THE EXPONENTIAL SLAVE TRADE (1989 - 2024)

The phrase -- "Exponential Slave Trade" -- is my own invented term that attempts to describe the modern day slave trade that is at work in Bangladesh.

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The Exponential Slave Trade is eerily similar to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade that operated from the 16th to 19th centuries between Africa, the Americas, and Europe. As a newly-evolved variant of a centuries-old practice, the Exponential Slave Trade yields spectacular profits to factory owners, retail chains, fashion brands, and financial investors in our contemporary present. It amounts to far more greater profits than any Southern Confederate plantation owner would ever receive -- let alone conceive of -- for their harvested cotton. However, the Exponential Slave Trade differs in one major respect: it has no need for slaver ships to transport human beings across the open sea. The Exponential Slave Trade has evolved and is more efficient; it no longer has any need for this extra step. Since the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre in China and the ushering in of globalization, "the slaves" simply remain in the country where they reside -- far removed from the view of Western consumers; out of sight and out of mind.

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The further one lives away from countries like Bangladesh, the profits grow exponentially higher for all the participants in the international garments industry chain. The commercial real estate markets and municipal tax bases of nearly every regional town and city throughout North America and Europe -- benefits immensely from modern slavery conditions that the six Tazreen women labored under (often, alongside their families and children). It is their "slave-wage" labor that subsidizes and funds the generous salaries all over the world of photographers, graphic designers, models, video editors, retail executives -- and even, in a bizarrely reciprocal manner, the actual staff members at NGOs whose mission is to help ameliorate the ill effects of the Exponential Slave Trade with softer sounding words like "sweatshop labor" or "fast fashion."

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The examples provided below illustrate different threads of the Exponential Slave Trade unfolding in real-time at different locations all over the world.

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However, it is the final example -- at the bottom of this page -- which provides the most crystal clear illustration of the Exponential Slave Trade at its point of origin. Nazma Akter, daughter of Tazreen survivor Hosne Ara Akter, is pictured and interviewed below when she was 16 years old. Nazma recounts how, because her father is dead and her mother is disabled, it is now her sole responsibility to work and provide for her mother and younger siblings. A former Tazreen worker herself, Nazma must now labor, on average, 10-14 hour work days at a different local garments factory -- seven days a week.

 

In the filmed interview below -- presented raw and unedited -- translated between Bangla and English in real-time by artist Shubho Saha, while I film and speak with her -- Nazma recounts her story, and admits that she does not understand the concept of a "day off" or "a vacation" because she has never had one. Nazma works every day at the local garments factory. Nazma has no choice. Nazma is a slave.

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To quote the writer bell hooks: "To be oppressed means to be deprived of your ability to choose."

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This is our modern-day Exponential Slave Trade that we have created to clothe ourselves.

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