficking
A Franciscan Theology of Stuff
David B. Couturier, OFM. Cap..
Ph.D., D. Min. Lic. Psych.
Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia
Aston, PA
October 12, 2013

2. Kym Erikson – “Human Trafficking” ©
A child so unloved That she cannot cry no more Markings on her face That she didn’t have before She tried but couldn’t smile Happy she was not Her father often traded her Sometimes she was bought A child of human trafficking To men she didn’t know They used her and abused her and wouldn’t let her go Her heart was numb with pain She did what she was told Knowing if she didn’t It was food they would withhold

3. “Human Trafficking
A life so full of suffering and games adults would play She was just a prostitute Who daily had to pay A life she wish she could deny An escape to young to take A numbness throughout her body A world so full of hate A life that’s really dead inside Scars that will never heal A mind that cannot comprehend The trauma of this ordeal Then one day it happened She got raided by the police Taken some place safe Then finally released To go some place and heal Her battle wounds and scars Start herself a new life Underneath the stars © Kym Erickson. All rights reserved, 9 months ago

4. What is Human Trafficking?
The Act
The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of a human person.
The Means
Through the use of force, coercion, abduction, fraud, deception, abuse of power or vulnerability, or giving payments or benefits to a person who is in control of the victim.
The Purpose
For the purpose of exploitation… to include the prostitution of others, forced labor, slavery or similar practices

5. Human Slavery in 2013 Close to 30 million slaves in the world;
17,000 to 20,000 foreign nationals trafficked into the US each year;
200,000 “domestic slaves” living and working in the US.

6. Human trafficking
… is the second most profitable form of transnational crime in the world after the sale of drugs, more profitable than the sale of arms.

7. Human trafficking is big business
… it is a diversified network of corporate enterprises that exists in almost every trade imaginable and it uses some of our most cherished and respected industries to advance its most desperate forms of exploitation.

8. Human trafficking is one of the “dirty little secrets” of Philadelphia’s suburbs. (August 6, 2013)

9. The big business of human trafficking
At the end of 2010, it was estimated that the 4% of the world’s 30 million people who were used as trafficked sex slaves generated $38.7 billion dollars in profits for those managing the human slave industry.

10. The Consumer: The New Face of Human Trafficking
We think we know the face of human trafficking. Dr. Jefferson Calimlin, MD. Dr. Elnora Calimlin, MD. Milwaukee Wisconsin physicians.

11. The frightening connection between human trafficking and Halloween
Americans are expected to spend upwards of $8 billion dollars on Halloween:
2.87 billion on costumes;
1.65 billion on decorations;
$2.35 billion on candy, most of it chocolate and most of it made by

12. Where does chocolate come from?
80% of chocolate comes from the cocoa plants of Ghana and the Ivory Coast of Africa.
43% of chocolate comes
from here….

13. The Harkins-Engle Protocol
In 2001, the Chocolate Manufacturers Association agreed to prohibit child trafficking in the cocoa industry by the year How did they do?

14. The Dark Side of Chocolate

15. 12,000 child slaves since 2005

16. “Demand for ‘fair trade’ chocolate remained relatively small.”
Why so little progress?
“Consumer pressure has been insufficient to spark industry collaboration to address child labor in the cocoa supply chain.”
“Demand for ‘fair trade’ chocolate remained relatively small.”
Elliot J. Schrage and Anthony P. Ewing,
“The Cocoa Industry and Child Labour,” (Summer, 2005).

17. The New Faces of Human Trafficking

18. The Dark Side of Human Trafficking
Kevin Bales: each and every day before we ever get to work, we are “eating, wearing, walking and talking slavery.”
“Every one of us, every day, touches, wears and eats products tainted with slavery. Slavery-made goods and commodities are everywhere in our lives.”
-Kevin Bales, The Slave Next Door (2009).

19. -David B Couturier, OFM. Cap.
The Corporate Side
“ The truly dark side of human trafficking, that which gives currency and cover to these heinous individual acts, is the ongoing corporate expression of trafficking and exploitation through the supply chains that feed modern human slavery.”
-David B Couturier, OFM. Cap.

20. “ Unnoticed damage is, of course, not nonexistent damage.”
David Scwartz
“ Unnoticed damage is, of course, not nonexistent damage.”
- David T. Schwartz, Consuming Choices: Ethics in a Global Consumer Age (2010), p. 44

21. “Franciscans as Consumers”
“Even though Franciscans don’t often think of themselves as consumers and our vow of poverty often keeps us from identifying with the streams and currents of modern economic life, the fact is that we are indeed consumers who spend and spend considerably… the question we need to ask ourselves is “how do we begin to see ourselves as ‘ethical consumers.’”

22. Ethical Consumers
What happens when we turn off the music and inspect the long chains that supply our shirts and sneakers, our tee shirts and blouses and realize that our low prices, everyday, really come at a high price and that price is the slave labor of men, women and children?

23. No small or insignificant problem

24. No small or insignificant problem
Tazreen Fashions Factory in Bangladesh
Faded Glory

25. The NY Times – “fast and severely flawed”
“An extensive examination by the NY Times reveals how the inspection system intended to protect workers and ensure manufacturing quality is riddled with flaws. The inspections are often so superficial that they omit the most fundamental workplace safeguards like fire escapes. And even when inspectors are tough, factory managers find ways to trick them and hide serious violations, like child labor or locked exit doors. Dangerous conditions cited in the audits frequently take months to correct, often with little enforcement or follow-through to guarantee compliance.”
Stefanie Clifford and Steven Greenhouse, “Fast and Flawed Inspections of Factories Abroad,”
NY Times (9/2/13)

26. Vikas Bajaj, NY Times Follow-Up
“A central problem, the first owner told me, is the rapid turnaround big retailers like Walmart demand when they put in orders for tens of thousands of T-shirts or shorts. Since his factory isn’t able to make all the garments in time, he has to send some of the work to smaller producers. “I can’t do it officially,” he said, “but unofficially, I can.” Unauthorized subcontracting to smaller, uninspected factories is not supposed to happen, but it remains an entrenched practice. It is a primary reason safety guidelines that apply to bigger contractors have not prevented the hundreds of worker deaths in fires and building collapses in facilities like Rana Plaza, which crumbled last April killing 1,129 people. The factory owners admitted that what they were doing was wrong. But they said Western clothing companies were also culpable because they often award contracts to manufacturers that they know do not have enough machines and employees to do the job. “ NY Times, September 15, 2013.

27. Walmart owners – 6 members of the Walton family
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent, tweeted a startling statistic to his followers on July 22, 2012: "Today the Walton family of Walmart own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of America."

28. Say What?
Who’s saving the money? Who’s living better? 6 people > 120, 000, 000 people

29. “According to the complaint, Signal and its agents defrauded 500 guest workers from India out of tens of thousands of dollars in exorbitant ‘recruitment fees,’ falsely promising the assistance in obtaining permanent residence in the US. Instead, these workers were trafficked to the company’s facilities in Mississippi and Texas, forced to live in overcrowded, unsanitary labor camps that threatened their health and psychological well-being. These workers were threatened with financial ruin, arrest and serious immigration problems if they did not acceded to the company’s strategies.”

30. More slaves today
The Polaris Project estimates that there are more individuals in slavery today than at the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

31. Taking one’s “slavery footprint”
How many slaves work for you?

32. Who cares? A friar asked:
“Do you think Americans really care under what conditions the products they buy are made, as long as the quality is good, the goods are readily available and the price is cheap?”

33. Children and Consumption
Long before we get to talks like these, we are children immersed in a culture of consumption, such that every aspect of our lives is touched by the ‘need and greed’ mentality of modern aggressive consumerism.

34. A reductionist philosophy
What is so troubling about consumerism is that it proceeds from a reductionist philosophy of the human person, one that narrowly defines men and women by their economic potential and the satisfaction of their material wants. Consumerism reduces us to what we can earn, spend and purchase.

35. A consumer’s examination of consciousness
Do I care whether the products I buy or use are tainted with human slavery?
Are the price, convenience and availability of goods more important to me than the possibility that these goods might be the result of child and slave labor?
How much time and effort am I willing to invest in determining whether a product is the result of trafficked labor?

36. A consumer’s examination of consciousness
How willing am I to make this problem of human trafficking upfront and personal in my life?
How willing am I to work with others to eradicate slave labor from my home and dinner table?

37. An imperceptible good An imperceptible good is not
an inconsequential good.
- David B. Couturier, OFM. Cap.

38. Justice work is not for loners The 3 Tasks of Justice Work
Inspire
Conspire
Perspire

39. “the divine conspiracy of love”
Solidarity
“the divine conspiracy of love”

40. “Transparency in Supply Chains Act” California 2012
1. They must verify their product supply chains and evaluate the risks of human trafficking and slavery at every step. They have to disclose whether or not this verification was conducted by an outside, third-party, agent or not.
2. They have to conduct audits of all their suppliers to evaluate their suppliers’ compliance with the company’s standards for trafficking and slavery in their supply chains. The disclosure to the state (and on their company website) has to specify whether the audit was done independently and whether it was conducted unannounced. (A good model of this effort, by the way, can be found on the Hewlett-Packard website.)
3. The law requires direct suppliers to certify that the materials incorporated into the product comply with the laws regarding slavery and human trafficking of the country or countries in which they are doing business.

41. California Transparency Act
4. The companies must maintain internal accountability standards and procedures for employees or contractors failing to meet company standards regarding slavery and human trafficking.
5. The companies must provide training to company employees and to management, who have direct responsibility for supply chain management, particularly with respect to mitigating the risks within their supply chains of products.

42. Information center on ways to press for greater private sector involvement in the fight against human trafficking at both the company and industry levels.

43. Free2Work App: Scan Feature

44. A Franciscan Theology of Stuff

45. St. Francis and Stuff
No one in the history of the Church has done more to inspire respect for the dignity of each and every person, no matter what class, race or culture one belongs to, than did Francis of Assisi.

46. We now live in a “disenchanted world.”
Charles Taylor
We now live in a “disenchanted world.”

47. The Earth on the other side of Saturn: 900 million miles away

48. Where theology and Franciscan insight come into play
At one moment in time, at one instant in history, out of the frozen silence of billions of years, God decided to speak:
In the beginning was the Word
And the Word was with God
And the Word was God…
And the Word became flesh.
(John 1:1)

49. The point of theologizing
Human trafficking has been facilitated by a crass and course disenchantment of the world and everything in it, reducing God’s great creation to nothing more than stuff.

50. Stuff
… is that we buy and sell, what we collect and store, what we pitch and toss away. Stuff becomes our impersonal and disconnected refuse. It is hoarded, piled up in our closets and hidden away in our basements. It is what gets buried and made invisible in our landfills.

51. Stuff
Instead, our consumerist mindset has transformed creation into matter and we have made it into stuff. Enchantment has become waste management. We have done it to nature and now we are doing it to humankind.

52. David B. Couturier, The Fraternal Economy
We replace the infinity of God with the infinity of goods.

53. St Francis and the refusal to touch coins
We too must demonstrate a similar holy madness. Human trafficking is a sin against the luxurious abundance and infinite goodness of God.

54. The trick and the treat
This is the trick and this is the treat of our Franciscan politics, the work of reclaiming all God’s creatures into the superabundant and enchanted divine conspiracy of love, which we have seen and heard in Jesus Christ, who is Lord, forever and ever. Amen!