Utility Manning: Young Filipino Men, Servitude and the Moral Economy of Becoming a Seafarer and Attaining Adulthood

To get a job as a seafarer in the global maritime industry, thousands of male Filipino youths work for free as ‘utility men’ for manning agencies that supply seafarers to ship operators around the world. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and approached from a moral economy perspective, this article examines how manning agencies and utility men differentially rationalize this exploitative work (utility manning). Manning agencies use it as a technology of servitude that, through physical and verbal abuse and other techniques, enforces docility to prepare utility men for the harsher conditions on-board a ship. In contrast, utility men use it as a technology of imagination, gleaning from it a capacity to shape their future. Faced with few social possibilities in the Philippines, they deploy servitude as a strategy for attaining economic mobility and male adulthood

The question of freedom in Foucault and la boetie

Para lograr entender la cuestión de la libertad en Foucault, es necesario analizar la problemática de la “servidumbre voluntaria”, cuya enigmática condición fue examinada primero por Étienne de La Boétie. Su ensayo, titulado De la Servitude Volontaire, discute el enigma de la política quizá más complejo: ¿por qué los hombres se someten al dominio? A partir de la idea de que la libertad, lejos de significar ausencia de poder, solo se puede entender y realizar por medio de su relación con el mismo poder, el autor pretende demostrar que Foucault, por un lado, se interesa por lo que nos relaciona con el poder respecto de los varios niveles de nuestra subjetivación; por otro lado, por cómo somos capaces de resistir, poner en duda y problematizar este vínculo y de comprometernos con prácticas de auto-constitución que, para él, son “prácticas de libertad”.This paper argues that the key to understanding question of freedom in Foucault lies in the problematic of ‘voluntary servitude’, whose enigmatic condition was first explored in the sixteenth century by Étienne de La Boétie. The essay, De la Servitude Volontaire, comes to grips with what is perhaps the most intractable enigmas in politics: why people freely submit to their own domination. Starting from the idea that freedom, so far from signifying the absence of power, is only intelligible and realizable through its relation to power, the author shows that Foucault is concerned with that which binds us to power at the level of our subjectivities; and, with the other side of this, how we are able to resist, contest and problematize this attachment, and how we are able to engage in practices of self-constitution which are, for him, ‘practices of freedom’

The Facts About Human Trafficking for Forced Labor

Defines human trafficking, details the various forms of forced labor, and explains the United States’ efforts to limit it worldwide, with special reference to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000 and 2003. This law provides tools for the U.S. to combat trafficking in persons, both domestically and abroad. One of the key components of the law is the creation of the Trafficking in Persons Report

The right of servitude between public interest and undisturbed use of private property

For obtaining the land in order to build the magistral pipeline a specific form of land expropriation is applied, namely the Right of servitude. The Right of servitude can be realized on the basis of established public interest, which can be defined according to the spatial plan of the relevant area. The Right of servitude is analyzed from the point of its influence on the respect of basic human rights of property owners to enjoy their property in safety and without disturbance. Current legal framework in Serbia that regulates procedures for acquiring land for the purpose of public interest allows for breach of private property rights. There is a mutual inconsistency between a number of decrees that regulate property rights for large infrastructural development projects. A specific, and possibly a greater problem, is the status of the local population, the land owner and other real estate. It concerns their awareness of their private and individual rights, as well as technical and other legal standards, which must be applied during the preparation, construction and working stages of an energy facility. Applying the Right of servitude as a way to acquire land for construction of the Pipeline, there is direct breach of the basic human right as stated in the first Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights, namely that ‘every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions’ (Article 1, Protocol 1). The Right of servitude allows the investor to use ‘public interest’ as a way of gaining access to another’s land, and under better financial conditions than if he were to apply permanent expropriation. While the owner retains his/her ownership of the land, inconvenienced by numerous limitations of its use, usability and market value of the land becomes substantially reduced

Female prisoners, aftercare and release : residential provision and support in late nineteenth century England

This article examines the release and aftercare of female prisoners in England during the late nineteenth century. Primarily it seeks to illuminate the use of residential provision for women who had been released from both convict and local prisons, contrasting the two systems and suggesting how such institutions may have affected the women's subsequent offending. The research presented here draws on two sets of data, the material on local prisons uses a case study of female prisoners at Stafford prison (Turner, 2009; 2011) and the convict prison data draws on the licensing and release of female convicts collated for a recent ESRC funding project on the costs of imprisonment (Johnston & Godfrey, 2013a). This article outlines and reflects upon aftercare and residential provision for women leaving prison, during a period when a woman released from prison was regarded as 'the most hopeless creature in the world' (Reverend William Morrison cited in Gladstone Committee Report, 1895). Aftercare and support was variable for those leaving local prisons, but for convict women released on conditional licence to a refuge, this could offer them the opportunity to build a new life after release