It's more acceptable outside the west. Western cultures were the ones who decided slavery was a universal sin and had to be eradicated everywhere.
There are still whole races of people kept as slaves in sub-saharan Africa, for example. And I mean outright slavery, no ambiguity about it.
Abolitionism is a Eurocentric concept.
Another example from Asia. Two people were kept as slaves for 14 years in a tofu factory. This is in a developed country with a GDP per capita comparable to Spains. They were caught and fined 40k USD, no jail time.
It's worth noting that punishments for 'employing' unfree labour in the west are also often astonishingly small, when it's prosecuted at all. Despite there being a fair bit of it around few people end up in jail over it.
Only because we were fortunate enough that the culture that ended up banning it won out. In fact we are lucky that Western culture took this path at all.
Wow that's super progressive. I'm not one for cultural relativism though, I'm afraid. I'm quite the reactionary, unenlightened provincial bore, with my outmoded beliefs like "slavery is unjustifiable".
Depends where you define Asia as. Saudi Arabia plays in the Asian conference in FIFA, but so does Australia. Australian and Saudi values differ ever so slightly :)
This idea is definitely more acceptable than it is in the west in all the world. Africa. Asia. Middle East. Maybe not South America, but even there it would be more acceptable than it is in say Norway.
As for the absolute level of acceptability in each area or country, that is hard to work out, especially in Asia where saving face means something can be unacceptable in theory, but practiced quasi-openly, as in the example of the article, where Lola was an open secret in the guys family.
