Serfdom

In 21st Century lingo a migrant worker, forced laborer, bonded manpower, wage earner, slave or serf are interchangeable status descriptions with more or less the same meaning.

The last type of serf was the slave. Slaves had the fewest rights and benefits from the manor. They owned no tenancy in land, worked for the lord exclusively and survived on hand-outs from the landlord. It was always in the interest of the lord to prove that a servile arrangement existed, as this provided him with greater rights to fees and taxes. The status of a man was a primary issue in determining a person's rights and obligations in many of the manorial court-cases of the period. Also, runaway slaves could be beaten if caught.

The word serf originated from the Middle French serf and was derived from the Latin servus ("slave"). In Late Antiquity and most of the Middle Ages, what are now called serfs were usually designated in Latin as coloni. As slavery gradually disappeared and the legal status of servi became nearly identical to that of the coloni, the term changed meaning into the modern concept of "serf". Serfdom was coined in 1850.

A freeman became a serf usually through force or necessity. Sometimes the greater physical and legal force of a local magnate intimidated freeholders or allodial owners into dependency. Often a few years of crop failure, a war, or brigandage might leave a person unable to make his own way. In such a case he could strike a bargain with a lord of a manor. In exchange for gaining protection, his service was required: in labor, produce, or cash, or a combination of all. These bargains became formalized in a ceremony known as "bondage", in which a serf placed his head in the lord's hands, akin to the ceremony of homage where a vassal placed his hands between those of his overlord. These oaths bound the lord and his new serf in a feudal contract and defined the terms of their agreement. Often these bargains were severe.

Within his constraints, a serf had some freedoms. Though the common wisdom is that a serf owned "only his belly"—even his clothes were the property, in law, of his lord—a serf might still accumulate personal property and wealth, and some serfs became wealthier than their free neighbours, although this happened rarely. A well-to-do serf might even be able to buy his freedom.

A serf could grow what crop he saw fit on his lands, although a serf's taxes often had to be paid in wheat. The surplus he would sell at market.

The landlord could not dispossess his serfs without legal cause and was supposed to protect them from the depredations of robbers or other lords, and he was expected to support them by charity in times of famine. Many such rights were enforceable by the serf in the manorial court.

Contemporary slavery, also known as modern slavery, refers to the institutions of slavery that continue to exist in the present day. Estimates of the number of slaves’ today range in the millions.

Modern slavery is often seen as a by-product of poverty. Countries that lack education, economic freedom, the rule of law, and have poor societal structure can create an environment that fosters the acceptance and propagation of slavery.

Slavery did not end with abolition in the 19th Century. Slavery continues today and harms people in every country in the world.

Women forced into prostitution. People forced to work in agriculture or mining, domestic work and factories. Children in sweatshops producing goods sold globally. Entire families forced to work for nothing to pay off generational debts. Girls forced to marry older men.

Open any newspaper anywhere and you will likely find similar stories of domestic workers who have run away or committed suicide as a result of withheld wages, confinement, food or sleep deprivation, exhausting work hours and/or verbal, physical, mental or sexual abuse by their sponsors.

Employment opportunities in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states for instance attract as many as 3 million women from developing countries in South Asia every year. The International Labor Organization (ILO), a U.N. agency dedicated to workers’ rights, estimates that Arab countries host more than 20 million migrant workers in all, one third of them women coming from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines and Ethiopia. Typically, these women find jobs through labor recruiters in their home countries. Although some recruitment firms are legitimate, many others are not licensed and have been known to trick women with false promises. Quite often, once these women arrive in their host countries to work as housemaids, they discover that labor laws do not apply to them and that there is little help available if they feel exploited or violated in any way.

The kafala system meaning "bondage or sponsorship system" is a system used to monitor migrant laborers, working primarily in the construction and domestic sectors, in the GCC and other states. The system requires all unskilled laborers to have an in-country sponsor, usually their employer, who is responsible for their visa and legal status. This practice has been criticized by human rights organizations for creating easy opportunities for the exploitation of workers, as many employers take away passports and abuse their workers with little chance of legal repercussions. According to The Economist, "The migrant workers’ lot is unlikely to improve until the reform of the kafala system, whereby workers are beholden to the employers who sponsored their visas.

Modern slavery is not the same as the slavery of earlier days. Many modern-day slaves are, ostensibly, “free” to leave their workplace. However, in practice, the threat of punishment and grinding poverty leaves laborers with no option but to keep working in sweatshops making the everyday things we consume. Employers in both the developing and developed worlds take advantage of these laborers’ desperate need for money to pay for the basic needs of themselves and their families back home. Laborers are mistreated, abused, underpaid, and forced to work in harsh conditions — but must continue to work for an abusive employer and an exploitative global system if they hope to make any income or come out alive. Desperation and fear, not always guns and chains, keeps many modern slaves in place — even if there are still many thousands of people, such as the young women and girls trafficked for the sex industry, who are forced to work under threat of bodily harm.

Sweatshop (or sweat factory) is a pejorative term for a workplace that has poor, socially unacceptable working conditions. The work may be difficult, dangerous, climatically challenged or underpaid. Workers in sweatshops may work long hours with low pay, regardless of laws mandating overtime pay or a minimum wage; child labor laws may also be violated. The Fair Labor Association's "Annual Public Reports" and The U.S. Department of Labor's "2017 Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor" similarly found that 18 countries did not meet the ILO's norms.

The aforesaid has not factored in or accounted for Africa, Central/South America, and the ever-growing numbers of detainees, draftees, displaced, refugees and asylum seekers around the world.

You may wonder where this is going... Well, to provide you an overall picture of the new norms, in which, serfdom has become the contemporary form of voluntary slavery by choice or lack thereof…

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