What industries are at risk for forced labor? (2024)

FAQs

What industries are at risk for forced labor? ›

The countries on the List span every region of the world. The most common agricultural goods listed are sugarcane, cotton, coffee, tobacco, cattle, rice, and fish. In the manufacturing sector, bricks, garments, textiles, footwear, carpets, and fireworks appear most frequently.

Forced labour exploitation is most often found in industries with informal workers and/or little regulation. These include: Agriculture and fishing. Services such as hospitality and transport.

Traffickers frequently target vulnerable populations, such as children, individuals without lawful immigration status, those with debts, and those who are isolated, impoverished, or disabled, to name a few. U.S. citizens, foreign nationals, women, men, and children can all be victims of forced labor.

The consumer sector is highly vulnerable to modern slavery as a large proportion of manufacturing is outsourced, often internationally. Particularly high risk goods include: rice, spices, tea, coffee, cocoa and cotton.

Forms of forced labor can include domestic servitude; agricultural labor; sweatshop factory labor; janitorial, food service and other service industry labor; and begging.

Forced labor is a serious and pervasive problem in the United States for four reasons: it is hidden, it is inhumane, it is widespread, and it is criminal. Each year thousands of men, women, and children are trafficked into the United States and forced to work without pay in deplorable conditions.

The most vulnerable – women, children, and migrants – remain disproportionately affected.

Europeans enslaved millions of men and women on the African continent during their colonisation of the Americas. Those who survived the transatlantic voyage were forced to labour on sugar, tobacco, cotton, and coffee plantations in the Caribbean and in North and South America.

What industries used slavery? ›

The collections document slavery in such enterprises as gold, silver, copper, and lead mining; iron manufacturing, machine shop work, lumbering, quarrying, brickmaking, tobacco manufacturing, shipbuilding, and heavy construction; and building of railroads and canals.

In the late 18th century, the mechanization of the textile industry in England led to a huge demand for American cotton, a southern crop planted and harvested by enslaved people, but whose production was limited by the difficulty of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers by hand.

Employers should provide written contracts of employment in language that all workers can easily understand and that clearly indicate their rights and responsibilities with regard to payment of wages, working hours, valid grounds for termination, and other issues related to preventing forced labour.

Human trafficking means moving someone by means such as force, fraud, coercion or deception, with the aim of exploiting them. It is a form of modern slavery. You don't have to cross an international border, and much trafficking takes place within countries. It could refer to county lines.

Title 18 of the United States Code, Section 1589, makes it a federal crime to knowingly provide or obtain the labor or services of a person using force, threats of force, physical restraint, or fraud, otherwise known simply as "forced labor."

Most forced labour occurs in the private economy. Eighty-six per cent of forced labour cases are imposed by private actors – 63 per cent in the private economy in sectors other than commercial sexual exploitation and 23 per cent in forced commercial sexual exploitation.

Bonded Labor or Debt Bondage

One form of coercion used by traffickers in both sex trafficking and forced labor is the imposition of a bond or debt. Some workers inherit debt; for example, in South Asia it is estimated that there are millions of trafficking victims working to pay off their ancestors' debts.

Forced labor, also known as labor trafficking, affects individuals of all ages, genders, and races. It is prevalent in industries that have high demands for low wages and minimal or no regulation of the working conditions.

Forced labor is most like historic American slavery: coerced, often physically and without pay. All other categories of slavery are a subset of forced labor and can include domestic servitude, child labor, bonded labor and forced sex.