Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade

Reviewed By Robin Caldwell

Author: David Batstone

Slavery, David Batstone suggests, is right in most of our backyards and we wouldn’t even notice it. No, we wouldn’t even know it.

The American concept of slavery is an antiquated notion based on a “peculiar” institution involving the African slave trade, and one that many believe ended with the Emancipation Proclamation. As heinous as the history of slavery on this soil is, there is a contemporary slavery trade few are aware of and few care about, and that is the impetus for Batstone’s book, Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade – and How We Can Fight it(Harper).

In Not for Sale’s introduction, Batstone discusses his personal discovery of a global slave-trafficking trade in his own backyard, San Francisco. A local restaurateur, someone highly respected in the city, hired an enormous amount of individuals from his homeland of India. The death of one of those workers from carbon monoxide affixation, and the restaurateur’s attempt to cover it, drew attention to a slave trade involving people brought into this country to work for minimal wages that were normally absorbed through the rents and other expenses they owed their “slave owners.” Batstone uses Not for Sale to present an argument, a well-formulated argument based on fact, to spur public interest in fighting this problem globally.

Not for Sale premises that there are approximately 27 million are enslaved today. In those numbers are children, who account for more than half, used for slave labor and prostitution, women used for cheap labor and prostitution, and men used to build everything from countries to businesses. Human trafficking has, until the recent disclosure of the atrocities taking place in Darfur, Sudan, been a quietly kept secret. In fact, Batstone, says that it is “slavery flourishing in the shadows.”

Thanks to Batstone and a growing legion of supporters or modern-day abolitionists from every facet of society – entertainment, sports, faith organizations, and politics – an incredible amount of attention has been drawn to the global slave trade. His Not for Sale Campaign stretches beyond political and ideological borders to end the inhumanity.