Beyond Trafficking and Slavery: Towards Decent Work for All

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The severe labour exploitation encapsulated in terms like 'forced labour', 'bonded labour', 'child labour', 'human trafficking' and 'modern slavery' is widely regarded as a major contemporary development challenge. Indeed India alone is said to have to have the highest number of modern slaves (18.3 million) in the world (Global Slavery Index 2016) and many regions including South Asia, Africa and Latin America face the gravest challenges in achieving "decent work for all". Although governments and civil society have decried such practices as 'the underside of globalisation' and as an affront to human dignity, passed anti-slavery and anti-trafficking legislation, and spent over £1.5 billion since the turn of the century on anti-slavery policy, the world's leaders have nevertheless placed 'forced labour', 'human trafficking' and 'modern slavery' at the heart of the Sustainable Development Agenda, with SDG 8.7 calling directly for their eradication. This reflects the fact that policy aimed at ridding the world of severe exploitation is consistently hampered by a dearth of nuanced, sophisticated empirical understandings. The Beyond Trafficking and Slavery network (BTS) exists to fill precisely this gap. BTS is a multi-disciplinary group of academics and civil society organisations from the global north and global south who are experts on the severe exploitation targeted by SDG 8.7. Established in 2014, BTS operates primarily through openDemocracy.net, an established 'digital commons' based in the UK that commands an annual readership of over nine million unique visitors. Combining the rigour of academic scholarship with the clarity of journalism and the immediacy of political advocacy, it brings together scholars, policy-makers, and civil society organisations keen to advance understanding of, and policies to address, the structural, political, economic, and social root causes of global exploitation, vulnerability and unfree labour. In the past two years alone, BTS has published over 300 articles from more than 200 contributors, and entered into public debate with large institutional actors including Human Rights Watch, the International Labour Organisation and the UK's Anti-Slavery Commissioner. BTS now intends to expand this work by engaging directly with research and activism in developing countries from South Asia (India), Africa (South Africa) and Latin America (Mexico). BTS will convene regional workshops in these countries bringing together all relevant stakeholders, including critical academic voices, high-level political officials, NGOs, the UN, labour and business organisations, donors, civil society and individuals with expertise on severe labour exploitation. It will host capacity-building trainings for local and regional civil society alongside these workshops, co-ordinate joint mapping of the knowledge terrain around SDG 8.7, and joint articulation of a research agenda that can equip policy-makers, particularly in the global south, with the conceptual and empirical tools necessary to achieve it, fostering south-south knowledge sharing in the process. BTS will conclude its expanded network activities by drafting a report for the ESRC-GCRF (given its focus on migration and development, inequalities, and inclusive growth) entitled The Global Research Agenda for SDG 8.7: Understanding and Addressing Forced Labour, Human Trafficking and Modern-Day Slavery. This will be shared widely with global stakeholders engaged around SDG 8.7, as will workshop proceedings and the latest research. Public dissemination will take place through the BTS website at openDemocracy.net, using text, podcasts, and video, as well as a targeted social media strategy. BTS will also lay the foundations for a UK-based Centre for the Study of Modern Slavery, which will position the UK as a world leader in responding to this development challenge, in turn informing future UK donor and research policy.