"I grew up witnessing a lot of people working in horrible conditions and not getting paid"

By Anastasia Moloney

BOGOTA, June 30 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - As a boy growing up in Brazil's impoverished northeastern state of Bahia, Brazilian actor Wagner Moura and star of television drug drama "Narcos", saw slavery all around him but like many people he thought it was normal.

"I grew up witnessing a lot of people working in horrible conditions and not getting paid, working for food or a place to sleep. And I grew up thinking these kinds of things were normal," Moura told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"I remember girls, 11, 12-year-old girls, mostly black girls. They would spend their whole lives working in homes and some of them wouldn't even go to school. So they were basically slaves."

It was when Moura aged 17 went to Salvador, the capital of Bahia, that he realised what he had witnessed as a boy was wrong.

"It was a shock to me because I really believed that it kind of was what it was .. it was then I realised people should get paid for their labour," Moura said.

Brazil acknowledged the use of slave labour in its economy - Latin America's largest economy - in 1995.

But more than two decades on, many people in Brazil, and across the world, still do not know slavery exists.

"I've been talking to people and they say they had no idea that this was happening. Slave labour - what are you talking about?," said Moura, 41.

Globally there are 21 million people in forced labour, including children, in a business worth $150 billion a year, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO).

In Brazil, forced labour is defined as a form of slavery. This includes degrading work conditions and long hours that pose a risk to a worker's health and or life and debt bondage.

But activists fear a bill being debated by Brazilian lawmakers that seeks to limit the country's broad definition of slave labour, including what constitutes degrading work conditions, could put more workers at risk of slavery.

"Changes to our definition of slave labour, I think it's very possible for it to happen," Moura said.

WORKED TO DEATH

As a goodwill ambassador on forced labour for the ILO, Moura earlier this year spoke to sugar cane workers who had been rescued from slave labour, including one who saw his friend die next to him in a field from exhaustion.

"He remembers the guy said to him. 'I can't see. I'm blind'. Then he goes to sit down and the guy just falls down dead," Moura said. "He worked until he died. His body just couldn't it anymore."

Moura believes tackling slavery is about promoting empathy between employers and their workers.

"When I talk to businessmen and politicians in my country, most of all I see a big lack of empathy with people. It's all about profit."

Brazil has been praised by the ILO and activists for making progress on tackling slavery in the past decade.

They highlight the government's mobile units - made up of labour inspectors, prosecutors and police - who raid places where slave labour is suspected.

Since the initiative was launched in 1995, more than 50,000 workers, many on farms and cattle ranches, have been rescued from slavery-type conditions.

But there are fewer mobile units operating in Brazil today, and tackling slavery is less of a priority since conservative Michel Temer became president last year, activists say.

DIRTY LIST

Moura said a key weapon in Brazil's fight against slavery is the so-called "dirty list" of employers published by the labour ministry.

Launched in 2003, the blacklist has made public hundreds of companies and individual employers who were investigated by labour inspectors and found to be using slaves.

The dirty list was banned from being published following a nearly three-year legal dispute over its release but since March is has been published again.

"If we can make the dirty list more accessible I think it's a powerful tool," Moura said.

(Reporting by Anastasia Moloney @anastasiabogota, Editing by Ros Russell.; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit http://news.trust.org)

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.