International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and Its Abolition is today, 23 August, a day designated by UNESCO to memorialize the transatlantic slave trade. Merchant ships set off from Britain to Western Africa, and British slave traders captured people of African heritage to be forced labour on plantations in the West Indies and Americas. Sixty million and more people died in the forced migration and forced labour of the transatlantic slave trade.

On the night of 23 August 1791 an uprising on Haiti started a series of events which led to the abolition of the slavery in the French colonies. At the conclusion of the French Revolutions, forced labour was the first human rights subject that was dealt with at the international level in 1815.

Yet, forced labour continued on the plantations long after slavery’s abolition in Britain’s colonies in the Caribbean, Mauritius, and the Cape of Good Hope in 1833, and the reparations system which concluded the end of slavery enriched plantation owners and their descendants. The British government took a loan of approximately £20 million for the reparations, which was only paid off in 2015. The formerly enslaved did not receive any compensations for their past labour or the abuse they suffered.

Our present condition of work can only be understood by recognising that race, work, and migration are deeply entangled. Although the relationship that labour unions in this country have had with race has been problematic, today, many of the labour unions in this country are fighting for migrant rights. In 1930, the International Labour Organization (ILO) attempted to suppress the use of forced or compulsory labour. The ILO commemorates 23 August by drawing our attention to the fact that in 2021, 49.6 million people today are still living in modern slavery, both in forced labour and forced marriage. Of the 27.6 million people in forced labour, 17.3. million are exploited in private sector; 6.3 million in forced commercial sexual exploitation, and 3.9 million in forced labour imposed by the state. 

Sadly, our university is complicit in modern slavery. Human Rights observers have noted that the company which was contracted to build the university’s campus in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, Tecom, uses indentured labour.

In 2018, our branch reported: 

“But while the University and their partners bring in record profits they remain silent on the treatment of the thousands of migrant workers set to be employed on the project. Human Rights Watch and others report the abuse, dangerous conditions, confiscation of passports and the indentured labour common place in the Dubai construction industry. Workers often face extortionate debts to recruitment agencies, which are then slowly paid down out of already desperately low wages before passports are released. Human Rights Watch also cite the scale of deaths on construction sites and the lack of medical cover or compensation for workers and their families.

“In 2017 Jeena Sharma, writing in the pacific standard, interviews construction workers and finds that the practice of confiscating passports and entrapping workers under exploitative contracts is still common place and amounts to little more than slave labour. The Guardian report that two migrant workers commit suicide in Dubai every week.”

The 2023 Global Slavery Index estimates that on any given day in 2021, there were 132,000 individuals living in modern slavery in the United Arab Emirates.

In 2018 our UCU branch members voted to boycott the Dubai campus, and this boycott remains in place.