Organized in 1986, the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery is recognized by the United Nations on December 2. It is estimated that 50 million people currently live in slavery, and it occurs in almost every country. According to the UN, modern slavery is not defined by law but includes any activity that coerces a person by threats of violence or abuse of power. This can mean human trafficking, child labor, forced marriage and migrant abuse. The UN website has more information about this important issue. Fountaindale also has titles about modern slavery around the world.
Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives
by Siddharth Kara
Published: 2023
Formats Available: Hardcover, eBook via Libby and Boundless and eAudiobook via Libby
Call Number: 338.2748 KAR
Summary: Cobalt Red is the searing, first-ever exposé of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves. Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara has traveled deep into cobalt territory to document the testimonies of the people living, working and dying for cobalt. To uncover the truth about brutal mining practices, Kara investigated militia-controlled mining areas, traced the supply chain of child-mined cobalt from toxic pits to consumer-facing tech giants and gathered shocking testimonies of people who endure immense suffering—and even die—mining cobalt.
Unraveled: The Life and Death of a Garment
by Maxine Bédat
Published: 2021
Formats Available: Hardcover
Call Number: 338.47687 BED
Summary: In Unraveled, entrepreneur, researcher and advocate Maxine Bédat follows the life of an American icon—a pair of jeans—to reveal what really happens to give us our clothes. We visit a Texas cotton farm figuring out how to thrive without relying on fertilizers that poison the earth. Inside dyeing and weaving factories in China, where chemicals that are banned in the West slosh on factory floors and drain into waterways used to irrigate local family farms. Sewing floors in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are crammed with women working for illegally low wages to produce garments as efficiently as machines. Back in America, our jeans get stowed, picked and shipped out by Amazon warehouse workers pressed to be as quick as the robots primed to replace them. Finally, those jeans we had to have get sent to landfills—or, if they’ve been “donated,” shipped back around the world to Africa, where they’re sold for pennies in secondhand markets or buried and burned in mountains of garbage. Deeply researched, Unraveled is not just the story of a pair of pants, but also the story of our global economy and our role in it. It challenges us to use our relationship with our jeans—and all that we wear—to reclaim our central role as citizens to refashion a society in which all people can thrive and preserve the planet for generations to come.
I Cried to Dream Again: Trafficking, Murder, and Deliverance
by Sara Kruzan and Cori Thomas
Published: 2022
Formats Available: Hardcover
Call Number: B KRUZAN
Summary: There is perhaps no crime more disturbing than the abuse of a child—and no court cases as upsetting as those in which juveniles who have faced abuse are tried for fighting back. In this gripping memoir Sara Kruzan, a survivor of childhood abuse and sex trafficking, tells the honest, disturbing and ultimately empowering story of her journey from abuse to incarceration without parole for killing her abuser to finally gaining her liberation.
The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America
by Saket Soni
Published: 2023
Formats Available: Hardcover
Call Number: 331.1173 SON
Summary: In 2007, Saket Soni received an anonymous phone call from an Indian migrant worker inside a Mississippi labor camp. He and 500 other men were living in squalor in Gulf Coast “man camps,” surrounded by barbed wire, watched by armed guards, crammed into cold trailers with putrid portable toilets, forced to eat moldy bread and frozen rice. Worse, lured by the promise of good work and green cards, the men had desperately scraped together up to 20,000 dollars each to apply for this “opportunity” to rebuild oil rigs after Hurricane Katrina, putting their families into impossible debt. Soni traces the workers’ extraordinary escape; their march on foot to Washington, DC; and their 31-day hunger strike to bring attention to their cause.