e-mail me at billdeg@umich.edu

11/09/2005

Slavery documentary

Last night the Michigan Coalition for Human Rights screened the documentary "Slavery: A Global Perspective," a shocking, lo-fi expose of Ivory Coast's cocoa industry (slave labor has a hand in about forty percent of commercially available chocolate, according to the film) and India's carpet industry, two of the major global industries that utilize slave labor. Not sweatshop labor. Forced, unpaid labor performed in large part by children who are lured away from their homes, kidnapped, chained to looms, and beaten brutally. The doc. also exposed the more familiar use of domestic worker-slaves in London, New York, and Washington DC. In 2005, the filmmakers claim, there are about 27 million slaves worldwide, more than at any other point in world history.

Resources:
Free the Slaves
Coalition Against Slavery and Trafficking

Next week's MCHR documentary is Robert Greenwald's "WalMart: The High Cost of Low Price," shown around Metro Detroit. See MCHR for details.

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