More from Disposable People by Kevin Bales.

A Flawed System Become Slavery
It’s easy to see how this system can be abused by landowners to create the condition of slavery. Bales estimates that up to 30% of kiln owners cheat their workers and 10% seriously abuse them. That means about 75,000 people are held in debt slavery.

Because nearly all of the indebted workers are uneducated, it’s easy for them to fall pray to dishonest bookkeeping. This creates endlessly insurmountable debt. Landowners and foremen can also resort to violence and intimidation to keep workers from leaving. Many brick kilns have armed guards and workers are beaten publicly to frighten other workers. Women are also vulnerable to assault by landowners.

One former kiln owner describes how other owners would come along and smash a whole day’s worth of bricks—no bricks means no pay—or hold a workers leg in the oven for a second as punishment.
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More from Disposable People by Kevin Bales.

A Culture of Division
“It is a feudal land overlaid with the thinnest veneer of twentieth-century capitalism.”

Society is set up with fierce loyalties that create divisions that breed conflict. People are bound first by blood ties to their immediate and extended family, then by their caste status. Although caste restrictions are no longer directly enforced (lower castes are not directly prohibited from certain jobs), they are so engrained in the culture that it’s nearly impossible to for lower castes to rise in status. The lowest castes, and therefore the worst jobs, belong to Muslims Sheikhs (who converted to more “recently”—two-hundred to three-hundred years ago) and Christians. These groups are the most likely to be in the bonded labor, and therefore at risk to being enslaved. One kiln owner told Kevin Bales that the system of debt bondage “work[s] in favor of these simple Christian, saving them from the responsibility of having to manage their own finances and keeping their wild impulses under control.”
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Check out the resource page for a newly updated list of places to find out more about human trafficking. The more educated we are about the problem, the better equipped we’ll be to work together to find a solution.

Take a small step toward big change: Pick up a book, watch a film, or peruse a website.

Here’s more from Disposable People by Kevin Bales. This section was about Pakistan. I’m going to post it in several sections over the next few days. At the end, there will be specific things to pray for about human trafficking in Pakistan.

Slavery in Pakistan
Debt bondage and slavery are prevalent in Pakistan. One particularly vulnerable industry is brickmaking. Mud bricks are widely used in buildings, roads, and sidewalks. To produce them whole families work long days, digging dirt, hauling water, and mixing and forming bricks to be baked in hot, giant kilns. Because of their poverty these families are dependent on the kiln owners for loans to get necessities. They work constantly to pay against these debts.

It is estimated that about 200,000 families (or 750,000 people) work in this type of labor.
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