Modern Slavery

Abstract

This article seeks to review the thematic of current slave labor, verifying how it is perpetuated in the Brazilian history in such a way as to indicate its non-anachronistic character in the Brazilian social relations. Critical-descriptive literature review was adopted, combined with the survey of relevant laws, case laws, and judicial decisions on the theme. Starting from the historicity of the slave labor experience in the Colonial Brazil, we review how this experience and reasoning of the existence of a human being as an object rather than as a subject of rights still remain today, including in judicial decisions that justify its occurrence based on a local pseudo-culture. We verified to what extent this approach, along with a restrictive reading of the concept of modern slavery, unveils a historical moment of setback in the fight against this form of exploitation. And, at the end, we pointed out how modern slavery is expressed in several forms of exploiting human labor today, suggesting paths for the hermeneutics of such a concept so that its confrontation is as broad as possible, as the only way to fulfill citizenship.