Forced-labour profits booming, as EU mulls laws
Illegal profits from forced labour around the world have increased by 37 percent in the last decade to a total of $236bn (€217bn) a year, according to a new report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in Geneva.
The increase over the past decade has been fuelled both by an increase in the number of people in forced labour (mainly in the private sector) and by its profitability.
"Today, forced labour is a very high-profit, low-risk undertaking," said the ILO’s deputy director general Manuela Tomei at the launch of the report in Brussels on Tuesday (19 March).
In 2021, at least 27.6 million people around the world worked involuntarily and under penalty or threat of penalty. This represents an increase of 2.7 million in five years.
Of these, an estimated 6.3 million were in forced commercial sexual exploitation, with nearly four out of five being girls or women.
"Forced labour is everywhere, there is no region that is immune and no economic sector that is spared from forced labour," said Tomei, noting that the industrial and service sectors saw the most cases.
Some 73 percent of this illegal income — equivalent to $173bn — came from the commercial sexual exploitation of victims, as their perpetrators paid them little or nothing, and victims had limited or no recourse to justice.
At $84bn, Europe and Central Asia saw the highest profits from forced labour, followed by Asia and the Pacific ($62bn), the Americas ($52bn), Africa ($20bn) and Arab states ($18bn).
$10,000 per victim
Every year, traffickers and criminals make nearly $10,000 per victim, an "obscene" amount of money from slave labour — and that is only a conservative estimate, the report says.
"We have done the best we could with the data available," said Michaëlle De Cock, head of the ILO’s research unit, stressing the limitations of missing information from many countries on a range of issues.
The financial gains calculated represented only the difference between what employers paid workers and what they would have paid them under normal circumstances, and were therefore only part of a broader picture.
Total illegal profits did not take into account state-imposed forced labour, nor the economic losses in terms of unpaid taxes, social security contributions and other recruitment costs.
What’s more, the full extent of state-imposed forced labour is not yet known, and forthcoming EU legislation on forced labour does not include a presumption in favour of high-risk geographical areas and sectors where there is evidence of forced labour.
Instead, there will be an online database where these sectors and geographical areas will be listed and available for consultation.
"Forced labour is the opposite of social justice and sustainable growth," said EU commission vice-president Valdis Dombrovskis at the ILO presentation, adding that "business must never be done at the expense of workers’ dignity and labour rights".
Once it has entered into life, the forced-labour regulation will provide a legal framework to identify and ban products made with slave labour in companies’ supply chains, whether they were manufactured in or imported into the EU.