Beyond the history books: Inside the hidden world of modern slavery
From forced labor and child marriage to the exploitation of migrant workers, tens of millions of people remain trapped in forms of slavery that have adapted to the modern economy
For most of us, "slavery" belongs to the distant past, an archaic term associated with the 19th century or even Biblical times. But the reality on the ground is that slavery, in most of its forms, still exists. It has simply changed shape and embedded itself in the modern labor market.
What is modern slavery?
"Modern slavery" is an umbrella term for situations in which a person is forced to work or live under another person's complete control, deprived of personal freedom and unable to leave because of threats, violence, coercion, deception or the exploitation of extreme power imbalances. Human rights organizations also classify forced marriage, including child marriage, as a form of slavery, and the figures are staggering: around 50 million people are trapped in modern slavery today.
That figure includes roughly 28 million people in forced labor and another 22 million in forced marriages. Because much of the phenomenon is hidden within the informal economy, there is no precise real-time count, but the Global Slavery Index provides the most comprehensive picture available.
Isn't it an exaggeration to call harsh working conditions slavery?
Words matter. Terms such as "genocide" and "Holocaust" still carry enormous weight and touch a raw nerve. The current climate of antisemitism is a reminder that without a place of refuge, the security of Jews around the world could once again be called into question. Some survivors of the 20th century's horrors are also still with us, making this, for many, living history rather than some distant past that can safely be forgotten.
"Slave," by contrast, has become almost casual vocabulary, precisely because we feel so far removed from its original meaning. No Jew today walks around worried that the Egyptians might enslave him again, or that he could suddenly be thrown into a minivan and wake up in the desert on his way to build "Burj Khalifa 2."
Some may jokingly describe sitting in front of a computer in an office as slavery. The thousands of migrant workers from Southeast Asia who died from heat and exhaustion while building Qatar's World Cup stadiums would probably disagree.
Where is modern slavery worst?
As with almost every question involving modern slavery, the answer to which country is the world's worst offender depends on how you measure it. Is importing exploited labor from abroad worse than enslaving your own citizens? At what point do appalling working conditions become slavery even in the absence of whips and chains?
More than half of all people living in slavery worldwide are concentrated in just five countries, reflecting both their enormous populations and systematic labor exploitation: India, with some 11.05 million people; China, 5.77 million; North Korea, 2.7 million; Pakistan, 2.35 million; and Russia, 1.9 million.
Measured as a share of the population, however, the highest rates are found primarily in dictatorships and countries plagued by prolonged conflict.
North Korea: 104 people per 1,000. The regime holds hundreds of thousands of people in kwanliso prison camps, where political prisoners are subjected to forced labor.
Eritrea: 90 people per 1,000. National service is compulsory and can continue indefinitely, effectively functioning as state-imposed forced labor.
Mauritania: 32 people per 1,000. Traditional chattel slavery, inherited from mother to child, continues to exist.
Saudi Arabia: 21 people per 1,000. The kafala, or employer-sponsorship, system can leave foreign workers with little legal protection and heavily dependent on their employers.
In China, between one and two million Uyghurs, a persecuted Muslim minority, have been held in detention facilities in Xinjiang and forced into labor connected to the cotton and electronics industries.
In Mauritania, exploitation is deeply rooted socially and culturally, while human rights activists attempting to free enslaved people have themselves been arrested by the authorities.
The conditions that allow exploitation to thrive
Modern slavery feeds on a legal and economic environment that magnifies the imbalance of power between employer and employee. In vulnerable sectors such as agriculture, caregiving and construction, workers may be effectively tied to a single employer, geographically isolated, burdened with debts incurred through recruitment fees and constantly afraid that losing their job will also mean losing their legal status and being deported.
Even in developed countries, exploitation often exists in the gray zone between the legal and the illegal. In the United States, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery but retained an exception allowing compulsory labor as punishment for a crime. Around 800,000 prisoners perform prison labor, often for negligible wages.
In the Western private sector, criminal networks exploit legal loopholes and vulnerable migrants to keep workers in subhuman conditions. Cases uncovered in Australian agriculture, for example, have involved workers being forced to labor under threats of death and for virtually no pay.
Israel: Failure to identify victims, little enforcement
Although slavery and forced labor have been explicitly prohibited under Israel's Penal Law since 2006, the criminal ban has not translated into effective enforcement. A 2020 report by TraffLab, a research group at Tel Aviv University's Faculty of Law, found deep structural failures in the state's handling of the problem.
The first major obstacle is identification. Israeli authorities rarely identify victims of labor trafficking on their own, with the overwhelming majority instead coming to light through civil society organizations. Between 2015 and 2017, for example, not a single man was identified in Israel as a victim of trafficking for labor exploitation.
The result is that exploited migrant workers can end up being treated primarily as immigration offenders, detained or deported before the abuse they suffered is ever properly investigated.
Criminal enforcement is extremely limited. The number of investigations is negligible, and indictments are almost never filed. Although labor trafficking accounts for nearly half of officially recognized trafficking victims in Israel, only around 6% of police investigations deal with this form of exploitation. Israel's most recent conviction for holding migrant workers in conditions of slavery dates back to 2012.
Is there a way out?
Eradicating modern slavery requires moving beyond isolated interventions in the most extreme and violent cases and addressing the structural conditions that make exploitation possible in the first place.
In Israel, experts have recommended re-establishing a dedicated police unit, bringing welfare and legal professionals into the victim-identification process and creating a complete separation between agencies responsible for protecting workers and those responsible for immigration enforcement and deportation.
Ultimately, there is also a moral and social responsibility that falls on all of us as citizens of developed countries. People who travel thousands of miles to do the exhausting and difficult jobs many of us no longer want to do, in agriculture, construction and caregiving, are entitled to humane treatment, full pay and the time off guaranteed to them by law.
Economic development is measured not only by the height of a country's skyscrapers, but by its ability to protect the most vulnerable people who helped build them.