Of Human Bondage

Around the world forced labour is alive and well. Our correspondent meets survivors and activists striving to break the chains once and for all.

- Jonathan Tasini

Consider this: Just about every product you consume and every service you use is at least a tangential result of forced labour. Someone put his or her sweat into giving you something, and she or he did so not out of free will but because of fraud, coercion, threats or abduction.

Your clothes almost certainly came from a country where people labour for wages of less than $2 a day while enduring threats, beatings and hazardous working conditions. Your food — whether eaten at a restaurant, handed to you by a roadside vendor or purchased at a grocery store —landed on your plate thanks in part to farm workers who were victims of human trafficking. The domestic worker who cleans your home or watches your children may have been a teacher in the Philippines before being lured here by a bogus recruitment agency.

The International Labor Organization, which tries to police the global agreements banning human trafficking, estimates that for every 1,000 people in the world, 5.4 are victims of modern slavery: 16 million people in the private sector; 4.8 million (mostly women) who are victims of forced sexual exploitation; 4 million in state forced labor such as prisons; and 15 million — virtually all of them women — trapped in forced marriages, which we don’t usually think of as slavery.