Forced labour is often described as an isolated crime perpetuated by ‘unscrupulous’ employers. But it is more systemic than many governments, businesses, and anti-slavery organisations want to believe.
While unethical labour recruiters and bad apple employers certainly do not help, the much bigger, structural problem is the unfair global economic system in which they operate. To genuinely understand why forced labor is thriving today, we need to understand how the system works, and the role that businesses and states play in fostering an economic and political context in which individuals can exploit with impunity.
We can begin to understand forced labour’s role in this system by thinking in terms of supply and demand. In the age of neoliberal globalisation, certain types of businesses ‘need’ forced labour to safeguard their profits or their market share. For this reason, as Andrew Crane explains, some businesses ‘attempt to underprice a key resource (labor) through illegitimate means.’ At the same time, large swathes of the poor ‘need’ awful jobs to safeguard their survival, and they frequently find their exit from those jobs blocked (creating a common scenario of forced labour). The former expresses the demand, while the latter are the supply.
