31 July 2024
What are the Drivers of Human Trafficking and Forced Labour?
Human trafficking and modern slavery are driven by multi-faced systems centered around a lack of opportunity. Average people find themselves in difficult situations in countries around the world where people face poverty and a lack of opportunity, which leads them to seek work either in a different region of their country or overseas. This highlights a real demand for work overseas and creates an inherent vulnerability to being exploited. It doesn’t mean people choose to suffer. There is a lack of work and development in their immediate environment. As workers travel to destination countries in the Gulf from origin countries in South Asia, that sets the stage for human trafficking and forced labour. On top of that, bad actors are willing to charge people for their employment, for their recruitment, in an environment that is either poorly regulated or not regulated at all by governments -- meaning that either there are laws that prohibit that but governments don’t actually enforce those laws, or that both the government as well as recruiters and the business community are very much able to exploit these people because as there’s money to be made, and they can charge them for their work. An individual doing very low-paid work, like a cleaner or construction worker is paying for their job, becoming financially burdened with debt, and unlikely to complain about the situation.
How are migrant workers exploited under human trafficking and forced labour?
There’s an inherently discriminatory mindset towards migrant workers. For example, the prevalent Gulf labour sponsorship systems, ‘Kafala’, binds workers to their employers and prevents them from changing jobs or leaving their country without their permission. This sets up a system of structural discrimination against non-citizens, a caste system based on national origin where workers experience uneven protections. Laws designed to protect migrant workers are poorly enforced and workers face systematic discrimination and challenges accessing justice. This legally entrenched system of employer control prevents workers from reporting the negative impacts on labour and human rights taking place.
A big part of what we are seeing is a system where workers are forced to pay for their own employment recruitment and that is a form of subsidy to the employer under the businesses whose value chains they will enter. Whether those workers are formally employed or informally, many workers are ultimately working to generate profit for very large companies or state enterprises. This leads to a relatively stable, if highly chaotic, profit-making venture. There’s money being made of suffering.
How do you break human trafficking and forced labour systems?
First, there is the strategy of acknowledging that labour migration is a reality and has been for all of human civilization. Even if there are more jobs created, even if there is more dignity provided in jobs back home, people will still migrate, therefore the migration process needs to be well-regulated. But long-term, having less people traveling abroad and building up the economies where people come from and particularly the regions where they come from – for example, in India or China, you have whole generations of children growing up without their parents because they cannot find work in their regions so they travel to other countries – those regions need to be built up. Children themselves are working, because there are no opportunities for them to access education or for their parents to find work. These systems turn people into victims and then these systems fail to provide justice.
Another key point is collective action -- worker organizing. Trade unionism is in decline globally. Low-wage workers and migrant workers are not unionized and so they don’t have the opportunity to practice their freedom of association rights. In many of the countries where they travel to, like Malaysia or Gulf countries, it is prohibited to do basic organization. We need to have systems where those workers can drive the change themselves.
What the Government Can Do to Stop Human Trafficking and Forced Labour
What governments can do to address human trafficking and forced labour is allow workers to vote in elections, even if they’re overseas. This leads to improvement in elected leaders caring about the welfare of their citizens. The second thing is trade unionism, creating collective power amongst workers. What's going to make these governments want to affect change is political power. Organizing workers so they can put pressure on their governments helps. What needs to happen is also reimagining unions from the perspective of migrant workers, low-wage workers, and informally employed workers. When workers are facing problems with their employers, they go to their own worker community to seek resolution or find support. The most effective forms of that are under the radar because they’re not legally allowed to exist. A lot of the effort is focused on the humanitarian needs of workers, but what we see less of is a rights-based approach. We need to empower workers to access their rights and get them to the forefront of those systems. As a migrant-worker-led organization, we are proud to be leading this multi-generational work.