The publication by the ILO of new estimates on forced labour in 2012 created a sense of urgency for addressing implementation gaps relating to the ILO's Forced Labour Conventions, leading to the adoption of supplementary standards by the 103rd International Labour Conference in June 2014. The power of normative pressure against those who still use or condone the use of forced labour is essential, and national legislation needs to be strengthened to combat forced labour and penalties against those who profit from it need to be strictly enforced. However, a better understanding of the socio-economic root causes and a new assessment of the profits of forced labour are equally important to bringing about long-term change. This report highlights how forced labour - which in the private economy generates US$150 billion in illegal profits per year, about three times more than previously estimated - thrives in the incubator of poverty and vulnerability, low levels of education and literacy, migration and other factors. The evidence presented illustrates the need for stronger measures of prevention and protection, as well as for enhanced law enforcement, as the basic responses to forced labour. At the same time, the report offers new knowledge of the determinants of forced labour, including a range of figures that break down profits by area of forced labour and by region. This can help us develop policies and programmes not only to stop forced labour where it exists, but to prevent it before it occurs.

Until now, there has been little scholarly analysis of the Soviet Gulag as an economic, social, and political institution, primarily owing to a lack of data. This collection presents the results of years of research by Western and Russian scholars. The authors provide both broad overviews and specific case studies.

Focusing on the pervasive, deeply entrenched, and wholly unjust system of bonded labor, Kara delves into this ancient and ever-evolving mode of slavery, which ensnares roughly six out of every ten slaves in the world. He provides a thorough economic, historical, and legal overview of bonded labor, describes the violent enslavement of millions, and follows supply chains directly to Western consumers.

A groundbreaking history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of enslaved people Winner of the 2015 Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians Winner of the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution -- the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy. Told through the intimate testimonies of survivors of slavery, plantation records, newspapers, as well as the words of politicians and entrepreneurs, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history.

This book focuses on labour dislocation and migration of Palestinians between 1967 and 1992. In particular, it highlights the social transformations in the occupied Palestinian territory where Palestinian labour was permitted to work in Israel from 1968 onwards. Elaborating on the results of the policy which saw a gradual increase in the number of Palestinian workers commuting daily from a negligible proportion of the actively participating labour force, to 35 percent of all employed persons, and 60 percent of all wage paid workers, the book studies this unique case which embodies characteristics from permanent migration situations not only in the de-jure, but also the de-facto sense; insofar as it embeds higher risks and reallocates resources as if it was a permanent relocation scenario. Illustrated with tables and econometric results, the book identifies the determinants and implications of migrant labour from the West Bank using two broad methodologies: the neoclassical and the historical-structural method. Each of these methods is divided into two branches: the classical divided into price determined and a choice-theoretic framework,and the historical-structural divided into dependency and Marxist theory. In order to gain a comprehensive understanding of the situation, all four perspectives are employed in the investigation. In doing so, what emerges is a structure for the book which takes shape along the different lines of migration literature. The book provides new insights into the making of wage labour and labour migration theory.

This groundbreaking volume presents the first detailed look at forced labor among displaced migrants who are seeking refuge in the United Kingdom. Through a critical engagement with contemporary debates about sociolegal statuses, endangerment, and degrees of freedom and its lack, the book carefully details the link between asylum and forced labor and shows how they are both part of the larger picture of modern slavery brought about by globalization.

Siddharth Kara is a tireless chronicler of the human cost of slavery around the world. He has documented the dark realities of modern slavery in order to reveal the degrading and dehumanizing systems that strip people of their dignity for the sake of profit—and to link the suffering of the enslaved to the day-to-day lives of consumers in the West. In Modern Slavery, Kara draws on his many years of expertise to demonstrate the astonishing scope of slavery and offer a concrete path toward its abolition. From labor trafficking in the U.S. agricultural sector to sex trafficking in Nigeria to debt bondage in the Southeast Asian construction sector to forced labor in the Thai seafood industry, Kara depicts the myriad faces and forms of slavery, providing a comprehensive grounding in the realities of modern-day servitude. Drawing on sixteen years of field research in more than fifty countries around the globe—including revelatory interviews with both the enslaved and their oppressors—Kara sets out the key manifestations of modern slavery and how it is embedded in global supply chains. Slavery offers immense profits at minimal risk through the exploitation of vulnerable subclasses whose brutalization is tacitly accepted by the current global economic order. Kara has developed a business and economic analysis of slavery based on metrics and data that attest to the enormous scale and functioning of these systems of exploitation. Beyond this data-driven approach, Modern Slavery unflinchingly portrays the torments endured by the powerless. This searing exposé documents one of humanity’s greatest wrongs and lays out the framework for a comprehensive plan to eradicate it.