ILO reports $236B profit from forced labour globally

Anjali Sharma

GG News Bureau
UNITED NATIONS, 20th March.
International Labour Organization researchers on Tuesday in a new report launched in New York stated that forced labour is happening all over the world and it’s earning criminal gangs an astonishing $236 billion a year $64 billion more than a decade ago.

ILO in a alert said that this increase had been fuelled by the growing number of people forced to work illegally, but also by higher profits.

The senior research officer at ILO Federico Blanco told journalists in Geneva that traffickers and criminals make close to $10,000 per victim, around $1,700 more than they did in 2014.

“The human toll is also incalculable. These illegal profits represent wages, resources, livelihoods, effectively stolen from workers”, he said.

“This not only affects the workers themselves, but also their families and the flow of migrant remittances, disrupting entire communities.”

The profits from forced labour are highest in Europe and Central Asia at $84 billion – followed by Asia and the Pacific ($62 billion), the Americas ($52 billion), Africa ($20 billion), and the Arab States ($18 billion).

The agency report stressed that forced sex work generates over two-thirds of profits, even though it only involves around one in four of the overall number of people forced to work illegally.

It added that exploiters make over $27,000 a year from each illegal sex worker, which is far more than the average $3,600 in profits generated by most other forms of forced labour.

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