What is Labor Trafficking?

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA, 2017) distinguishes the two primary types of human trafficking as forced labor and sex trafficking.

As a crime and a grievous human rights violation (Polaris, 2021), labor trafficking is defined by the TVPA as the “recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery (22 U.S.C. § 7102(11)(B))” (U.S. Department of Justice, n.d., para. 4).

According to the U.S. Department of Labor (n.d.), labor trafficking is present across all tiers of the global supply chains (e.g., cotton, sugarcane, tobacco, fish, coconut, auto parts, solar, cocoa, and batteries), levels of the economy, and industries, including agriculture, construction, landscaping, hotels, domestic work, and restaurants (U.S. Department of Labor, n.d.).

Ultimately, this means that the clothes and jewelry we wear, the electronics we use, the coffee we drink, the food we eat, the tires on our cars, the bricks of the building we call home, and the cotton used in sheets and bath towels we use may have been touched by the many victims of human trafficking that exist in this world (Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, 2014).

The International Labour Organization [ILO] et al. (2022) estimated that globally at least 50 million people experienced human trafficking in 2021. This estimate includes people who have been forced into marriages (22 million) and individuals who are being labor trafficked (27.6 million) in private and state-imposed sectors.

As the demand for inexpensive products rises—driven in part by companies seeking higher profit margins and cheap labor—so too does the supply, at the expense of human lives (Gould, 2017).

  • "Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

    Frederick Douglass (1857), formerly enslaved person

  • "Awareness on forced labor and current efforts is needed to ensure accountability from all parties, public/consumer, human trafficking experts, businesses so that demand reduction is achieved. As a result, more transparency in the actual supply chain is also requested to understand and address forced labor in the supply chains. Transparency of suppliers, how price reduction is achieved, production technologies so consumers can make informed decisions about the products."

    Kezban Yagci Sokat (2022)

  • "Human trafficking is an open wound on the body of contemporary society."

    Pope Francis (2014)

  • "Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility."

    Eleanor Roosevelt (1960)

  • "History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again."

    Maya Angelou (1993)