Multinational corporations are becoming increasingly powerful – and this has serious implications for workers at the bottom of supply chains.
As labour is usually a factory’s biggest cost, the most obvious option for remaining profitable is to further squeeze workers in turn.
Sometimes, suppliers respond to commercial pressures by introducing business models configured directly around forced labour.
Cameron Thibos is the managing editor of Beyond Trafficking and Slavery. He is a former research associate at the Migration Policy Centre of the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and holds a D.Phil from the Department of International Development at the University of Oxford.
Neil Howard is an academic activist and Prize Fellow at the University of Bath. His research focuses on unfree labour, and on the workings of the policy establishment as it seeks to respond. Follow him on twitter @NeilPHoward.
