A new ad from anti-trafficking NGO Hagar International confronted Hongkongers with the real cost of modern-day slavery — literally, in fact — presenting diners in a local restaurant with bills that quoted the price of their dinner not in dollars, but in slaves.
According to the campaign, dubbed “Reality Check” by its creators, the cost of a slave today is just US$90 (about HK$700) — in other words, a fraction of what many Hongkongers spend on a meal. In a guerrilla-style video, posted on Wednesday, diners in Hong Kong’s Upper Modern Bistro restaurant are handed checks for “1.33 Slaves,” “2.04 Slaves,” or, for one group of big spenders, “3.65 Slaves.”
“Even though we don’t hear much about slavery these days, the issue is more widespread and closer than you might think,” a waitress explains to groups of understandably baffled patrons, before pointing out a table of trafficking victims helped by Hagar at a nearby table.
In the video, the survivors describe having food withheld by their enslavers, enduring repeated physical violence, and living in general fear.
In interviews as they left the restaurant, patrons called the revelation that their meals could have purchased a human life “shocking.”
“Many people think that slavery is a thing of the past, or something that is removed from our everyday lives,” Hagar International CEO Micaela Cronin told Mumbrella Asia, a publication covering the ad industry.
“Our ‘reality check’ experience inserts slavery into the world of ordinary consumers by giving them an opportunity to meet those who have survived it.”
According to the group’s website, a slave in the US in the 1850s cost US$40,000 in today’s dollars — 444 times the US$90 average price for a slave today, making modern-day slaves “more available and disposable than ever.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly then, “there are more slaves today than ever before,” according to Hagar, more than 40 million as of 2016, representing a global business more profitable than the arms trade.
