Sex trade to slavery: A UN agency says criminals reap US$236B a year in profits from forced labour

Illegal profits from forced labour worldwide have risen to the 'obscene' amount of US$236 billion per year, the UN labour agency reported Tuesday.

Illegal profits from forced labour worldwide have risen to the "obscene" amount of US$236 billion per year, the UN labour agency reported Tuesday, with sexual exploitation to blame for three-fourths of the take from a business that deprives migrants of money they can send home, swipes jobs from legal workers, and allows the criminals behind it to dodge taxes.

The International Labour Organization said the tally for 2021, the most recent year covered in the painstaking international study, marked an increase of 37 per cent, or US$64 billion, compared with its last estimate published a decade ago. That's a result of both more people being exploited and more cash generated from each victim, ILO said.

"$236 billion. This is the obscene level of annual profit generated from forced labour in the world today," the first line of the report's introduction said. That figure represents earnings "effectively stolen from the pockets of workers" by those who coerce them to work, as well as money taken from remittances of migrants and lost tax revenue for governments.

ILO officials noted that such a sum equaled the economic output of EU member Croatia and eclipsed the annual revenues of tech giants like Microsoft and Samsung.

Forced labour can encourage corruption, strengthen criminal networks and incentivize further exploitation, ILO said.

Its director-general, Gilbert Houngbo, wants international cooperation to fight the racket.

"People in forced labour are subject to multiple forms of coercion, the deliberate and systematic withholding of wages being amongst the most common," he said in a statement. "Forced labour perpetuates cycles of poverty and exploitation and strikes at the heart of human dignity."