Seite 289 [289]
THE EXPLOITATION OF LABOUR AND THE EUROPEAN VALUES
Forced labour has two, basically different meanings. One specifically views
things in terms of enemies and focuses on punishment. According to it "forced
labour is a prohibited kind of free labour, which is introduced in a war or after
that by violent, overpowering military or civil powers because they are in an
economic emergency situation, which they are trying to solve by punishing or
sometimes even destroying people groups or persons regarded as their enemies"".
The other meaning is closely related to an exploitation-centred and widespread
approach of production in our present world and also to the two central themes
of criminological investigations: human trafficking and sexual exploitation.
Based on regular information coming from civil organizations, mainly from
developing countries, Veronika Gyurdcz summarizes the essence of slave work in
the following:
“There are still a lot of practices around the world that infringe on people’s personal
freedom, who are treated as property, their labour is exploited, and all this with
violence and intimidation. These concerns are shared by the most important
international organizations that guarantee international legal protection and they
urge the member states to make efforts in order to put an end to slave work. For
example, since 2007 there has been a special envoy at the United Nations, assigned
to ensure that these practices are treated uniformly as slavery by the national
authorities and that the victims receive protection accordingly and the perpetrators
are held responsible.”
Ihe exploitation of labour is kept alive as most of the consumer habits in our
globalised world are incompatible with fairness as a supreme value of Europe and
are consequently unacceptable from a moral point of view. The reason behind it
is distorted capitalism, which is based on exploitation that serves to satisfy the
hunger for profit instead of the keystones of bourgeois society: the sanctity of
private property, the freedom of contract and equality before the law. Ihe goal
of exploitation is the cheap production of products, serving customer needs to
the outmost, with a wide selection of goods and securing a huge extra profit
through these. The key participants of the globalised economy have no regard for
the consequences of the process that starts with production, continues through
transport and consumption and ends with the destruction of goods. The treadmill of
production (ToP) theory contains the detailed connections of that. The direct losers
> https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A 9nyszermunka.
6 Gyuracz, Veronika, Legal and pedagogical protection against modern-day slavery in
Hungary [Jogi és pedagógiai védelem a modernkori rabszolgaság ellen Magyarországon],
Acta Humana 2 (2016), 75-94, https://folyoiratok.uni-nke.hu/document/nkeszolgaltato¬
uni-nke-hu/AH_2016_2_04_Gyuracz.pdf.
* 287 «