Modern slavery and exploitative work regimes: an intersectional approach

ABSTRACT

This Special Issue covers an intersectional approach to extreme labour exploitation. We provide concrete empirical studies and new theoretical frameworks. This overview paper analyses how modern slavery theories might influence policy options. The theories examined in this Special Issue include supply-chain theories, feminist approaches to work, diffusion of innovation theory, intersectional gender-and-development theory, and the social construction of narratives around bonded and forced labour. Evidence is given from the garment industry, farming, and other sectors based on field research and questionnaire surveys dated 2015–2020. Women in paid jobs are widely exposed to extreme exploitation, coerced overtime, having their papers held by the employer, and subject to threats/violence. In care work, the gender worktime difference is large, and evidence is given from India of girl children’s work hours being much longer, on average, than boys’ hours. Extreme exploitation rests upon gaping social and economic inequalities which deserve policy attention.

KEYWORDS:

• Employment
• extreme exploitation
• modern slavery
• gender
• intersectionality
• work regimes

Acknowledgement

The Special Issue is based on a stream in the Development Studies Association Conference 2021, which had the title “Modern slavery and exploitative work regimes in the Global South and the North and work: Multiple and differential intersections”.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shoba Arun

Professor Shoba Arun has research interests on global social inequalities, migration, and the labour market. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and member of the British Sociological Association and the Global Studies Association. She serves on the Editorial Board of the Work, Employment and Society Journal. She was Principal Investigator for a Horizon 2020 Project MICREATE – Migrant Children and Communities in a Transforming Europe (see www.micreate.eu). She is also the Lead for the Centre for Communities and Social Justice at the University of Greenwich.

Wendy Olsen

Professor Wendy Olsen works as a Professor of Socio-Economics and the Head of the Department of Social Statistics, University of Manchester. She has taught sociology, development economics, and research methodology. She teaches statistics and PhD research methodology as well as computerised qualitative data analysis, the comparative method, the case-study method, and topics in political economy (e.g. child labour in India).