Hidden in plain sight: slavery on a high street near you

A new report argues the three main strategies to combat forced labour are inadequate. The first step to improving these is to understand the business of forced labour
England, Somerset, Glastonbury, High Street
Modern-day slave markets operate not in some hidden corner of the economy but in broad daylight close to the high street. Photograph: Alamy

Forced labour is often described as a hidden crime. But it is not as difficult to unearth as many in the UK, including businesses and government, seem to believe.

The problem is not so much that we cannot find forced labour; it is that either we choose not to look where it is most likely to occur or we simply misclassify those being exploited as criminals rather than victims. A new approach to detecting and enforcing forced labour is necessary. To pinpoint its occurrence we need to start by examining the forces of supply and demand.

The supply of workers into forced labour situations depends on their degree of vulnerability. Some workers – immigrants with limited legal opportunities to work, the homeless, or those with alcohol or drug dependency – are most at risk.

Businesses looking to profit from forced labour deliberately seek out those made vulnerable by such conditions in order to exploit them. They are not difficult to find. Many people recruited into forced labour are picked up on street corners, outside homeless shelters, or from spots around retail parks where informal day labourers congregate hoping for work offers. Modern-day slave markets operate not in some hidden corner of the economy but in broad daylight close to the high street.

The demand for forced labour within the UK economy is also relatively predictable. It is traceable to specific business models used in particular industries. As our new study, Forced Labour's Business Models and Supply Chains, demonstrates, while there is no "one size fits all" model of forced labour in the UK, there are clear, discernible patterns of businesses that use forced labour and how they make money from it.

The first thing to recognise is that there are actually two quite different types of businesses that employ forced labour. One are the direct producers, like local farmers or small construction companies, which use forced labour either to reduce their costs or to exploit them for additional forms of revenue (through practices like benefit fraud). These producers are predominantly small enterprises with fewer than ten workers, operating in the informal or illegal sector. They are also likely to be concentrated in labour-intensive, poorly mechanised sectors that require low-skilled labour.

The other type of business using forced labour are intermediaries like temp agencies or gangmasters that recruit workers and then hire them out to other companies. The agency finds workers to meet short-term fluctuations in demand and to keep costs down. Sometimes, this drive to reduce costs pushes agents to exploit their workers to a point that crosses into illegality.

This is how forced labour sometimes finds its way into mainstream business – and even into the products we buy in the supermarket. Forced labour enters the formal economy through such intermediaries, which we describe as a labour supply chain.

A labour supply chain is the employment relationships that a worker goes through in order to be deployed in a productive capacity. This is different from the product supply chain, which maps the different stages of processing that a product goes through from extraction to sale.

Product and labour supply chains can involve multiple layers of contracting and intermediaries. They grow more complex in time-sensitive or volatile industries such as agriculture or construction. It is this complexity that allows forced labour to thrive. But if we look at both of these chains together, we can identify incidences of forced labour much more effectively.

If, as we suggest, it really is possible to anticipate where forced labour is likely to emerge, why is it still thriving within the UK economy? There are three main strategies to combat forced labour in this country: regulatory enforcement, social auditing, and the licensing of labour providers. But each has weaknesses.

Regulatory enforcement within the private sector is typically left to businesses themselves. But where law enforcement does come into play, there is a tendency to misclassify forced labour victims as criminals. For instance, there have been difficulties making distinctions between criminal cannabis growers and trafficked victims forced to work. Similarly, policing around minimum wage workplaces tends to be focused on workers' immigration status rather than forced labour.

Social auditing is the voluntary tool that retailers use to verify supply chains against forced labour and exploitation. Yet audit pathways follow products, not people, so they tend to miss the areas of the labour supply chain that pose the most risk. And when audits do detect forced labour, they are obligated to report abuses to their retail clients, not externally, which hampers information sharing.

The licensing of labour providers through the Gangmasters Licensing Authority(GLA) does establish oversight over the labour supply chain. But the GLA's remit is limited to food, horticulture and forestry; it does not deal with other industries where forced labour is likely to occur. In addition to this, funding to the GLA has fallen in recent years, which has made its work much harder.

Forced labour doesn't need to be as hidden as we currently think it is. Recognising the inadequacies of our current detection strategies is the first step to bringing it into the light. From there we must apply our knowledge of the business of forced labour can we design more effective ways of detecting and eradicating it.

Genevieve LeBaron is vice-chancellor's fellow in politics at the University of Sheffield and research fellow at the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute. Follow her on twitter at @GLeBaron

Andrew Crane is a professor of business ethics and director of the Centre of Excellence in Responsible Business at Schulich School of Business, York University (Toronto). Follow him on twitter at @ethicscrane
