GENEVA — Illegal profits from forced labor worldwide have risen to an “obscene” amount of $236 billion a year, the UN labor agency said on Tuesday, with sexual exploitation accounting for three-quarters of the proceeds of a business that deprives migrants of the money they can send home, steal jobs from legal workers and allow the criminals behind it to avoid taxes.
The International Labor Organization said the figures for 2021, the most recent year covered in the rigorous international survey, represent an increase of 37%, or $64 billion, compared to the last estimate published a decade ago. That’s the result of both more people being exploited and more money being generated from each victim, the ILO said.
“$236 billion. This is the obscene level of annual profits from forced labor in the world today,” reads the first line of the report’s introduction. That figure represents the income “effectively stolen from workers’ pockets” by those who force them to work, as well as the money taken from migrant remittances and the lost tax revenue for governments.
Forced labor can encourage corruption, strengthen criminal networks and encourage further exploitation, the ILO said.
Its director general, Gilbert Houngbo, wants international cooperation to combat the racket.
“People who engage in forced labor are subject to multiple forms of coercion, with the deliberate and systematic withholding of wages being one of the most common,” he said. “Forced labor perpetuates cycles of poverty and exploitation and strikes at the core of human dignity.”
“We now know that the situation has only gotten worse,” Houngbo added.
The ILO defines forced labor as work imposed against the will of the worker and enforced under punishment – or the threat of it. It can occur at any stage of employment: during recruitment, in life circumstances related to 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 labor – a 10% increase from five years earlier, the ILO said. The Asia-Pacific region was home to more than half of those, while Africa, the Americas and Europe-Central Asia each accounted for about 13% to 14%.
About 85% of affected people worked in “privately imposed forced labor,” including slavery, serfdom, forced labor and activities such as forms of begging where money raised benefits someone else, the ILO said. The rest performed forced labor imposed by the government – a practice not covered in the study.
Although just over a quarter of victims worldwide were victims of sexual exploitation, this accounted for almost $173 billion in profits, or almost three-quarters of the global total – a sign of the higher margins generated by the sale of sex .
About 6.3 million people faced situations of forced commercial sexual exploitation on any given day three years ago – and almost four in five of these victims were girls or women, the ILO said. Children accounted for more than a quarter of the total number of cases.
Forced labor in industry fell a distant second at $35 billion, followed by services at nearly $21 billion, agriculture at $5 billion and domestic work at $2.6 billion, the Geneva-based labor agency said.