The Economist had a pretty scathing tear-down of indicies in the issue week before last. One article specifically criticises the Global Slavery Index, another is more satirical, but still well worth a read:
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21631039-interna...
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21631025-learn-ruses-i...
The definition of slavery according to them:
Modern slavery involves one person possessing or controlling a person in such as a way as to significantly deprive that person of their individual liberty, with the intention of exploiting that person through their use, management, profit, transfer or disposal.
I would like to know what significantly means. Were African slaves in America "significantly deprived" or just "deprived".
An issue with problems like this, that are obviously bad, is that only positive examples are tested, or only examples that would increase the estimate of the scope of the problem. I doubt the 'Walk Free Foundation' has tested equally for negative examples, and would look for ways to lower their estimates (as one has to do to fit reality).
This claims 60,000 "enslaved" in the US, however many people would argue it's much more thanks to forced prison labor
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-unit...
I'm sceptical of the score. How did they calculate that?
Today I learned there are 23 enslaved people in Iceland.
I find it hard to believe that close to one percent of Russians are slaves.
The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially declared, "now I am my own master", upon taking a paying job. But later in life, he concluded to the contrary, "experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery