As soon as, combating exploitation meant higher wages, stronger unions, and safer workplaces. At this time, it means police raids, satellite tv for pc imagery, and border management. “Fashionable slavery”, usually used interchangeably with “trafficking”, has change into a political spectacle, dramatic sufficient to stir feelings, imprecise sufficient to serve energy.
Labour interventions have lengthy formed our understanding of labor and exploitation. Since its founding in 1919, the Worldwide Labour Group has developed a framework of worldwide labour requirements aimed toward selling first rate work and social justice, regardless of resistance from rich industrial nations. Early conventions laid the groundwork for regulating working time and baby labour. [1] Over the a long time, landmark devices and nationwide laws expanded the language of rights, guaranteeing protections round collective bargaining, non-discrimination, and truthful wages.[2]
By the late Nineties, a wave of anti-trafficking and anti-slavery campaigns started to reshape how we speak about exploitation at work. Staff’ rights, higher wages, and social safety gave solution to ethical theatre. The highlight shifted from structural reform to simplistic narratives of heroic Non-Authorities Organisations and authorities businesses rescuing victims and punishing villains. Police raids on bars and brothels, therapeutic massage parlours, garment factories, and nail salons proceed to seize headlines the world over, together with in our analysis websites in Leicester, Delhi and Manila. However our analysis exhibits that these interventions not often change the lives of staff and will even deepen their precarity, whereas leaving intact the structural vulnerabilities produced by poverty, weak labour legal guidelines, and restrictive migration regimes.
Take the 2020 Boohoo scandal in Leicester. Allegations of recent slavery prompted state raids and manufacturing unit closures. Manufacturers distanced themselves, and Boohoo shifted manufacturing elsewhere. The employees—principally South Asian—have been left behind. Many turned to gig work or different low-paid jobs. Girls misplaced the kinship networks that had shaped round garment work. What, then, did the antislavery intervention truly obtain? It didn’t result in higher wages, stronger enforcement, or mechanisms for employee voice. In Delhi, too, staff “rescued” from brick kilns or home labour usually returned to the identical jobs. Authorized instances dragged on for years, and staff merely couldn’t afford to attend. In Manila, girls intercourse staff “rescued” from bars and brothels by Western NGOs usually returned to intercourse work as a result of the options out there—similar to home work or manufacturing unit work—have been much more labour-intensive, insecure, rigid, and poorly paid.
The place is the agenda heading?
Extra not too long ago, the language of “fashionable slavery” has been stretched far past the unique give attention to exploitative labour practices. It’s now repeatedly invoked in relation to a big selection of points – from warfare and migration to local weather displacement and digital surveillance. However what does this enlargement truly obtain? When slavery turns into a metaphor for the whole lot, does the time period retain any which means in any respect?
In Ukraine, trafficking studies surged after the invasion, however this framing usually obscured the casual economies that displaced folks entered. An identical dynamic is rising round local weather migration – one of the regressive turns within the fashionable slavery agenda. In Bangladesh, over 90% of migrants from climate-affected areas similar to Sylhet and Pirojpur report experiencing wage withholding, debt bondage, restricted motion, and bodily abuse. Many are pushed into inner migration or despatched overseas to Gulf international locations, the place they find yourself in exploitative labour circumstances in building, agriculture, or home work. But somewhat than constructing secure migration pathways and stronger labour protections, policymakers usually body these migrants as trafficking victims, subjecting them to surveillance, crackdowns, and immigration restrictions within the identify of “safety”, whereas failing to handle the structural drivers of exploitation. If local weather migration is inevitable, the actual query is why we’re nonetheless failing to construct programs that guarantee dignity, security, and rights for these on the transfer.
Additional, authoritarian regimes have weaponised anti-slavery rhetoric to justify exclusion, surveillance, and crackdowns on migrants, but exploitative circumstances are maintained: In Saudi Arabia, the Kafala system continues to present employers near-total management over migrant staff’ authorized standing, motion, and employment. Regardless of reforms, staff, particularly from Ethiopia, Nepal, and India, face wage theft, passport confiscation, and compelled labour on mega-projects like NEOM, a high-tech, carbon-neutral mega-city, envisioned as a showcase for futuristic city design and financial diversification, the place over 21,000 migrant staff have died since building started. In the meantime, within the UK, the federal government is just not revising its Fashionable Slavery Act 2015 to strengthen employee safety however to limit asylum seekers’ entry to it. The Border Safety, Asylum & Immigration Invoice (2025) retains provisions disqualifying trafficking claims and detaining baby asylum seekers. In September 2025, Residence Secretary Shabana Mahmood introduced additional reforms narrowing protections, following court docket rulings that had blocked deportations of people that claimed trafficking standing. Theresa Might chairs the International Fee on Fashionable Slavery and Human Trafficking, regardless of considerably rolling again protections for migrant home staff within the UK as Residence Secretary.
In the meantime, tech firms market AI dashboards, apps, blockchain audits, and satellite tv for pc imagery as instruments to detect slavery in provide chains from cocoa to cobalt. Tasks like Slavery from House and Exiger’s AI platform promise visibility of slavery, deflecting consideration from the low-wage, casual labour that underpins international manufacturing. Apps focused at due diligence or employee voice have already been critiqued for problematic methodologies, wrongful prosecution and considerations round susceptible staff’ information misuse with out bettering their structural circumstances. In the meantime, sources are shrinking. In 2024–25 alone, the US Division of Labour’s Bureau of Worldwide Labour Affairs minimize over US$500 million in grants for labour normal enforcement affecting important programmes on stopping baby labour, pressured labour and human trafficking in 40 international locations throughout Mexico, Central America, Southeast Asia, and Africa, leaving even much less cash for structural enhancements.
However with all these various phenomena being folded into the vocabulary of slavery and trafficking, what does it imply when “slavery” turns into a catch-all metaphor for injustice? Does its rhetorical enlargement heighten political urgency or dilute its capability to handle the on a regular basis circumstances of staff? If slavery is in every single place, in warfare, in tech, in area, in provide chains, is it additionally nowhere specifically?
Returning to the fundamentals.
As soon as, labour rights meant one thing tangible: truthful wages, secure working circumstances, and the facility to organise. At this time, the fashionable slavery agenda has traded these foundations for theatrics. It now not asks how exploitation is produced; it asks who may be saved, and the way loudly. Structural considerations like welfare, enforcement, and employee voice are sidelined in favour of border raids, provide chain audits, and algorithmic dashboards.
Given this trajectory, it’s unsurprising that “fashionable slavery” discourse has been simply folded into right-wing populist agendas. As an alternative of advancing justice, it now underwrites detention centres, deportation flights, and empty company compliance rituals. The result’s a future the place migrants are criminalised within the identify of safety, tech corporations promote “freedom” by way of satellite tv for pc imagery, and governments minimize funding for labour rights whereas increasing surveillance.
There may be an pressing want for course correction that recentres extra radical, even when much less glamorous, goals: truthful wages, sturdy and complete social providers, and dignified work. These don’t make headlines. They don’t match into shiny CSR studies or triumphant rescue narratives, however they’re one of the best ways to stop exploitation.
Pankhuri Agarwal is a Leverhulme Early Profession Analysis Fellow on the College of Bathtub and King’s School London. Her work may be discovered right here.
Dr Sharmila Parmanand is an Assistant Professor of Gender, Improvement and Globalisation on the London College of Economics and Political Science.
[1] Such because the Hours of Work (Trade) Conference, 1919 (No. 1) and the Minimal Age Conference, 1919 (No. 5).
[2] For instance, the Compelled Labour Conference, 1930 (No. 29), Freedom of Affiliation and Safety of the Proper to Organise Conference, 1948 (No. 87), and the Equal Remuneration Conference, 1951 (No. 100)
Picture credit score: Jon Tyson by way of Unsplash
