Sex trade to slavery: A UN agency says criminals reap US$236B a year in profits from forced labour

In this Monday, Nov. 9, 2015 photo, children and teenagers sit together to be registered by officials during a raid on a shrimp shed in Samut Sakhon, Thailand. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)

GENEVA -

Illegal profits from forced labour worldwide have risen to the "obscene" amount of US$236 billion per year, the UN labour agency reported Tuesday, with sexual exploitation to blame for three-fourths of the take from a business that deprives migrants of money they can send home, swipes jobs from legal workers, and allows the criminals behind it to dodge taxes.

The International Labour Organization said the tally for 2021, the most recent year covered in the painstaking international study, marked an increase of 37 per cent, or US$64 billion, compared with its last estimate published a decade ago. That's a result of both more people being exploited and more cash generated from each victim, ILO said.

• The information you need to know, sent directly to you: Download the CTV News App

"$236 billion. This is the obscene level of annual profit generated from forced labour in the world today," the first line of the report's introduction said. That figure represents earnings "effectively stolen from the pockets of workers" by those who coerce them to work, as well as money taken from remittances of migrants and lost tax revenue for governments.

ILO officials noted that such a sum equaled the economic output of EU member Croatia and eclipsed the annual revenues of tech giants like Microsoft and Samsung.

Forced labour can encourage corruption, strengthen criminal networks and incentivize further exploitation, ILO said.

Its director-general, Gilbert Houngbo, wants international cooperation to fight the racket.

"People in forced labour are subject to multiple forms of coercion, the deliberate and systematic withholding of wages being amongst the most common," he said in a statement. "Forced labour perpetuates cycles of poverty and exploitation and strikes at the heart of human dignity."

"We now know that the situation has only got worse," Houngbo added.

ILO defines forced labour as work that's imposed against the will of the employee and exacted under penalty -- or the threat of one. It can happen at any phase of employment: during recruitment, in living conditions associated with work or by forcing people to stay in a job when they want to leave it.

On any given day in 2021, an estimated 27.6 million people were in forced labour -- a 10 per cent rise from five years earlier, ILO said. The Asia-Pacific region was home to more than half of those, while Africa, the Americas, and Europe-Central Asia each represented about 13 per cent to 14 per cent.

Some 85 per cent of the people affected were working in "privately imposed forced labour," which can include slavery, serfdom, bonded labour, and activities like forms of begging where cash taken in goes to the benefit of someone else, ILO said. The rest were in forced labour imposed by government authorities -- a practice not covered in the study,

Some critics have railed against "modern day slavery" in places like the prison system in the U.S. state of Alabama.

ILO experts said that government-imposed forced labour was excluded from the report because of a shortage of data about it -- even if estimates show nearly 4 million people were affected by it.

"The ILO certainly decries instances of state imposed forced labour wherever they occur, and whether that's in prison systems or the abuse of military conscription or other forms or manifestations of state and post forced labour," said Scott Lyon, an ILO senior policy officer.

While the report said just over one-fourth of the victims worldwide were subject to sexual exploitation, it accounted for nearly US$173 billion in profits, or nearly three-quarters of the global total -- a sign of the higher margins generated from selling sex.

Some 6.3 million people faced situations of forced commercial sexual exploitation on any given day three years ago -- and nearly four in five of those victims were girls or women, ILO said. Children accounted for more than a quarter of the total cases.

Forced labour in industry trailed in a distant second, at US$35 billion, followed by services at nearly US$21 billion, agriculture at US$5 billion and domestic work at US$2.6 billion, the Geneva-based labour agency said.

Manuela Tomei, ILO's assistant director-general for governance, told a conference launching the report in Brussels -- where the European Union's parliament is close to finalizing new rules aimed at cracking down on forced labour -- that "no region is immune" to the practice of forced labour and all economic sectors are involved.

While countries including the United States were cited at the conference for efforts to fight forced labour, Tomei said the world was "far away" from UN goals to eradicate forced labour by 2030.

Valdis Dombrovskis, the executive vice-president of the European Commission, called the ILO findings "shocking and appalling."

"Forced labour is the opposite of social justice," he said. "Let me be very clear. Business must never be done at the expense of workers, dignity and labour rights."