$236 billion a year profit from forced labour , lucrative sex trade
Travel BizNews —
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, UN researchers said on Tuesday.
In an alert, the International Labour Organization ( ILO) said that this increase had been fuelled by the growing number of people forced to work illegally, but also by higher profits.
ILO senior research officer 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).
Forced sex work generates more than two-thirds of profits, even though it only involves around one in four of the overall number of people forced to work illegally.
This is because exploiters make more than $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. – UN News
19 March 2024
Photo : Forced labour generates profits of $236 billion per year,. – UNICEF
