Forced labour creating $236B a year in illegal profits, UN says
Illegal profits from forced labour worldwide have risen to the “obscene” amount of $236 billion (U.S.) per year, the UN labour agency reported Tuesday, with sexual exploitation to blame for three-fourths of the take from a business that deprives migrants of money they can send home, swipes jobs from legal workers and allows the criminals behind it to dodge taxes.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) said the tally for 2021, the most recent year covered in the painstaking international study, marked an increase of 37 per cent, or $64 billion, compared with its last estimate published a decade ago. That’s a result of both more people being exploited and more cash generated from each victim, ILO said.
“$236 billion. This is the obscene level of annual profit generated from forced labour in the world today,” the first line of the report’s introduction said. That figure represents earnings “effectively stolen from the pockets of workers” by those who coerce them to work, as well as money taken from remittances of migrants and lost tax revenue for governments.
ILO officials noted such a sum equalled the economic output of EU member Croatia and eclipsed the annual revenues of tech giants like Microsoft and Samsung.
Forced labour can encourage corruption, strengthen criminal networks and incentivize further exploitation, ILO said.
Its director-general, Gilbert Houngbo, wants international cooperation to fight the racket.
“People in forced labour are subject to multiple forms of coercion, the deliberate and systematic withholding of wages being amongst the most common,” he said in a statement. “Forced labour … strikes at the heart of human dignity.”
ILO defines forced labour as work that’s imposed against the will of the employee and exacted under penalty — or the threat of one. It can happen at any phase of employment: during recruitment, in living conditions associated with work or by forcing people to stay in a job they want to leave.
On any given day in 2021, an estimated 27.6 million people were in forced labour — a 10 per cent rise from five years earlier, ILO said. The Asia-Pacific region was home to more than half of those, while Africa, the Americas, and Europe-Central Asia each represented about 13 per cent to 14 per cent.
Some 85 per cent of the people affected were working in “privately imposed forced labour,” which can include slavery, serfdom, bonded labour, and activities like forms of begging where cash taken in goes to the benefit of someone else, ILO said. The rest were in forced labour imposed by government authorities — a practice not covered in the study,
Some critics have railed against “modern day slavery” in places like the prison system in the U.S. state of Alabama.
ILO experts said governmentimposed forced labour was excluded from the report because of a shortage of data about it — even if estimates show nearly four million people were affected by it.
“The ILO certainly decries instances of state imposed forced labour wherever they occur, and whether that’s in prison systems or the abuse of military conscription or other forms or manifestations of state and post forced labour,” said Scott Lyon, an ILO senior policy officer. While the report said just over one-fourth of the victims worldwide were subject to sexual exploitation, it accounted for nearly $173 billion in profits, or nearly three-quarters of the global total — a sign of the higher margins generated from selling sex.
Some 6.3 million people faced situations of forced commercial sexual exploitation on any given day three years ago — and nearly four in five of those victims were girls or women, ILO said. Children accounted for more than a quarter of the total cases.
Forced labour in industry trailed in a distant second, at $35 billion, followed by services at nearly $21 billion, agriculture at $5 billion and domestic work at $2.6 billion, the Geneva-based labour agency said.