Sex trade to slavery: U.N. agency says criminals reap $236 billion a year in profits from forced labor
GENEVA
Illegal profits from forced labor worldwide have risen to the “obscene” amount of $236 billion per year, the U.N. labor 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 the activity to dodge taxes.
The International Labor
Organization said the tally for 2021, the most recent year covered in the painstaking international study, was an increase of 37%, or $64 billion, from its previous estimate, published a decade ago.
That’s a result of both more people being exploited and more cash being generated from each victim, the ILO said.
“$236 billion. This is the obscene level of annual profit generated from forced labor 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 taxes not paid to governments.
ILO officials noted that such a sum equaled the economic output of European Union member Croatia and eclipsed the annual revenues of tech giants like Microsoft and Samsung.
Forced labor can encourage corruption, strengthen criminal networks and create incentives for further exploitation, ILO said.
Its director general, Gilbert Houngbo, wants international cooperation
Gilbert Houngbo, the director general of the International Labor Organization, in Berlin in 2022.
to fight the racket.
“People in forced labor 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 labor perpetuates cycles of poverty and exploitation and strikes at the heart of human dignity.”
“We now know that the situation has only got worse,” Houngbo added.
The ILO defines forced
labor as work that is imposed against the will of the employee and exacted under penalty — or the threat of one.
It can happen at any phase of a person’s employment: during recruitment, in living conditions associated with work or by forcing people to stay in jobs in which they do not want to remain.
On any given day in 2021, an estimated 27.6 million people were in forced labor — a 10% rise from five years earlier, the 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% to 14%.
Some 85% of the people affected were working in “privately imposed forced labor,” which can include slavery, serfdom, bonded labor and activities like forms of begging where cash taken in goes to the benefit of someone else, the ILO said. The rest were in forced labor 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 that government-imposed forced labor was excluded from the report because of a shortage of data about it — even if estimates show nearly 4 million people were affected by it.