The financial cost of forced labour
Funding Agency
International Labour Organization
Project period
2022 – 2023
Researchers
- Maame Esi Woode
Collaborating researchers
- Vinh Vo, Research Assistant
Project Description
This research aims to estimate the financial costs of forced labour.
Forced labour is defined by the International Labour Organization (ILO) as “all work or service that is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which said person has not offered himself voluntarily”.
Key to forced labour is the use of threats and menace of penalty as means of coercion to impose involuntary work.
Of the 24.9 million global victims of forced labour in 2016, 20.8 million were in privately-imposed forced labour. In 2014, it was estimated that the illegal profits from the use of privately-imposed forced labour constituted US$150.2 billion. Illegal profits from forced labour included the wage “stolen” from people in forced labour.
This current research will build on previous methodologies to re-estimate the illegal profits made from the use of forced labour exploitation to feed into a broader framework on the costs and benefits of eliminating forced labour exploitation by 2030. The analysis will rely on the ILO's new global estimates of the prevalence of forced labour, which will be released in the summer of 2022.