In this post, keynote speaker Genevieve LeBaron, Professor of Public Policy at Simon Fraser University, explains why we need to stop thinking of modern slavery as a hard-to-uncover issue.

I often hear policy leaders, business representatives and even academic researchers describe forced labour as a ‘hidden crime’. The story generally goes that because forced labour is illegal, it is almost impossible to find or to predict where it might occur within the economy.

For instance, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime capture this sentiment in their Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2020, where they write, “Although found in every country and every region, trafficking in persons remains a hidden crime, with perpetrators operating in the dark corners of the internet and the underbelly of the global economy to entrap victims for sexual exploitation, forced labour, domestic servitude and other forms of exploitation.”

After researching forced labour for over 15 years, I find depictions of it as such to be both puzzling and misleading. I have studied the patterns of forced labour across several sectors and parts of the world, including in India’s tea industry, Ghana’s cocoa industry, and garment production in India, Ethiopia, Honduras and Myanmar. With colleagues at Simon Fraser, Stanford and Yale universities, I co-run Re:Structure Lab, which has recently reviewed the interdisciplinary academic literature on the business of forced labour and synthesised this into six evidence briefs.

Reflecting on this body of work, I’m struck by how easy forced labour is to find.

Read full blog post here.