Despite economic development, modern slavery persists all around the world. The issue is not only one of crime but the regulation of the economy, better welfare, and social protections.
In this episode, Richard Kemp speaks with Sylvia Walby and Karen Shire, authors of Trafficking Chains: Modern Slavery in Society, about this growing global issue. They discuss what trafficking chains are, how the forces of colonialism, capitalism and gender regimes affect modern slavery, and what changes are needed to correct our course.
Listen to the podcast here, or on your favourite podcast platform:
Scroll down for shownotes and transcript.
Sylvia Walby OBE is Professor of Criminology at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is Fellow of the British Academy, Fellow the UK Academy of Arts and Social Sciences, and Co-President of International Sociological Association’s TG11 on Violence and Society.
Karen A. Shire is Professor of Comparative Sociology at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. She is a Member of the International Max-Planck Research School on the Social and Political Constitution of the Economy, and President of International Sociological Association RC02 Economy and Society.
Trafficking Chains is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £27.99.
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SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
01:25 – What is a trafficking chain?
03:57 – Can you explain the main forces of inequality and how they affect one another?
07:01 – Do we need consistency in law worldwide and what damage has this inconsistency already caused?
11:59 – How difficult is it to gain a true picture of trafficking and modern slavery?
14:30 – Can financial figures around trafficking help reach people who are anti-immigration?
17:39 – What results do we see from the different sexual exploitation policies around the world?
23:32 – Will this suffering continue as long as people are individualised and not supported as a group?
26:47 – How does modern slavery shape the nature of our society and what changes are needed to correct our course?
29:08 – Where can people find you online?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
Richard Kemp: You’re listening to the Transforming Society podcast. I’m Richard Kemp, and on this episode I’m joined by Sylvia Walby, OBE, Professor of Criminology at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Karen A. Shire, Professor of Comparative Sociology at the University of Duisburg-Essen. In their new book, ‘Trafficking Chains: Modern Slavery in Society’, published by Bristol University Press, Sylvia and Karen discuss the huge global problem of trafficking and modern slavery, a problem so huge, in fact, that the United Nations has prioritized its elimination by 2030.
It’s easy to forget that trafficking and modern slavery exist hidden deep in society’s underbelly. They’re big business. It’s why in 2004, for example, a group of Chinese cockle pickers drowned on Morecambe Bay. This was a horrific headline story at the time, and there have sadly been plenty more stories since. In their new book, Sylvia and Karen revealed the core issue to not be one of crime, but of regulation of the economy, better welfare and social protections.
In it, they expose the forces behind trafficking and modern slavery as the intersection of inequality of gender regimes, capitalism, and the legacies of colonialism. Sylvia and Karen, welcome to the Transforming Society podcast.
Sylvia Walby: Thank you.
RK: Thanks so much. I’m really, really looking forward to talking about your book today. The title of your book, Trafficking Chains. Can you explain what a trafficking chain is and what it tells us about modern slavery?
Karen Shire: This is a book about coercion in the global economy, and the concept of chains has long been a subject of study and analyzing how global economic activities impact on labor rights, on gender equality, on human rights more broadly. We find this in the analysis of what some researchers call commodity chains. For instance, people picking flowers in Africa and sending them to supermarkets in Europe.
We find it in global value chains, companies like Nike, and the tiers of subcontractors that they have throughout the world to produce sneakers that are mainly sold in higher income countries. We find this in labor supply chains that more or less these days, are moving migrant workers from low and middle income countries to higher income countries. We find it also in care chains, people being recruited for domestic labor or for cleaning homes and the global economy organized in this way is basically about the flow of value over time and space.
In all of these chains, there’s some flow of value and profit taking all along the way over time and space. Trafficking chains, we define as flows of value involving coercion, coercion may be part of any of these chains commodity, labor recruiting, care, supply chains, and are the source of profits in the global economy. But when it’s coercive, then we can speak of trafficking.
RK: Well, thank you, Karen. So the way the way you’re describing it there makes me think of supply, like supermarket supply chains is what that’s making me think of. Is that I mean, is that too simplistic the way I’m understanding that there?
KS: Well, it’s not too simplistic in that we may think of these supply chains more locally, but, look on the back of the products that you’re buying at Marks and Spencers and you’ll see that they come from all over the world. And the question is, how do they get there? Who has picked them? Who’s traded them? Under what conditions have the people picked them.
What wages are they getting? Do they- are they forced to live in certain accommodations? All those things are factors at any point in time that may involve some form of coercion.
RK: And in your book, you say that migrants make up one third of all victims of trafficking or modern slavery globally, and that migrants of a minority ethnicity are most likely to be trafficked. This is due in part, you say, to economic inequality from colonialism, but also capitalism and gender regimes. Can you explain these three main forces of inequality and how they affect one another?
SW: Yes. Trafficking and modern slavery are constituted by multiple forms of inequality. Capitalism, obviously, because of, this concerns the extraction of profit. And capitalism is organized around the extraction of profit. But it’s not only that this is extraction of profit under duress, in situations of vulnerability. These these are forms of coercion. So we’re looking at additional forms of inequality, not only the conventional ones.
So we’re looking at issues of coloniality, the history of those empires which create situations of vulnerability from which the disadvantaged migrants move from poorer parts of the world to the richer parts of the world and also the gender regimes. This is also very specific forms of inequality and very specific kinds of exploitation. In relationships, gender regimes, we’ve looked particularly at issues around sexuality and sex trade. So we need these different kinds of concepts of both capitalism and coloniality and of gender regimes in order to put together that picture of these multiple inequalities which are shaping trafficking and modern slavery.
RK: Thanks, Sylvia. The, I said at the top of the show here and I took this from your book as well about, the Chinese cockle pickers in Morecambe Bay. I was just wondering with that story, like, how does that story relate to what you’ve just said there?
SW: These were a group of workers who were in situations of vulnerability in that they didn’t understand the local working conditions. The tide came in very fast and they drowned. They weren’t looked after. The work wasn’t properly regulated. The people organizing the work hadn’t ensured that the health and safety of their workers was properly looked after.
So this was a situation where these workers, from a different country, were exploited in their situation of vulnerability with these terrible consequences, in that they drowned in Morecambe Bay when the tide came in very rapidly. The attempts to regulate that were then to look at these very specific conditions of these workers and the- in Britain, we called it the gangmasters regulations.
This was a group of workers they called it a gang, and they’ve attempted to put in specific regulations so that the people organizing these groups, or gangs of labor, are supposed to look after them much better than they did. They’ve started to do that. That’s been a question of developmental policy. The Gangmasters Association has been asking for more powers and more resources, and more capacity for them to be able to do their jobs properly.
RK: Kind of, related to that then with, with, well, with law, basically that you discuss law in your book. Quite often you’re bringing up, how the EU and the US differ in their approaches to law. Do we need consistency in law worldwide and what damage has already been done by this inconsistency?
SW: We need law at all of those levels. So the international level of law has been really important. In the book we focus on the UN convention, the Palermo convention in 2000, which is applicable to all member states of the United Nations, which is almost all of the countries in the world. And then different countries have implemented it in different ways.
And European countries have tended to focus more on the regulation of the economy and welfare, and America, which has less developed issues around issues of regulating employment and welfare, has tended to use criminal justice to a greater extent. So we see different kinds of regulations. But let me give you a flavor of the total range of what could be done.
So it’s not merely asking for consistency with the international protocol and for people to- countries to implement that properly and consistently, but is also thinking about the extremely wide range of policies. Trafficking is a crime, it’s wrong. It’s immoral. It’s against human rights and it is correctly identified as a crime. But whether criminal law is the best way of actually reducing it, we’re not quite so sure.
So, for example, some of the people in situations of vulnerability are fleeing war. If you want to ask a really big question, you’re saying stop war. Look after the people who are fleeing war, look after the refugees fleeing war. Those are people in situations of vulnerability who may well be exploited to the point of being trafficked. You need to think about issues of international development.
Trafficking is now, one part of the sustainable development goals of the UN. The World Bank Group has said that since 2016, it will implement these goals. Will it actually effectively and thoroughly implement the policies which are necessary to regulate international capital so that we see that financial development gives priority to the well-being of people in situations of vulnerability?
These are issues to be developed in policy. We’ve got questions of regulation of industries, what kinds of industries should exist. So for example, organs, should there be a trade in organs? Most of the professional bodies in relationship to transplants have argued that it shouldn’t be, that this should be a matter of consent, that people choose to give an organ and that they shouldn’t be sold, because it’s impossible to actually regulate the sale of organs in a way which isn’t extraordinarily exploitative.
So that’s an industry where we might say the industry itself should be so tightly regulated that it doesn’t exist as a for profit industry. We’ve got issues with regulation of labor at a distance. Karen gave us examples of these long chains, in which labor and value is moved from one part of the world to another. We see really interesting innovations in attempting to regulate those chains.
The UK Modern Slavery Act introduced this, where companies had to have a due diligence look at all the different components of what was making up their products all the way back to their origin. Really difficult to do. Sanctions aren’t really yet there, people don’t really think it has yet been effective, but it’s a site of development of some really interesting potential policies to go back and regulate the supply chains.
Then we’ve got labor intermediaries, such as the gangmasters, the people who are organizing these bodies of workers, are they properly regulated? And when people move from one country to another, they will often be charged fees, for moving from one country to another. Now, internationally, that’s been subject to a lot of critical analysis.
Should these fees really be paid by the employer rather than the worker? They’ve sometimes given rise to enormous amounts of debt, which the worker has, which make them extremely vulnerable. And so there’s a question about whether those debts should be taken on by the employer. We’ve got issues of welfare. Should migrants be excluded from welfare? Should they not have full entitlement to all of the forms of welfare that any other worker in the country has access to?
And fundamentally, access to democracy. Is everybody party to the political decisions which are made, which are relevant to all of this. So you can see from this we have a very wide range of policies, all of which have got a legal basis, which we think are worthy of study in order to push back on the trafficking or slavery.
RK: Yeah, absolutely. Going through your book, Sylvia, just so there’s so much that can be done that you talk about in your book that. Yeah, that that leaders and policy advisers can now take and, you know, actual actionable things that can be done for the betterment of society. And, yeah, for everybody suffering. The numbers in your book that you quote are absolutely staggering.
The International Labor Organization estimates that 49.6 million people were in modern slavery on any given day in 2021, however, only 49,000 people were registered to be in trafficking in 2018. You also say that every registered victim in the EU costs €312,756, but that’s just those who are registered. How difficult is it to gain a true picture of trafficking and modern slavery?
How does this affect authorities ability to help those in need?
SW: The number of people who are registered as victims of trafficking is the absolute minimum number that we know. That’s that number of 49,000, which is collected together by the UNODC, the UN Office of Drugs and Crime. Those are people who have who are known about by the authorities. Most people are not in contact with the authorities at all, which is why we see this much larger estimate produced by the ILO, 49 million people.
RK: Oh, sorry. You said the IMO, I think.
SW: The ILO, the International Labor Organization.
RK: Ah, thank you.
SW: In coalition with Walk Free, and the IOM has been working on these global estimates to produce estimates of the number of people in the actual population, not only those who are registered. These numbers are under development. The methodology is under development. They use surveys. They patch together evidence from all sorts of places. So this is a major site of scientific work to attempt to develop the methodology so that these numbers overall are made better.
One of our contributions to this was to estimate the impact of trafficking on society and to give it a cost. And that’s where this, €300,000 came from. This was work for the European Commission. What that does is to ask how much money is put in the services, the criminal justice, the specialized welfare services, how much money is lost to the real economy by its diversion into the criminal economy?
And what is the loss in the value of human life and the experience of human life? And these are estimates which follow the conventional method of costing. And they are an extraordinarily large sum. And they would be much bigger if it had included all of the other people who are not yet registered. So, yes, these are, forms of development of the estimations, and all of them are extremely large.
RK: With the, can I, it was so helpful for me to kind of understand more through you giving, giving actual numbers and figures like actual economic cost, were so, so helpful. I do want like, and part of it was like, oh, yeah, I can use this number and I can say it to I can say it to people when I’m in a debate about immigration, for example.
And we can- And you go in and out, zigzagging in and out of that, of that arena. And I suppose I was wondering like will quoting that financial number to people who emotionally have already got their minds made up on, you know, stopping immigration, that’s, you know, those, these people who want to stop illegal immigration, but also legal immigration to a certain extent as well.
Are we going to be able to kind of broach the gap with those people?
SW: Two issues there. I wouldn’t normally lead any arguments about ending trafficking with its cost to society measured in terms of the pound sign. I think the most important issues are to do with the immorality of these extraordinary forms of exploitation and the fact that this has been recognized in every country around the world as constituting a crime.
This is criminal exploitation, using coercion. And I think that should be the major focus. The estimate in terms of money is maybe useful for when people are discussing what level of priority should be given to different kinds of policy interventions. And I think at that point, it’s helpful to see the damage to society that that’s produced. I think the issue of migration, is, is quite a different one, is people in difficulties who are then subject to these extraordinary forms of exploitation.
And the answer to that isn’t stopping migration, but to reduce the situations of vulnerability to which have been attached to those processes of migration. So, I think that they’re two quite separate issues.
KS: There’s one part that I would like to add to that too, in relation to migration, because it’s what Sylvia has said is absolutely correct that, and this is where legacies of colonialism an gender inequalities come in to create situations of vulnerability in which migrants find themselves. But that’s one side. The other side is the way they are received in destination countries.
Migrants don’t create the jobs that they’re in. Our economies create these jobs as low wage, as unconnected to regular employment forms and protections. We create visa systems that differentiate certain access to social protections for migrants. We situate them in an extremely precarious situation. That actually means that the act of migration increases vulnerabilities. And this is something that the destination countries are responsible for, not the people who are moving to seek livelihood somewhere else.
RK: Thanks, Karen. Thanks, Sylvia. In one chapter you talk about sexual exploitation. Policies differ worldwide. The UK, for instance, allows buying and selling sex between two private individuals, but no profit taking as a third party such as a brothel. Germany allows this plus third party profiting and has strict employment regulations to protect workers. Meanwhile, the US outlaws all of it.
What are the different results from these differing policies?
KS: This is a big question. The main result is that the sex trade in a country like Germany, where everything is legal, has become a very legitimate part of the German economy and a source of profits, part of the tourist industry, part of the entertainment industry. And as we clearly show, I think in the detailed analysis in that chapter, the attempts to regulate the sex trade, in fact, have not focused on employment regulations, but on business regulations, on trying to license companies.
The only way in which persons selling sex are subject to the regulatory regime that has been set up is through an obligation to register. And what this has actually done is put more attention on the businesses than on what is actually the title of the law protecting persons in the sex trade. And what that has led to is, in fact, very low compliance.
First of all, it allowed the industry to be very legitimate and to grow some people talk of Germany as the brothel of Europe and without regulations that actually try to institute employment protections and social protections for the person in the industry the regulations don’t get at the root of the problem. At the same time, it creates the sector of the economy, which is highly profitable and even more profitable if businesses don’t comply with the regulations.
So we know from German statistics, the statistical agency actually collects information about the industry. That’s how legitimate it is. We know from those statistics that really only a small share comply with the licensing regulations. That means that a large part of this is in the informal economy, as it is in any country, no matter how regulated. But it’s a much bigger part of the economy in Germany than it is anywhere else.
The problem is, of course, the profits that are to be had and the profits that are to be taken. And for that reason, going back to something that Silvia said earlier today when we were talking about organs, we have to really seriously consider should this be part of the economy. And what’s interesting about the British regulations is that it is not formally part of the economy.
It’s an agreement between two individuals, doesn’t involve any third party, doesn’t involve any profit taking. Of course there are also problems in implementing but statistics are very hard in that sector. But it seems that it’s certainly a much smaller part of economic exchanges than it is in Germany.
RK: Going on from that, you quote in the book from a German police officer stating the difficulty in ensuring the health and safety of prostitutes. The officer talks about being able to walk into a brothel and recognize many of the workers. “Nowadays,” he says, “the workers are mainly short term traveling workers, which diminishes any possibility of creating a relationship with the workers and being able to protect them.”
Do the problems from this police officer, do they link back to your three forces of capitalism, colonialism and gender rights? Gender regimes? Excuse me.
KS: Yes. they link especially to the first point, that, coercion is part of a global economy, that sex trade is part of this economy. And behind its operation are chains of persons taking profit and transferring value. I think, that’s the most important point, that it’s mostly women, that it’s mostly women who are ethnic minorities or from low and middle income countries, often very racialized.
That has, of course, everything to do with colonial legacies, with gender regimes, and with how they prey on persons in some of the lowest income countries in the world. And what this case is also pointing to is how legalization in Germany is not just a problem of compliance, but also of misrecognizing the way in which this is part of a global flow of value and flow of profits, because somebody is behind these movements of mainly women, from German brothels to Belgian brothels to Dutch brothels, to other parts of Germany and most of them who are registered are from Romania or other EU countries.
So also we have dynamics of the periphery of Europe playing in here and of course post-socialist countries have colonial legacies of a different sort. But if we look at the expansion of the EU and how that is feeding in to the kinds of exploitation that we see within the European context, that is a very good example because these are mobile workers, they have the right to go from one place to the other, and they don’t need to be registered.
They’re fully legal, but still they’re being traded across borders in this way.
RK: People are suffering in all these ways that you’ve been, saying about today and that, it seems that as long as people are kind of kept individualized and able to be separated, not grouped together and therefore not supported like there’s, it appears that it will continue. If I, am I understanding this right?
SW: I could be slightly more optimistic than that, on the grounds that more people are aware of the nature and extent of trafficking than modern slavery. So we are now seeing a series of interventions which attempt to deal with it. So we’ll see at multiple UN bodies, for example, the International Labor Organization has been working on this since its convention, on forced labor in 1930 and has put renewed energy behind this, as we could see in relationship to collecting the data, which is so hard to get.
We’ve got new UN agencies like the UNODC, the UN Office of Drugs and Crime picking up responsibility for this new protocol in 2000. We’ve seen the European Union pick it up with the directive in 2011 and deciding to put some resource behind the implementation of this in all of its member states. So I think we’ve seen, more energy and resources and capacity being put to attempt to address this issue.
Indeed and in in all of its multiple intricacies. The more pessimistic side is that we’ve been connecting trafficking, modern slavery with regimes of inequality. And in so far as you see, an increase of inequality, either in terms of capitalist inequalities, gender inequalities or colonial inequalities, then we’re likely to see increases in trafficking and modern slavery.
So to take the colonial, it would be nice to think of that as something from the past, we’re only dealing with legacies, but actually we have contemporary coloniality. There have been discussions about the use of forced labor and forced marriage in some of the new forms of war, which we’ve seen anywhere from Ukraine to ISIS to China, and that these forms of authoritarianism are giving rise to new forms of forced labor and forced marriage.
So there are, insofar as we see an increase of inequality connected to forms of neoliberalism and attempts to deregulate the economy, then we will see increased likelihood of situations of vulnerability to which those agents who are willing to use coercion can take advantage. So I think I would want to balance this. On the one hand, we’ve got a policy and political initiative trying to increase the interventions.
We’re seeing a growth of knowledge as this is entering into a multiplicity of social science disciplines. And on the other hand, we’re seeing some increases of inequality associated with each of those three regimes of inequality, which might actually be driving an increase in trafficking and modern slavery. So I think it’s a question of how we balance those two different processes.
RK: Towards the end of your book, you, you say that, not only do inequalities generate trafficking and/or modern slavery, but that trafficking and modern slavery shapes the nature, shapes the very nature of our society. Could you explain a bit about that? And also what changes do we need to make to correct our course? Maybe, and also, where should we start first?
SW: The focus in our book has been on coercion in the economy. I think everybody recognizes that coercion is wrong. And what we’ve done is to attempt to illuminate how coercion is in parts of the economy that people hadn’t previously really recognized. In the academic disciplines, the study of coercion is usually separated from the study of the economy. You have criminology on the one hand, you’ll have economics on the other.
And what we’ve been trying to do is to put those together so that we can actually have better forms of understanding. So what we’re showing is how trafficking and modern slavery harm society in multiple ways. It’s a kind of coercion, and all forms of coercion and violence have detrimental impact on the wellbeing of people. Anybody who’s been subject to coercion and violence suffers those effects for very long periods of time.
It isn’t something that you can just brush off. It’s something which will typically scar people for very long periods. It damages the economy in that this takes away productive capacity from the economy. It damages the organization for policy. These are forms of organized crime which are often connected to forms of corruption. Organized crime and corruption create detrimental effects on the organization of our politics, of our states, of our democracies, in all sorts of ways.
So we see the ramifications of coercion in the economy into multiple aspects of society, the wellbeing of people and issues of economic development, and issues of the development of our democracies. So it has terrible consequences if it’s not adequately addressed.
RK: Sylvia and Karen, thank you so much for coming on the Transforming Society podcast today and discussing your book. It’s been an absolute pleasure to discuss your book. I’m going to let everybody know in a moment where they can find it. But first I wanted to ask, is there anywhere that we can find you online?
SW: Thank you very much indeed for inviting us on to this. And we, each of us have websites, where you can find us. If you put our names into Google, Sylvia Walby and Karen Shire, you will find us each and you will find the websites on which you can find our publications and other activities. The book is available open access.
So if you would like to own a real copy you can buy it. It is also available open access to anybody who would like to read it. And you will find that also, from the Bristol site and from our own websites.
RK: Excellent. Thank you. Sylvia. ‘Trafficking Chains: Modern Slavery and Society’ by Sylvia Walby and Karen Shire is published by Bristol University Press. You can find out more about the book by visiting bristoluniversitypress.co.uk and also transformingsociety.co.uk.