Modern-day slavery

We live in a world of organisational hierarchies, where fruits of labour are obviously not distributed evenly. A corporate lawyer can make more in a day writing up a legal brief than the annual salary of a daily wager who toils under a gruelling sun from morning to evening.

There are varied perspectives offered to understand the problem of labour exploitation and what must be done to address it. Marxists, for instance, have long criticised the exploitation of the labouring classes by those who control capital. Conversely, the prevalent economic order seems to place faith in the market and growth-based approaches to overcome deprivation.

Multilateral agencies like the International Labour Organisation (ILO) try to facilitate tripartite interaction between employers, labour groups and respective governments aiming to ensure goals like the ‘dignity of work’. The situation on the ground, however, remains far from optimistic, given that there are millions of people who are not only being paid very little for the hard work they do, or made to work in unsafe environments, but are actually forced to work under the threat of coercion.

Consider, for instance, the newest report released by the ILO, which uses recent data (from 2012) to claim that nearly 21 million men, women and children around the world are locked into forced labour, having been trafficked or are held in debt bondage and made to work in slave-like conditions. Moreover, the ILO has estimated that these forced labourers generate $150 billion in illegal profits for their bosses every year. While a major proportion of this amount is made from sexual exploitation, the rest of it comprises profits made from forced economic exploitation.

While the above statistics may not be very accurate, since they are describing an illegal and not-so-well documented phenomenon, the fact remains that forced labour is evident in numerous countries around the world. In Pakistan, for example, labour under debt-bondage is a rampant problem not only in the agriculture sector, but in brick kilns and other informal sectors such as shoe making, fisheries, stone crushing, carpet weaving and even domestic work.

People are not only being forced to work in poor developing countries. An estimated 1.5 million people are forced to work as illegal workers within rich countries as well. An estimated 600,000 migrant workers are forced to work in the Middle East under the ‘kafala system’, which often allows vulnerable migrant workers to be abused by exploitative employers.

A ‘forced labour convention’ was established by the ILO in the 1930s, but it primarily aimed to protect forced labour by colonial sates and much has changed in terms of the socio-economic conditions that create conditions for forced labour. This week, the ILO has convened a major moot to develop more effective mechanisms to deal with newer forms of forced labour such as human trafficking.

Besides identifying gaps in preventing forced labour in developing countries themselves, the ILO would do well if it encourages developed countries to do more to improve migrant working practices, rather than merely trying to tighten migration inflows. The ILO must also take note of the broader global production systems that make people vulnerable to forced labour, such as the forced and exploitative labour involved in producing raw materials or extracting natural resources for export to Western markets.

Unless the ILO applies more pressure on holding accountable the increasing number of global multinational corporations and authoritarian governments, which derive competitive advantage and generate exponential profits by enabling forced labour within their supply chains, the phenomenon of forced labour will remain hard to eradicate.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 6^th, 2014.

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