CA Sri Lanka, Audit Firms & Their Slaves

By V. Kanthaiya –June 2, 2015 

Long ago, perhaps not so long ago, and to be more precise, at a particular occasion between 1828- 1910, Leo Tolstoy said the following,

“What a misguided world where the rich, who live off the labour of the poor, consider themselves benefactors of the poor”.

Keeping those words of wisdom aside, let’s take the history of slavery in the USA. The southern states took the critical decision to secede from the union due to the issue over the expansion of slavery into the new western states. The slavery, at the present context is looked upon as a practice that is inhuman and savage . In the past, it was not. It should be noted that eleven states of USA went to war to hold their “right” for slavery, based on the justification that slavery gave the cheap labour to the cotton economies of these states.

In the present civilized world, slavery exists. It is not in the same format as the past where human beings would be chained and forced to do physical work. Now it is done through the labour contracts, where the powerful corporates use the low standard of living of the particular segment of the society to exploit them to make profits. Just think about this. Why the ‘garment companies’ put up their businesses in the developing countries like Sri Lanka & Bangladesh? Why not in USA and Europe? The profitability in labour/human resource intensive industry is decided by the cost of the labour/human resource. So for the profitability, of which that the corporates and the entrepreneurs are desperate, will do their maximum to find the cheap labour and locate their labour/human resource intensive business there. Well! That is acceptable to some certain extent, because this is done based on the market equilibrium of demand and supply of labour/human resource.Read More