Factory in Mymensingh, Bangladesh. NYU Stern BHR/Flickr. (CC 2.0 by-nc)
Since the financial crisis, the partial recovery of profitability for business has happened at the expenses of workers worldwide. In the UK, improvements in employment rates have been paralleled by a decline in real wages. Abroad, countries hosting global labour-intensive manufacturing hubs have witnessed a further intensification of harsh labour regimes. In this scenario, unsurprisingly, industrial disasters and sweatshop scandals have proliferated.
It is in this context that the term ‘modern slavery’ is increasingly being used in media and policy circles, where it is more or less loosely deployed to capture extreme exploitation in global supply chains. With reference to the garment industry, debates on ‘new’ slavery trace back to the 1990s, and intensified after the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster. But to what extent is the term ‘modern slavery’ helpful, and which other categories of analysis could be used instead?
