How many slaves work for you ?

Slavery Footprint is an online experience and mobile app that launched on the 149th anniversary of the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation and can tell you approximately how many slaves have pitched in to make the goods you enjoy on a daily basis. A survey built in HTML5 to be accessible from desktop and tablet, directed by Robert Bader to increase awareness of people’s slavery footprint.

You may not think that slavery is still a major problem worldwide, and you’d be wrong. There are more slaves bought and sold today than at any point in human history. But how many work for you? Who is digging up the minerals in your smartphone or picking the cotton for your T-shirts? The issue of forced labor continues to drift in and out of the social consciousness but hasn’t successfully yet stuck in people’s mind.

The challenge has been to hit people with more hard facts and sustain their attention.

“Every citizen can take action: www.slaveryfootprint.org! By speaking up and insisting that the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the products we buy are made free of forced labor…” 

[Barack Obama - 44th President of the US, September 2012]

The site, created in a collaboration between anti-slavery nonprofit Call+Response and the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, uses a complex algorithm to calculate how many slaves work for you based on 11 questions, including how much jewellery you own, whether you’re a gadget geek, what’s in your medicine cabinet.

The site was created by UNIT9 is a multidisciplinary production company. You can view the credits here. To take the interactive survey, please go here.