The Resilience of Forced Labour in Global Production and Trade

Abstract

The severe forms of economic exploitation which are encompassed by the term `forced labour' are a resilient feature of the contemporary global economy. The revised global estimates issued by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in 2012 indicate a likely total of 20.9 million people working in conditions of forced labour across the world, which the ILO itself stresses is a conservative estimate. Of those 20.9 million people, the ILO's figures reveal that fully 90 per cent are exploited in the private economy by individuals or enterprises, and that 68 per cent of these are victims of forced labour exploitation (ILO 2012). In short, the problems of forced labour and trafficking for labour exploitation are overwhelmingly phenomena of economic exploitation in the private economy. They also span the breadth of the global economy, occurring not simply in nonmarket contexts associated with, say, subsistence agriculture, or small- scale production for local markets, but across a wide range of industries and sectors tightly integrated into global production networks (GPNs).1 A growing body of detailed research documents the incidence of forced labour across a wide range of manufacturing, agricultural, extractive and other industries in the `mainstream' of global economic activity (e.g. Andrees and Belser 2009a, Bales et al. 2009, US Department of Labor 2012, Verité 2012, Allain et al. 2013, Barrientos et al. 2013). In its latest reports, the US Department of Labour confidently identifies 134 goods from 74 countries listed as being produced using forced or child labour, and its list of suspected goods is much longer (US Department of Labor 2012).