Why (and How) We Need to Talk to ‘the Victims’

Too often, research on unfree labour is speculative, inaccurate and downright damaging to the individuals labelled as ‘victims’. This Chapter will make the case that, in order to overcome these serious failings, we need to conduct in-depth qualitative research with victims themselves. This means giving voice to their analyses and experiences and it means spending time learning from and with them. In making this case, the Chapter will draw on the author’s research between 2005 and 2012 into ‘child trafficking’ and youth labour mobility between rural Benin and Nigeria.

Understanding the Global Business of Forced Labour: An Introduction

This introductory Chapter provides an overview of the political, methodological, and ethical challenges of researching forced labour in the global economy tackled in this Volume. It argues that in spite of these challenges, researchers are pioneering fresh approaches to understanding the business of forced labour that are anchored in strong empirical methods, rather than outdated theoretical propositions or sensationalist newspaper headlines. This burgeoning and interdisciplinary body of research challenges conventional narratives about the nature and role of modern slavery. It reveals that rather than an individualised, randomly occurring human rights issue caused by the moral shortcomings and greed of unscrupulous employers, severe labour exploitation is a coherent and predictable feature of many sectors and regions within the global political economy. The methodological reflections contained within this Volume offer a resource for academics and practitioners seeking to understand forced labour, the factors that shape vulnerability to this phenomenon, and the variegated mechanisms through which businesses systemically profit from labour exploitation.

Methodological Challenges in the Business of Forced Labour

Most forced labour takes place in business contexts, yet the business logics of exploitation are rarely explored empirically. This gap relates to the lack of researchers in the field with specific expertise in business and management, as well as the methodological and logistical challenges with researching the business dynamics of forced labour. This Chapter will argue that we need to take the business of forced labour seriously if we are to understand and address it in a meaningful way. We propose an analytical framework that can be used to understand the business and organisational dynamics of forced labour. Drawing on our own research on forced labour’s business models and supply chains, we reflect on how business methodologies can be strengthened to overcome the substantive gaps that exist in our knowledge about how forced labour works as a business.

Archival Trouble: Researching Sex Trafficking in Early Twentieth-Century America

This Chapter examines the challenges that historians face when researching illicit labour and the shadow economy – in this case, prostitution and sex trafficking. It argues that generating reliable data about the extent of prostitution and sex trafficking continues to be an insurmountable challenge for historians, just as it was for the historical subjects historians study. It notes that like today’s debates about what practices actually constitute forced labour, the parameters of the term ‘white slavery’ were similarly contested. And it suggests that political forces produced the quantifiable data about white slavery, but the very archives that house the sources historians use are themselves political spaces and function to legitimize state power, reformers’ values, and narratives where the ‘victim’ was rendered silent.

Researching Unfree Student Labour in Apple’s Supply Chain

Taiwanese-owned Foxconn Technology Group, the world’s biggest electronics contract manufacturer of Apple, used the labour of 150,000 student interns – 15 per cent of its entire million-strong workforce in China – during the summer of 2010. This Chapter looks into the quasi-employment arrangements of student interns, who occupy an ambiguous space between being a student and a worker in Apple’s global supply chain. The incorporation of vocational school teachers into corporate management can strengthen control over students, who are in effect unfree labourers during their internships, which could last from three months to a year. While male and female student interns are required to do the same work as other employees, their intern labour is devalued. With the loss of their capacity to control the timing, location and training content of the internships, student-workers vent their pent-up anger and grievances in the capital accumulation process, in which their fundamental rights to labour and education are scarified.

What is Forced Labour? A Practical Guide for Humanities and Social Science Research

This practical guide provides a baseline understanding of the concept of forced labour to assist researchers in the humanities and social sciences ensure their representations of the phenomenon are rigorous and credible. While recognising the limitations of the 1930 ILO Convention definition of forced labour, this Chapter provides helpful guidance in understanding what does – and what does not – constitute forced labour. Summarised in 10 Practical Points for Understanding Forced Labour, this Chapter helps researchers build a baseline understanding of forced labour by providing a dozen helpful markers to ensure that those within the humanities and social sciences are speaking the same language when they represent the phenomenon of forced labour.

Transparent Companies? Legal Research Strategies to Understand Forced Labour in Global Supply Chains

Private commercial relationships constitute significant practical challenges for researchers analysing issues of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), such as forced labour in global supply chains. The private nature of commercial relations means that freedom of information requests are not available. One way for researchers to study forced labour in global supply chains, therefore, is to use information made available by the corporations themselves. This Chapter draws on empirical legal research methods to explore the value of publicly available documents on how companies address CSR issues. It argues that, despite some limitations, it is possible to use data that is available on company websites such as codes of conduct, terms and conditions of purchase and nonfinancial reporting to assess business practices. These documents can complement both traditional doctrinal legal research of cases and statutes and research from other disciplines, thus providing new opportunities for research on forced labour in global supply chains.

Confronting Bias in NGO Research on Modern Slavery

This Chapter explores the extent to which efforts to attain more reliable, comprehensive data and knowledge on forced labour could be impeded by a lack of critical reflexivity in the use of mainstream conventional definitional and conceptual frameworks. Drawing on textual and discourse analysis of dissemination materials from a study of forced labour, the Chapter makes three key contributions. First, it argues that uncritical reliance on mainstream discourses reinforces their dominance and forecloses alternative conceptualisations, interpretations and understandings of the nature, causes and effects of forced labour. Second, the absence of critical reflexivity gives rise to methodological issues that adversely affect research validity, reliability and quality. Third, crucial empirical findings could be distorted or ignored where they contradict conventional discourses, interpretations and frameworks adopted for the research.

The Role of Discourse Analysis in Researching Severe Labour Exploitation

Investigating severe forms of labour exploitation presents a series of particular methodological challenges to researchers in the field, including access to respondents, credibility of data, reliability of measures, researcher ethics and the practical and political dimensions of study design. For researchers embarking on qualitative approaches – whether it involves interviews, ethnography and/or documentary forms of analysis – this Chapter seeks to illuminate the potential of a discursive approach to understanding severe forms of labour exploitation. It aims specifically to help understand how severe forms of labour exploitation are variously constructed as an object of knowledge/s, and how this construction is always contingent upon socio-political con/texts. To this end it recommends the investigation of texts as data, proceeding to discuss some interpretive work generated from an early-stage analysis of media, government and civil society discourses surrounding the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015.

Evaluating the Political Effects of Anti-slavery and Anti-trafficking Activism

This Chapter considers ‘what happens next’ once information has been collected. This in turn means focusing upon political activism. Drawing upon ideas and insights from existing works on social movements and advocacy networks, I consider some of the main ways in which ‘success’ or ‘progress’ have been – and, I would argue, should be – evaluated in relation to several recent high-profile forms of political activism targeting slavery, trafficking and forced labour. The principle argument that emerges from this analysis is that anti-slavery and anti-trafficking need to be regarded as one component of broader portfolio of practices, interests and ideologies, rather than a singular issue or civil society cause which is assumed to enjoy a separate and elevated humanitarian or bipartisan political status. There is consequentially a pressing need for researchers to made further efforts to help understand and refine the ways in which patterns of political activism and mobilisation can strategically target the underlying sources and conditions of forced labour, vulnerability and marginalisation.