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Slavery Wage

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Wage and Well-being

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Abstract

The nadir for wage-related wellbeing, on the wage-wellbeing spectrum, is economic slavery. This chapter focuses on trafficked work and Slavery Wages. There are compelling reasons for a dearth in on-the-ground ‘research’, including issues of safety, invisibility, and criminality. Yet grey literature, anecdotal reports and theoretical arguments illuminate that slavery wages are everywhere in plain sight, from daily morning tea to cell-phone, coffee to clothes, eating in or out - and when leaving a tip. Organisational supply chains, governance interventions, include using high-tech solutions to safely reporting labour abuse and acting on those reports are implicated in perpetuation of Slavery Wages. Such systems can also however be reorientated towards combatting trafficking, exploitative employment, and the pervasive deleterious effects of slavery wage. This chapter includes illustrations of how such changes can be made to happen.

A Nov. 24 tweet from Uber-Facts said: ‘Tipping became popular in the U.S., in part, because restaurant owners didn’t want to pay Black Americans after the ratification of the 15th [Abolitionist] Amendment. This way, owners could set a $0 wage for waiters and rely on voluntary tips from customers to pay them’...

Our ruling: True. Based on our research, the claim that tipping became popularized by restaurant owners who didn’t want to pay Black workers after the passage of the 15th Amendment is generally TRUE, though more context is helpful...

Tipping in America began before the Civil War. But afterward, it is true that employers in the restaurant industry, railroads and more used the practice of tipping as a way to keep some wages low. Formerly enslaved Black people worked in many of these jobs.

Source: Extracted from Testino (2020, parenthesis added)

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Acknowledgement

Thanks to Dr. Veronica Hopner, my valued colleague from Project S.A.F.E. (Security Assessment for Everybody), for invaluable feedback on an earlier version of this chapter. I am also grateful to CSEND (Centre for Socio-EcoNomic Development) for their inspirational conceptualisation and advocation of New and Business Diplomacies.

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  1. UNESCO Chair on Sustainable Livelihoods/School of Psychology, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand

    Stuart C. Carr

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Carr, S.C. (2023). Slavery Wage. In: Wage and Well-being. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19301-9_4

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